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¶ … microtheme Gordonr's poem - file attached a microtheme analysis paper focuses a specific poem a specific Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem "To My Brother" addresses the ills of poverty. The poem's theme explores the effects and perceptions of poverty on the impoverished, which largely takes the form of the poem's speaker. The author utilizes a number of specific literary devices to emphasize the pervasiveness of this theme and of poverty's impact upon people; these devices include metaphor, diction, and onomatopoeia.

The theme of poverty and its debilitating effects upon the impoverished is demonstrated a number of ways in this poem of Cervantes. One of the most accessible of these is through her usage of metaphor. Poverty engenders the effect of dulling the lives and perceptions of people burdened by it. The author utilizes a metaphor about the weather to convey this fact. She writes, "Sun, scarcely a penny in that dreary setting" (Cervantes 520).

The effects of poverty on the perceptions of the speaker are noxious and extremely evident in the preceding quotation. The speaker likens the sun to a currency, a noteworthy metaphor because of the denomination of currency selected which is a penny, the least amount of money one can possess in the United States. By comparing the sun to a paltry sum of money, the speaker is implying that there was a dearth of sun in her life, much like there was a dearth of money.

The figurative significance of this passage is clear: the speaker had little money, and experienced a number of dark, "dreary" days because of that fact. Cervantes employs another metaphor to reflect the state of indigence the poem's speaker experienced. She writes, "We were poor. The air was a quiver of thoughts we drew from to poise, unsaid in the ineffable world we lived in" (Cervantes 520).

The metaphor found in this passage likens the air to thoughts, a fact which suggests that the air, and the thoughts of the narrator, were virtually all the speaker of the poem had (since he or she was considerably "poor"). Additionally, an analysis of the author's diction in this passage underscores the poem's preoccupation with penury.

The author describes the air and the thoughts it represents figuratively as something the speaker "drew from." This diction is important because it is regularly used in conjunction with banking and checking accounts, which people regularly draw from or make withdrawals from. However, the narrator of the poem is drawing air and the thoughts it represents, since penury has rendered him or her bereft of bank accounts.

Lastly, the thoughts that the air yielded to the narrator remain "unsaid," which emphasizes the poor nature of these thoughts that they remained immaterial, unlike material, pragmatic money. Onomatopoeia is certainly a subset of diction, and the author employs both of these to indicate the debilitating effects of poverty. Towards the end of the poem the speaker describes the type of work he or she performs to help escape from penury. It is obviously meaningless,.