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Explication Of Jane Kenyon's Poem

Decent Essays

I decided to pick this poem for a couple reasons. First, I read it though once, and understood the big picture, but I didn’t understand certain lines. Second, I relate to this poem because when I cook, I always make sure that the amount of food that goes into the trash is minimum. If I don’t, I feel guilty for the rest of the day. Third, I love potatoes and some people call me a potato so it was cool finding a poem with my name in the title. In the poem, a person was making dinner with potatoes when they threw the bad parts of the potato away into the compost. When they went back to look at the potato, it looks better than it has before and it seems bigger, as if you can feed a whole town. This reminds me of Macbeth when Macbeth sees Banquo at his …show more content…

But I did notice that the amount of stanzas goes 3,6,3,6. Does that make it formal? It’s also interesting to look at all the grammatical marks that Jane Kenyon makes. For example, in the first line, “In a haste one evening while making dinner” she puts no comma after dinner, just skips to the next line. Next, she completely separates a sentence. “I threw away a potato that was spoiled on one end. The rest would have been redeemable. In the yellow garbage pail” I wonder why she did that. If I were her I would have kept it on the same line as the rest of the sentence. Lastly, she uses this symbol: --, and I don’t know what it is. We’ve learned about the em dash and the en dash, but that is not either of those. Jane Kenyon makes a cool simile in this poem. She says, “I pitched it into the compost where steaming scraps and leaves return, like bodies over time, to earth.” I could really visualize the steaming food in the compost and the smell. The lines I did not understand are lines 16, 17, and 18. “for a whole hamlet, people who pass the day dropping trees, pumping gas,

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