Reading response to a poem

Oranges

The purpose of literature is for the author to invoke and emotional reaction by the audience reading that poem. Some works are designed to inspire joy and others are written in the hopes of inspiring fear or longing or sadness. Poets use the tone of the poem to illustrate the emotion of their work. They use imagery such as symbolism to give meaning to things that might not be obvious to someone without the context provided by that poet. They also determine how a work is to be interpreted by deciding who the narrator of the poem will be, either a person within the work or an unspoken narrator sometimes confused with the poet him or herself. In Gary Soto's poem "Oranges," a single person walks along a street and reminisces about a long ago day wherein his youth and emotion made him warm despite the weather outside. Although a short work, Soto uses tone, imagery, and a first-person narrator, to effectively bring the reader into the mind of his character.

The tone of Gary Soto's "Oranges," is one of nostalgia. The first two lines read "The first time I walked / With a girl, I was twelve" (1-2). Immediately, the reader knows that the narrator is speaking from some distant point from the present. He is reflecting on a long ago day when he experienced his first interaction with a member of the opposite sex. Everything about the poem is subsequently shaded by the knowledge that the memory the narrator is imparting may not have actually happened as he claims. Memory has a tendency of blurring the lines of reality and fantasy, so what may have been an uneventful afternoon becomes one of great importance because of the fact that the narrator is looking back upon it from some point in his adulthood.

Gary Soto uses the imagery of memory and of the senses to invoke the feeling of a cold December day. He uses words like "cold," "jacket," "frost cracking," and "gray of December" to make the reader recall what it feels like to be out and about when it is bitterly cold outside. In December the weather turns very cold and people have to put on their winter wardrobes in order to keep warm. The beginning of the piece is designed to regain that sense memory in the reader. Then the imagery changes to ones that invoke a feeling of warmth. These include: "touch," "gloves," "light," and "fire." All these words create a feeling of warmth to combat the prior imagery invoking feelings of cold. However, these are all pleasantly warm things. The fire at the end of the poem is not one of violent destruction, but imagery of a burning that saves a frozen body. By contrasting the two types of imagery, the writer forces the reader to remember what it felt like the first time that they fell in love, or at least the first time they had a crush. The cold is symbolic of the isolation a person feels when he or she is alone in the world. The warm images are designed to parallel the comfort and happiness a person feels when he or she has the love of another person.

Finally, it is interesting that Gary Soto uses a first-person narrator for his poem. Poetry, because of its very form, is a personal form of literature. To place the narration in a first-person, Soto is identifying heavily with the person who is narrating the story. A first-person narrator provides the text with authority. Instead of being told a story of a young boy who felt his first emotions of love and attraction, the reader is placed inside the mind of this young man and is allowed to feel what he felt in the same ways that he did.