Plans for Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving I'm going to San Diego.
Flying by myself, I will meet my family there,
Upon seeing the ocean, I will stop and stare.

California is my birth place,
Running a 5K race, setting a pace.
Watching football, and the sun set,
On the beach near the inlet.

The Thanksgiving meal will be like what most people have,
Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberries, sweet potatoes,
And most importantly, pie.

Toads

       This poem by Philip Larkin, he uses toads as a interesting and clever way to talk about people.  The metaphor in the poem is the toad.  To explain the connection between a person and a toad he uses personification.  Larkin uses frog words such as, "squats," and "it's sickening poison."  He then relates this back to humans working to pay the bills, and provide for their family.  He then uses alliteration of multiple "L" words.  "Lectures, lispers, losels, loblolly-men, loughts."  Not only is this difficult to say, it causes the reader to think about these strange sounding words and what they mean.  This can capture the reader's attention, and makes this poem stand out more due to it being about toads and having funny sounding words.

Vergissmeinnicht

The title Vergissmeinnicht is German for "forget-me-not." This relates to the poem because it is talking about war, soldiers, life and death.  It also has quite a bit of figurative language. I first noticed the use of rhyming, shown throughout the poem, such as, "paid, decayed and mingled, shingled." There was also some use of personification. When the author Kieth Douglas says, "The frowning barrel of his gun," it gives the human characteristic of frowning to an inanimate object. Another thing I noticed was his use of similes. Douglas compares, "my tank with one like the entry..." and also, "burst stomach like a cave." These comparisons using the word, "like," give examples for the reader to better understand the poem.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

         This poem by Walt Whitman is a unique and different topic for a poem.  Talking about a spider is a metaphor to a human in the poem as a whole.  When he talks about building a web, he compares it to building a bridge along with exploring, "oceans of space."  I also noticed the structure of the poem.  It has two stanzas, but only two sentences, one in each stanza which each sentence is only broken up by commas.  Alliteration is used in both stanzas.  When he says, "forth filament, filament, filament, filament..." he also used it in the second stanza with repeating the words, "Till the..."  This poem has various types of figurative language in which the author used it effectively to relate the comparison of the spider to human behaviors and characteristics.