There are many different forms of literature but perhaps most famous and most loved of the many kinds is poetry. Compared to other forms of literature like short stories and even that of the novel, poetry has been famous dating back to the time of Ancient Greece until now wherein even poems are converted into modern songs. The wonderful thing about poetry is that not only would the readers be able to imagine the images conjured by the carefully selected the words, the lines in poems would also appeal to the hearing of a person as it involves rhyme and rhythm. After all, poetry is both sights and sounds sights being the images imagined by a reader and the sounds being the playful or melodramatic onslaught of words. These sights and sounds are what both appears in Lisa Parkers Snapping Beans, Mary Olivers Answer and Glenis Redmonds Naming. But more important than these images and sounds are the lessons or messages that the poems want to show the readers, in this case, the essay will discuss the theme of the three poems as well as what the readers can infer from and between the lines which makes the unquestionable truth of the poems as well as its message.
In the poem Snapping Beans by Lisa Parker, the usual problems of a student who is at lost over a new culture and new life is portrayed. The persona (though it is questionable whether it is male or female) comes home from school for a vacation as what appears in lines 4-5 of Lisa Parkers Snapping Beans I was home for the weekend from school, from the North . The descriptions of the surrounding seem to suggest that the home is located in the countryside or province as the sun rose, pushing its pink spikes through the slant of cornstalks. The main issue that the poem presents is the dishonesty of the student as hisher grandmother wants to know hisher school life and though the student wants to tell the real things that happens in school and the feelings that heshe has about it, heshe opted not to. The poem concludes when the grandmother makes an ominous statement about how funny things blow loose like that which could just mean that the student might suddenly explode one day and hisher feelings of misery might take over himher entirely.
On the other hand, in Glenis Redmonds Naming, a misunderstanding (though not quite seriously) happens between a mother and the child over the naming of a flower. The persona who is also the child (and again, is not identified of whether being a girl or a boy) tries to explain to the mother about the Forsythia but the mother tells the child that they call it Yellow Bell and the other word is too hard. This naming of the same flower is what causes the conflict as the child uses a more complicated term most likely learned from school and the mother uses a much simpler term most likely learned from their community. The persona goes on about the differences that the two words cause to both of them with the mother being able to look back on her life caused by the mention of the flower and the child being able to appreciate the simplicity of life brought on by the mention of the simpler term for the flower.
In Mary Olivers poem, Answers, the same sentiments were expressed as that of the poems of Parker and Redmond. The persona in the third poem seems be a person to have advanced in the ways of the world and this persona recalls hisher time with the grandmother who has encouraged himher with such ways. The poem features the wide gap between the grandmother and the grandchild like the lines of the grandmother being uneducated with faulty grammar and how there is such confusion within her. The grandchild meanwhile is the one who is supposedly educated with hisher books and music and circling philosophies and with the lofty career that the grandmother even encouraged. But even if the grandchild and the grandmother are very different from one another, the grandchild still envies the grandmother while the grandmother is very much supportive of the grandchild and even cooled...hisher wild sauces.
A deeper understanding and appreciation for the poem can be done with a comparison of the three poems. First of all, the theme revolves around a disagreement of the persona with the other character mentioned in the poem. This disagreement can be seen as that of a conflict between youth versus the elderly or even to a greater and specific extent, the differences between tradition and that of modernity. In Naming, the term used for the flower causes conflict and the fact that the younger person used a more complex term manifests that heshe has had an education while the mother is more used to the simper and non-complex things provided by her being uneducated or just not knowing a lot of technical things. For example, like the way the persona perceives that foreign words anguish her mothers tongue. On the other hand, Snapping Beans also has the same theme that revolves around the conflict between the old versus the new or the ignorant versus the educated. The student was in conflict of whether informing the grandmother the reality of things about life and school such as the evening star was a planet that my friends wore noserings and wrote poetry About sex, about alcoholism, about Buddha. As what transpired in the poem of Parker, the student in Olivers Answers also has the same situation wherein the student has changed because of what heshe has experienced but the student still relies on the grandmother to comfort and console himher with the innocence and naivete that the grandmother knows with her being uneducated.
In conclusion, the three poems revolve around the young and the educated telling the old and the ignorant about the complex, the real and the technical and yet even if the young knows more, they are not that happy compared to the old nor do they want their situation. Both poems give out a lesson on how things are with the young and the ability to not be contented with who they are, what they have and what they are undergoing through. Though the old and the provincial would seem ignorant of things, it does not mean that they are unhappy. Naming, Answers and Snapping Beans give out an invaluable lesson of life as what poems always do, in this case, it is about how the old, though they are ignorant, would always be there for the young no matter what.
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