Joshua Strange Assignment 3

In "Singapore" by Mary Oliver, Oliver used personification and simile to describe her emotions and display her tone of disgust and appreciativeness towards the worker.

In the first three stanzas of the poem Oliver's diction choices are extremely negative.  "Darkness" (l. 2), "ripped"(l.2), "Disgust"(l.6), "argued"(l.6), "gaudy"(l.9), and "falling"(l.12) show Oliver's negative tone to the work the woman has to do.  By personifying her disgust by saying it "argued" (l.6) in her stomach it is easy to tell the author is disgusted by the work of the woman.

Her tone changes in the 4th stanza, and mixes her positive and negative diction more through out the stanza. The "embarrassment struggled" is extremely negative, but to close the stanza the smiles exchanged begin to show the appreciation the author has for the worker.

Oliver uses a simile in l. 26 to show that she likes the woman, and is dissapointed that the woman has to work such a poor job.  In the last stanza the author begins to describe her empathy for the woman using verbs like "rise up" and "fly down".  Those diction choices show how the author is sad to see such a joyful woman doing work for such little reward.


"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption." -Raymond Chandler

Personally I think that art is anything created by anyone.  If you create anything, it is reflective of what you have learned or have felt over your life time. So by expressing yourself through the creation of art, you are redeeming what you already have learned or felt in your past- or what you hope to redeem in your future. (While typing this I also thought of the most recent Under Armour commercial that says "You are the sum of all of your training" which is another way that can be used to describe any kind of artist or creation.)