How I Learned to Sweep

How I learned to Sweep

Introduction

The poem “How I Learned to Sweep” is written beautifully by Julia Alvarez. She was born on 27th March 1950. She is a renowned Dominican-American poet, essayist and the novelist. In this paper, I will be discussing and concentrating on the poem “How I learned to Sweep” on different aspect of material objects, including words, figurative language, rhythm and meter. Sweeping is metaphor which is used throughout the poem which means in real life to get rid of unpleasant thing.

Discussion

The lines 1-3 describes that, the poets mother never taught her how to sweep in her childhood, which portrays an image that the mother is avoiding the child to learn sweeping. This line suggests that children mind is full of joy and innocence. Her mother wishes for her to have a better life than she did. But in some situations, they are exposed to bad things, which include the violence, crime and sexual content. For all this bad things, the major part is played by media, who is responsible as they show great violence and crime scenes, which had created negative impact in minds of children. This holds true in today's era as well where children are under the severe influence of what the media feeds them. Therefore, the lines 4-7 describes that poet`s mother never taught her how to sweep, which draws an image that when children are never taught about anything, then they make decisions on what they see and what they observe. They can make a good or bad decision depending on the image they perceive. Perception plays a vital role in the lives on children and may ultimately be the defining factor in our lives.

In lines 19-21 the pentameter and rhyme scheme is arranged interestingly. The poet Julia Alvarez has beautifully and uniquely made the combination of sweeping of the weeds from a helicopter dropping off troops and the sweeping with the broom (line 9). The line 18 tell us about the soldiers and the troops who were landing in their helicopters into jungles, their propellers swept like weeds seen underwater gives a brilliant and striking intellectual representation. This feature actually feels like seeing the weeds underwater swaying and also the weeds that are being swept down from a helicopter. Once again, the poet here shows the how the children took to violence when they saw soldiers descending on ...