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One Today- Poem Analysis Essay

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"One Today"- Poem Analysis Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is. Blanco uses several rhetorical devices throughout "One Today", more so in the first few stanzas. An example of figurative language he used was the repetition of certain words or similar words in order to create a flow within the poem. "My face, your face, millions of faces in morning's mirrors" is a line in the poem that best represents this. Blanco also uses personification …show more content…

I think the tone and voice that this poem has is that of pride and patriotism. The author does this by outlining the good qualities that the United States has to offer. However he does this is in such away that it does not sound like bragging, because he does not boast about all of the beauty or things that America is known for but rather the people who work to make it this way and how these things bring them together. "One Today" is of course written in a formal manner because of the occasion that that it was written for. That is why it does not contain any humour, abbreveations or informal language. I think that the voice that the author used in this poem fit the occasion perfectly because it was straight forward, easily understandable and relatable to any American citizen. The sentence structure of this poem is unlike a lot of poems that you might see where the lines are of equal length and contain the same amount of sylables. Rather than taking that approach, Blanco's poem contained senteneces, and lines that were all of different length. For example, in the second stanza blanco included two very long lines that included dashes and comma's because he was creating a list. Some of the very short lines feautured throughout the poem occur beacause the sentence was too long to fit into the line before and was continued in the next line. After I applied all of these craft techniques to the poem "One Today" it helped me

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