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I Conform All My Duties By Greg Hynes

Decent Essays

During their adolescent lives, teenagers can face a multitude of problems and struggles. Poetry is used by some youth to reflect on issues such as divorce, sexuality and parental expectations. It is also easy to express emotion through poetry, which makes it a useful creative outlet for teenagers coping with their issues. It is not difficult to relate to these poems, as they all focus on common problems that teenagers go through on a daily basis. Three pieces of poetry that are used to discuss these issues are "Beyond Pastel," "I Perform All My Duties", and "Warren Pryor."

The first poem is called "Beyond Pastel," by Katherine Lawrence. The main conflict of this poem is a divorce between two parents and the internal struggle of their …show more content…

In this poem, the struggle that the teenager is facing is coping with his homosexuality. He believes that no one would accept him if he were to be true to himself, so he hides it. He does not want to disappoint his peers, or to be bullied, so he keeps it a secret for his whole life. The author of this piece expertly uses repetition of the phrase "I'm a perfect little," and the word "must." Throughout the author's life, he acts as if he were a robot, obeying every command and wish. He wants to be a perfect, well-behaved child so that his parents are not unhappy with him, and feels that his homosexuality is equivalent to letting his parents down. He says, "must be careful of how I act. There can't be any gay stereotypes." This line shows us that he is extremely considerate of how he portrays himself to the point of having to watch how he acts. A few lines later, he says "mustn't show any sign of falling apart," and a break in the repetition of 'must' makes it evident that he is having a very tough time internally, and that he really is falling apart. In the end, he marries a woman, has children, and has a family, but it is clear it is not what he …show more content…

His parents worked and endured much toil to send him off to an expensive school for him to graduate and get a job. It is said that they were "slaving to free him from the stony fields, the meager acreage that bore them down," which implied that their land may not have been taking in very much money for the family. At that point, it would seem as though anyone would want to get away from the farm and go to work at a much nicer job. Eventually, Warren Pryor did graduate, and as he picked up his diploma - a "passport from the years of brutal toil" - his parents were content and proud. The author used the metaphor comparing the diploma to a passport to show just how relieving it would be for anyone to finally be able to leave the old farmland. When Warren's parents came to visit him at his new job as a bank teller, they were clearly amazed. They believed that they had saved his life, and had "saved him from their thistle-strewn farm and it's red dirt." But the mood of this poem changes from cheerful and positive to gloomy when it's said that Warren is "hard and serious, like a young bear in it's teller's cage." He feels out of place in his job, and that it isn't the place for him. He had done what his parents wanted for him, so that he could make them proud, but he did not speak up about how he

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