In line 7, “squirting” is set off by a comma to show how the mother walked by and sprayed the dust. Lines 6 and 7, “practicing signatures like scales/ while mother followed…”, flow without breaks like how cursive signatures or smooth scales are unbroken. The phrases “then crossed” and “scrawled” are set apart by commas and shortened, much like the punctuated drawing of a little girl’s hand on a dusty surface. “Dusting” uses syntax to mimic the activity of the poem. “Each morning I wrote my name/ on the dusty cabinet, then crossed/ the dining table in script, scrawled (Dusting, 1-3)” This metaphor is exemplary not only because it’s logical, but it also surprises the reader by taking a restrictive context and turning it to be a tool for liberation. As it relates to poetry, housekeeping is valuable and can be used to “clean-up” or “re-organize” traditional forms in order to express your own voice. It’s thinking from the oppressor’s point of view to say that what you did was nothing (4). Her reply is that housekeeping is actually valuable and worthy work (3). In the beginning, she rhetorically asks why she’s writing about housekeeping, since many assume it clashes with feminism and liberation (1-3). You housekeep it by working the words just so (Housekeeping Cages, N/A).”Īlvarez uses the metaphor of housekeeping throughout the poem to relate the above theme. But the cage can turn into a house if you housekeep it the\ right way. “My idea of traditional forms is that as women much of our heritage is\ trapped in them. The image of a sprinkler on a mowed lawn is very Americano, and it shows they were assimilating into the culture. The components of the simile also go hand-in-hand with the following line, “blended into the block,”. Firstly, associating a sprinkler with a flag is unexpected, but makes sense because they’re very similar in their motion. “By year’s end, a sprinkler waving/ like a flag on our mowed lawn,/ we were blended into the block, (Queen’s, 1963, 4-6).”Īlvarez creatively uses simile well here to convey muliple messages. The poem serves as a poignant reminder that our culture has gone through many changes, and it will likely go through many changes, even in our lifetimes.īelow are several snippets of Alvarez’s use of poetry devices. The way she develops the families in the poem and the prejudice they endured brings to life the difficult realities of that era, which was not that long ago. However I was greatly challenged by her poem “Queens, 1963.” Change happens very slowly, so it can be easy to think that our culture wasn’t that different a few decades ago, and that it will remain mostly as it is now. Personally, I had some trouble relating to Alvarez’s writings, because I come from and live in very different circumstances than she does. Consistent with her other work, she resolves at the end to follow her passion and write anyways. She also writes in “First Muse” of how she had been despairing under the weight of voices trying to drown out her dream of writing in English as a non-native speaker. In it she casts aside the notion that stereotypes from certain forms of poetry are law, and that you can work within the given structure of a poem form to express your own unique voice. We see this same progressive attitude in her own poem “Housekeeping Cages”. She didn’t believe that she had to be categorized according to an existing label. In “Mapping an Identity”, Keli Johnson writes how Alvarez, in response to the question of belonging as an immigrant, created her own identity as a multi-ethnic writer. Julia Alvarez is a poet worth studying because she comes from a background that’s more diverse than many other poets, and as such she provides a different perspective that we can hold up to our own beliefs and worldview.
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