Shifts in Diction, Li-Young Lee

¶ … shifts in diction, Li-Young Lee changes the tone of "Persimmons" dramatically. The first few stanzas are about young love and passionate sexuality, accompanied by words like "sweet" and "tenderly." By the fourth stanza words like "fight" and "fright" edge their way into the poem. Later, the poet weaves between the polarities of softness and hardness, all the time returning to the central image of the persimmon. The effect of repetition in Paul Muldoon's "Gathering Mushrooms" adds a musical, lyrical dimension to the it.

However, the line "you could barely tell one from the other" also conveys the poem's tone of ambivalence over the narrator's parents' death. He muses about herbs. He uses the words "mother and father" to describe storms and continually suggests that he could not tell "one from the other" because he barely knew them. In "Those Winter Sundays," Robert Hayden describes his hardworking yet taciturn father whose "austere and lonely offices" belied his affection for his family.

As the poet points out, even on Sundays he performed backbreaking work in the cold of winter: on a day when most people would stay home and rest. Hayden laments the fact that he did not appreciate his father when he was a child because his dad seemed so stern and angry. Yet it was his father who provided for the family due to his working "Sundays too" and offering an "austere but lonely" love. 4.

One of the ways Daniel Tobin signals a shift in tone in "The Clock" is by using italics in the line "I'm older now, and now, and now." Repetition of the phrase "and now" imparts the anxiety the narrator feels as a child wanting so badly to grow up fast. Yet Tobin's tone becomes ominous when the boy's hands touch the clock. Before he touches it, he is unaware of how adult lives are controlled each minute by demands and schedules. As a boy, the narrator is still innocent.

His life is his own, lived on his own terms. He is not a slave to the clock. Thus, when he feels the pulse of time in his very fingertips, the "gears" of change "start to tick through every room of that house." The touch is his awakening, the beginning of his adulthood and the end of innocence. 5. In Seamus Heaney's "Mother of the Groom," several words have double meanings.

For example, the word "ring" connotes a wedding ring and it also refers more directly to the "ring of boots" at her feet. The word "lifted" also has a double meaning, one literal and one metaphorical. The mother remembers literally lifting her baby boy in the bathtub, but she contemplates how he is being "lifted" or stolen by his fiance. Her baby boy is leaving her.

The word "bedded" also connotes two different things, suggesting both sex but also finality as she describes the feeling wedding ring being permanently em-bedded on a person's finger. 6. The first stanza of Agha Shahid Ali's poem "Postcard from Kashmir" is filled with hope and optimism, delivered mainly by the word "neat." Written from a youthful perspective, the word "neat" is often used as slang like the word "cool" is. Moreover, the word "neat" is used to described his humble yet poor home.

The narrator notes also "this is home," which also affords hope and optimism. However, the tone of the poem shifts dramatically in the second and third stanzas, when the narrator realizes that his beloved Kashmir is changing while it becomes modernized. It will no longer be peaceful and neat but rather "a giant negative" of both black and white, positive and negative, indigenous and colonial experiences. 7. When Elena Mora.