Sunday, June 2, 2019

Terra-Cotta Girl :: essays research papers

Terra Cotta GirlThe poem has clear, wide-open drama while managing ambiguity and open-endedness. A sort of modern local color piece tinted with gray elements, it nevertheless makes its characters real and sympathetic, treats important themes that are both topical and general, and offers an apt objective relationship with universal implications.Technically a lyric, the poem filled with story and drama an off-the-farm college misfire, a Southerner, and perhaps a Georgian like Sellers herself, has fallen in love with a quiet girl down the hall (9). The girls conservative mother has seen to (10) having her daughter seek for an expert help. Ungraceful, conflicted inwardly, and beset outwardly by parental pressure, the girl now waits to see a counselor. No character speaks, provided the role of each is well defined. At least five characters, perhaps six, come into play ii girls, their two mothers, and one or maybe two counselors. Onstage is the terra cotta girl (1)--and maybe her mot her as well. The other, quiet (9) daughter and her mother, along with a counselor (perhaps the same one), running a parallel to the scene we are witnessing.Although the poem shows us the girls as living down the hall (9) from each other in their college dormitory, it also suggests another verifying possibility that, at the very moment of the present action, this other girl, the quiet one, is just down the hall waiting to see another counselor during two parallel sessions that the mothers have seen to (10). Perhaps, the other girls mother is with her, too. The other girl may be quiet precisely because the narrator chooses not to run her a separate story. If this is the case, her terra cotta lover stands in as her delegate. The phrase quiet girl draws the image of a shy character, who may be less subject to handle her current torture, and not as strong as terra cotta girl.Formally, the poem has thirteen short lines with different numbers of syllables and accents. The poem is unrhym ed but engages such alliterations as flat farm feet (2) / furrows (3), soil has seen (10), and weep for the waste (12). All of the alliterated sounds are voiceless, which projects the current situation of the girls. The thirteen breath units of the poem drainage basin into two clear sentences. With no stanza break in the poem, these sentences establish the language of the drama.

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