The poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” was published in 1976 at the beginning of a renaissance of Mexican-American (also referred to as Chicana [for female authors]) literary creativity. This renaissance did not reflect the female authors’ sudden burst of creativity, for there always were women writing, but rather it reflects the sudden willingness on the…
Tag: Poetry
My Mother Pieced Quilts – Themes
Kinship/Motherhood Teresa Palomo Acosta’s poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts” stitches together pieces of memory, history, and tradition to create a poem, much as her mother once stitched together pieces of old dresses, work clothes, and nightgowns to create a quilt. In the poem “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” the speaker reflects on images of her mother,…
My Mother Pieced Quilts – Meaning – Annotation
Lines 1–4 Acosta begins the poem at the most literal level, introducing the quilts and how they were used: for warmth against winter chill. Using a metaphor, she describes the quilts as “weapons” against “pounding january winds,” perhaps the way a young child would imagine them during the coldest of winter nights. Lines 5–7 Here…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Analysis
Critics seemed unable to pigeonhole e. e. cummings. He was a man of many moods—some caustic and full of ridicule, others quiet and contemplative. The themes of his poetry were just as likely to be influenced by politics and social affairs as by sexuality and love. But one recurring theme that cummings seems to have…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Rhyme Scheme – Poetic Devices
“Maggie and milly and molly and may” is written in the tone and style of a nursery rhyme and is marked by both its skillful use of alliteration and its complex end-line and internal rhymes. Nursery rhymes do not all share a single poetic form or meter, but they are generally marked by their use…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Themes
The poem “maggie and milly and molly and may” represents one of e. e. cummings’s experiments with rhymed couplets. True to his disregard for formal rules of writing, cummings does not rhyme every couplet in this poem. It is also a perfect and, on the surface, simplistic expression of his belief that the outer self…
maggie and milly and molly and may – Summary
Line 1 Here the speaker of the poem introduces the four characters. Notice how the repetition of the “m” sound in each of the girls’ names gives this line a musical quality, like a melody, and makes it sound like a nursery rhyme. Such repetition of consonant sounds at the beginnings of words is called…
The Lamb by William Blake – Analysis
It is easy to dismiss “The Lamb” as a sentimental or naive poem. Simple in its structure and vocabulary, it leaves no difficulties of interpretation. Unlike some of the Songs of Innocence, it does not force the reader to consider ironies or ambiguities involved in the state of innocence. The only question the child speaker…
The Lamb by William Blake – Poetic Devices – Setting
“The Lamb” consists of two ten-line stanzas which pose a question and give an answer. Each stanza has five pairs of rhyming couplets, where the end word of one line rhymes with the next. Note that Blake often repeats a word to create this rhyme, creating a type of refrain, and twice employs the slant…
The Lamb by William Blake – Themes
Innocence When Blake published Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 1794, he subtitled the book, “Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.” The qualities displayed by the child speaker in “The Lamb” are an example of what Blake meant by the state of innocence, which may be found in children but is…