Sunday 31 March 2013

How does Clifton employ symbolism and imagery in her poem "There Is a Girl Inside"?

is when the poet uses
language meant to convey sensory information; so it can be visual (seeing), auditory (hearing),
tactile (touch), gustatory (taste), or olfactory (smell). The image of "a green tree in a
forest of kindling" is a very clear visual image, as is the image of the speaker
"break[ing] through gray hairs / into blossom."

The "girl
inside" is actually a for the way the speaker, presumably a
woman of advanced years, feels inside: she does not feel like an old woman
on the inside. We can identify it as a metaphor and not a symbol, proper, because the speaker
does not literally have a girl inside her (and a symbol must work both literally and
figuratively).  Instead, she feels like a young woman, a woman who is "randy as a
wolf," which is a  used to convey the continuation of the
speaker's sexual desire. She is a "green tree in a forest of kindling,"
which...


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