There is an emphasis on the word men throughout the whole poem. The hands being in their pockets make the boys seem more grown up. The boys having small fights give the reader some auditory imagery, hearing high pitch boy voices yelling. The boys at this party are acting like adults as a comparison to how men act when surrounded by other men.
The author does this to show how the boys look like to mothers when they are growing up and trying to act like adults. More than anything else in this poem, the author is showing what first grade boys do and how mothers watch them being themselves. In lines 10 and 11, the author compares the young boys clearing their throats to having a room of small bankers.
I guess she thinks bankers clear their throats a lot. The final four lines shows the boys pretending to be generals and are playing war. Throughout this poem, the author has consistently compared the boys to men or short men. The main idea of this poem is to show how these boys try to act like men, even though they do not know how to.
They probably think that to be a man, you have to be tough and mean, and so that is what the author is describing in this poem. Also she talks about how they fight and are competing, because they think that is what men do. They obviously have not been taught what grown up means. All the older boys agree with this one boy. They just care about age and think it is okay to be mean to people younger than them. Hopefully when they actually get older, they learn that being older does not mean being violent.
Hands in pockets, they stand around Jostling. They clear their, throats a lot. Peer pressure seems to be a theme of this poem also. This sheds a light on how uniformity and how a society full of conformist affects even the youngest generations. The poem also gives you a bit of a taste of the competitive nature of men. They have to prove them selves to others. I believe that she is comparing him to balsa wood because balsa wood is fragile and can brake easily, and she thinks that he is still her little new born baby.
It is portrayed in a negative light, as these boys did not decide for themselves that they wanted these character traits, but they were engrained into them since an extremely young age. They have not the slightest clue of the horrors of war, yet they play it like a game for fun because it is the social norm.
It is unlikely that any of them have been in a real fight, but the poem is riddled with mentions of pugilistic violence. They are performing these acts that are stereotypically manly in an attempt to prove their masculinity. Children are observant people, and they take careful notice of the way that their fathers and other prominent men in their lives act.
They want to be like them, so they make efforts to prove their manhood, a title they are clearly not worthy of. This is a shame because they are hastening their youth which is a time that they will never get back. This is the main theme of the poem; how the only thing boys want to do in their youth is grow up. Olds also touches on the social struggles that boys of this age face.
They have an incredibly competitive nature that is mostly driven by peer pressure, also a trait that is masculine by nature. They all feel the need to be similar but they also have the desire to outdo all of their friends. This is seen when they are all standing together and break out into small fights.
Each of them engages in the same activity and display their ambitious mannerisms. Although they are at a little birthday party, it is not happy and they make the party less innocent and fun than it should be. The boys are only about six and seven, and are acting much older. They are not mature in a grown up manner, they just know more than they should. These lines contradict each other. This diction really makes you carefully think about the whole situation.
The boys are again making themselves believe that they are grown ups. They are skipping right passed their best ages in childhood. Society is starting to expect more from younger and younger ages every few years. The kids see that society is in war, constantly fighting, and the people are disagreeing.
Violence is overtaking the purity of youth, as it is also doing to the adults. The children do not understand the seriousness of aggression and fighting, and do not realize the consequences. The theme of this is the negativity of maturation. These young boys are maturing to fast to start to think about hurting others. She admires him and think that he is the perfect little sweetheart.
From this, I can tell that Olds probably thinks that society is oblivious to evil, power hungry, self centered, and unaware of the terrible aspects of fighting and killing others.
Every boy sees becoming a man as a rite of passage, and until they are one they insist on acting like it. To them, being a man shows that they are above everyone else, it gives them power. This is exactly what the boys are doing in this poem, they are trying to show their manliness to each other. This is probably brought on by the aging of one of the boys. Today is his birthday so he is becoming older, presumably 7 or 8, so to the other boys he is surpassing them, becoming a man.
The mother of the birthday boy is apparently treating this as harmless play that the boys are doing, but to them this means much more.
To them, it decides how they will be seen for the rest of their life in the eyes of the other boys. Obviously their small fights and threats are nothing more than harmless games in the real world, however their threat in line 22 is. In this line they express how easily they could kill a two year old infant.
To the boys, murder is the ultimate form of power and by agreeing to the fact that they could all easily kill someone, they agree that they all have equivalent power. The use of the simile comparing the birthday cake to a turret added a new level of depth by comparing the conflict between the seven and the six to a war between two men, showing that while the fight seems trivial to the adult mind, it is everything to the children.
Olds then shifts the focus away from the conflict with the addition of a mediator. The children again model themselves after older male role models, exhibiting how even the youngest of men aspire to fill their stereotypical place is society. This reminder is important because it reveals how a boy spends his whole life preparing to be a man and that it is a rite of passage for a boy to dream about his future life. The truth is that men care just as much as women do about being on par with societal standards.
The difference lies in how one approaches his what others want of his life. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. The author uses words and phrases to create a mental image for her readers. Being able to visualize what the author is writing allows the reader to directly identify with the mother in the poem.
However, each poem makes a different comment about this relationship and the tensions it can create. Parent-child relationships can bring joy and security but also pain and restrictions.
The title of the poem 'Before you were mine' instantly tells the reader that the relationship here may be unbalanced. The speaker of the poem is somewhat possessive, the word 'mine' suggesting ownership. Meanwhile, others sit in total confusion. My two older brothers were always brainstorming new ideas and grew to have a reputation for their creativity.
We used to spend many summer afternoons making new music videos or playing games with our own rules. He radiated so much warmth, and momentarily, I disregarded the feeling that had been on my mind all evening.
As I let go of him, he smiled and without knowing I was smiling back at him. I turned to my friends, they had all stopped talking and just stared at us, I felt embarrassed yet completely secure with showing my emotions. The attention then turned to Tina, who dropped a knife, knocking other items on the table with it, we laughed at this but I I looked at him, knowing that this night would forever be in my mind, the day I realised that Alexis was amazing and that we were more than friends, yet I also realised that he knew what I felt, I felt embarrassed yet I knew that I had fallen for the right person, and to this day I still believe that my life changed that day.
We know her state of mind in the last year of her life i. She realizes it with bitterness never experienced earlier, but the phenomenon of betrayal is sought to be hid on her part from her mother. This is the dialectic part of her poetry. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. Loss of Innocence in Rite of Passage by Sharon Olds A rite of passage is defined as a ceremony marking a significant transition or an important event or achievement, both regarded as having great meaning in lives of individuals.
In Sharon Olds' moving poem "Rite of Passage", these definitions are illustrated in the lives of a mother and her seven-year-old son. The seriousness and significance of these events are represented in the author's tone, which undergoes many of its own changes as the poem progresses. From its title, the tone of the poem is already set as serious, and we know there will be a significant event taking place in someone's life.
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