Poetry: A Comparative Analysis

Poetry: A Comparative Analysis

As is true with most comparative analysis essays, we must write a paper in which we compare and contrast different things; in this case, compare the relationship between the language and content of three poems. I am faced with creating a list of seemingly unrelated similarities and some differences. At this point I feel a bit confused about how I want to construct this paper.

I want to attempt to analyze the writing styles of three authors, whose works are from the book The Art of Work. I chose to spotlight three poems: Me and My Work, written by Maya Angelou, Factory Jungle, written by Jim Daniels, and Share-Croppers, written by Langston Hughes. I want to show the relationship between the language the poets used in their writing styles and the content of the poems. The first poem I read for this assignment, Share-Croppers, was very interesting to me in that it seemed to have been written from the viewpoint of a slave. I started reading it and although it was short, it said a lot to me and I just had to read the verses again and again. The words are poignant and made me remember some of the stories I heard as a child told to me by my grand father.

To read any of Langston Hughes' poems one could see that he had a deep concern for depicting American Negro life through the use of the dialect and the terms he used; this was an important part of his writing style. In this poem the language he used made me also think about era in which it was written, a time after emancipation when most southern blacks were forced to become share croppers and were enslaved by debts as tenant farmers. In this poem one starts to get an idea of what it was like to be a black share cropper in the south; the hurt of trying to make a living in a thankless job, only to have what this person worked so hard for taken away. He is left hungry and torn, but not broken, because life goes on.

In the next poem, Factory Jungle, the language this author uses paints a picture of a factory worker feeling free as if in a jungle swinging freely through the trees without a care in the world. The author uses his words as metaphors to bring the reader into his "jungle". Thin lights of sun through the factory windows, shown down like ropes of light is reminiscent of the vines hanging down from the trees. Keeping in the theme of being in a jungle, the author uses a reference to a mad elephant and what it could do to a hand; this refers to biggest press in the plant, just think, if one of the workers were to have their

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