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Traveling Through The Dark Analysis

Decent Essays

“Introduction to Poetry” and “Traveling Through the Dark,” are poems written by Billy Collins and William Stafford. The poem’s, “Introduction to Poetry”, main conflict is a teacher who tries to get his students to read and appreciate a poem, but what all the students only care about is figuring out what it means. The conflict is highlighted through the many uses of metaphors to help us understand how he wants the students to look and decipher a poem and how they only focus on finding the meaning instead of taking their time to listen and see the art of poetry. William Stafford’s poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” describes a driver’s dilemma of deciding whether to throw a dead pregnant deer into the river, or leave it laying on the road where it can cause an accident. In both poems, the use of literary devices such as metaphors, personification, imagery, and diction are effective in making and building up the conflict and reaching the resolution. The main conflict in the poem, “Introduction to Poetry”, is that a teacher is troubled by his students not wanting to put effort into understanding poetry. He uses metaphors and similes to explain how a poem should be analyzed to be understood and appreciated and how the students want to understand what the poem means without putting in the effort and mindset that go into reading poetry. For example, the author says, “and hold it up to the light like a color side”, which is a simile that explains how the teacher is comparing the

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