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What Does Billy Collins Symbolize In On Turning Ten

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How do you normally feel on your birthday? What is your favorite part of your birthday? What things do you think about on your birthday? On birthdays people usually think about the fun they have had in the last digit and think about the fun-filled one they will have next. In the story called “Eleven” written by Sandra Cisneros and the poem called “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins shares what the main characters from the story and the poem think about growing older into a new stage of life. In both authors’ writings to convey the feeling they have about growing up they use key literary elements. In Billy Collins’ poem, the speaker is melancholy about turning ten, while Sandra Cisneros has a more upbeat outlook on growing up. Even though they …show more content…

Collins proposes this theme via his main character. The speaker of the poem is doleful thinking that he will have to leave his childhood imagination and his childish innocence behind because he is growing up. In the text it states, “But now if I fall upon the sidewalks of life,/ I skin my knees. I bleed.” These two lines from the poem symbolize that the speaker is struggling to accept and face reality. The sidewalk symbolizes the reality that he must face and skinning his knees means …show more content…

She shows this through her writing by way of the speaker. When the speaker, Rachel thinks about the macabre occurrences that take place on her eleventh birthday. In the story it says, “Like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one.” This demonstrates that she feels growing up is just a bunch of years stacked on each other, like the layers of a cake. For her, growing up is not really a grandiose thing. Also, in the text it says, “I want today to be far away already, far away like a runaway balloon,” This shows that she wishes she can run away from the realities of life that she is afraid to face. She knows one day she will have to face them, but she is not ready yet. All in all, Cisneros

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In the poem “On turning Ten '' by Billy Collins and in the short story “ Marigolds” written by Eugenia W. Collier, both authors talk about how life has changed and the end of their childhood based on situations of their past life. In the poem and the short story, both authors explore the impact of losing innocence by describing their memory and discovering the truth. Both authors show how emotional it was to face the truth and reality based on his and her memories. In “Marigolds”, she starts losing her innocence when she “Never heard a man cry before” (Collier 42) and how she discovered Miss Lottie wasn’t frustrated with the situation at the end but was upset. In “On Turning Ten” he realizes “I skin my knees.

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Sandra Cisneros the author of Eleven she uses a lot of similes, and senses to make the reader feel like they are there in the classroom with Rachel. When Rachel is explaining “when you you are growing old it’s like an onion, or like the rings in a tree, or like the little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, one year after another”. Sandra makes more similes throughout the story but this simile is the best on because, it’s probably the more accurate one as you get older so does your body, you get taller until you stop growing, then when you get about your late 30s early 40s you start to get gray hair plus the wrinkles start to come out. She wasn’t exactly saying that, but what she was trying to say is, even when you are getting older you don’t feel that way, you still have a little five year old who wants to come out and play.

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It is wholly recurrent to blindly skim through a detailed piece of literature and be unconscious to the likeness it shares with other pieces of literature. I am surely guilty of this ignorant practice, however. As I was reading “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde and “On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins, I didn’t truly perceive the connection right away. The obvious was already divulged in my mind; they’re both in the points of views of children. They, however, both have a mutual theme; growing up brings uncertainty and disappointment.

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1054 Words | 5 Pages

For example, Rachel narrates, “This is when I wish I wasn’t eleven, because all the years inside of me — ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two one — are pushing at the back of my eyes when I put one arm through the sweater that smells like cottage cheese, and then the other arm through the other and stand there with my arms apart like if the sweater hurts me and it does, all itchy and full of germs that aren’t even mine.” In this she is comparing all her ages to the sweater hurting her. The ages that she is feeling are ages she has already been, which is showing she is getting older, but she still feels mentally younger. Since she is getting older the sweater should not hurt her and she should be more mature with how it feels, but she is feeling all the ages underneath her making her feel hurt. The sweater is a huge symbol in this story for Rachel.

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The author, Sandra Cisneros, uses literary techniques in “Eleven” to characterize Rachel by using metaphors, comparisons, and repetition. In the beginning of Sandra Cisneros’s short story, she states that when a person becomes an age older they will not feel a difference. The character Rachel explains that in different situations, for example, “Like some days you might say something stupid, and [you will feel ten]” a person might feel different from their actual age. She then competes growing old to layers of an onion, rings of a tree, wooden dolls that fit inside each other because, according to her, “that’s how being eleven years old is”.

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He could imagine his deception of this town “nestled in a paper landscape,” (Collins 534). This image of the speaker shows the first sign of his delusional ideas of the people in his town. Collins create a connection between the speaker’s teacher teaching life and retired life in lines five and six of the poem. These connections are “ chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard,” which compares images that the readers can picture.

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In almost each of her poem Cisneros shows her energetic, crazy personality. One main topic her poems and personality brings light to the topic “Feminism.” For many years, women have been working hard in order to gain equality with man. Through her poems Cisneros 's has put a light to the things that women fear of saying based on the world 's ideology of a woman. She shows that women aren 't just emotional creatures and can be as wild and sexual as a man.

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She states, “I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I’m me. One day I’ll jump. Out of my skin. I’ll shake at the sky like a hundred violins.” (Cisneros 60-61).

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In the story Eleven writen by “Sandra Cisneros” was about a little girl named Rachel and it was her 11th birthday. She wasn’t happy to be 11 though it says that “I wish I was one hundred and two.” Sandra Cisneros used different details in the story to characterize Rachel without outright saying it. The way she is explaining how she feels and how she is thinking you can tell that she is mature. Another thing that you can tell about Rachel is that she is shy and soft spoken.

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Stylistically, Collins use of humor and irony, along with the common theme of death is what makes his poems stand out to readers by making a serious topic seem more lighthearted. However, his variety of themes is what ultimately makes him a noteworthy poet. In the poem Forgetfulness, Collins establishes his humorous tone through figurative language such as hyperbole, metaphor, and personification. The exaggeration in the poem is what creates Collins’ witty sense of humor.

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700 Words | 3 Pages

Sandra Cisneros’ short story “Eleven”, poem “My Wicked Wicked Ways”, and book The House on Mango Street have many similarities and differences in terms of style, tone, theme, character and setting. In the short story “Eleven”, Sandra Cisneros manages to convey a powerful message about growing up from the perspective of an eleven year old. The story starts out with Rachel, the protagonist, who is turning eleven today. It starts out with her at school while she's in math class.

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In Billy Collin’s Poem “On Turning Ten,” the speaker reflects on his past birthdays leading up to the present year. Collins uses literary techniques such as foreshadowing and imagery to convey the speaker’s solemn attitude by illustrating the maturity that he is beginning to show. Foreshadowing is used throughout the beginning and middle of the poem to give insight into the feelings and attitude the speaker has about his birthday. In the second stanza, the speaker reflects back to his earlier birthdays and how innocently blissful they were. He explains that “At four I was an Arabian wizard.

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As you grow older so do your feelings. In the short poem “ On Turning Ten” by Billy Collins, a little boy gets to experience the pain of growing up and having to experience change. Through the use of tone and hyperboles, Collins conveys how growing older can push you from what you love most. To begin, Collins uses tone to evoke how the boy is feeling throughout the poem, the boy is feeling what it is like to be older and looks back on golden memories from when he was younger. The speaker is trying to present an melancholic tone to express what the little boy is going through and how he is feeling about the change he is experiencing “ This is the beginning of sadness” (Collins 24).

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509 Words | 3 Pages

Cisneros’ “Eleven” is a simplistic short story told from the ingenuous view of an adolescent named Rachel, and though her diction shows her age, Rachel shows the challenges that come from growing up under adult precision. A large amount of people would be joyous on their birthday, instead she is poignant, tired of facing the discriminations that come with being eleven; Rachel feels that her opinions don’t matter, because compared to what an adult says she will never be right. “Eleven” has many literary devices woven into the story to emphasize important details the author wants you to know. At the age eleven Rachel understands that people exhibit traits of the ages they have passed, she knows that even though she is eleven she can still

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The tone of the story is important in making the story sound like it is being to through the eyes of an eleven year old girl, such phrases like “pennies rattling in a band-aid box” and “my whole head hurts like when you drink milk too fast.” All these are certain phrases that would be used in an eleven year old's life, bandaids for the bumps and scrapes, and the milk that your parents would make you drink. That is the tone Eleven sets, a young girl telling us her humiliating story while she is still a child. Sandra Cisneros does an excellent job at using literary devices to characterize Rachel in “Eleven”. By using imagery, simile, and tone we can see that Rachel is a empathetic, bashful, wise, but still naive in her own ways.

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