Monday, January 19, 2009

External Form Poem 4- Shel Silverstein!

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I remembered from the days of my youth (who am i kidding....from last week) that Shel Silverstein, who writes tons of children's  poem, often uses the poem's external form as a device to visually aid the poem. In this one, the poem is very simple: lazy jane doesn't want to get up and get a glass of water, so she waits for it to rain so the water can just fall into her mouth. Every word is a word is a single stanza, and the words "lazy" and "and waits" are repeated many times, which gives the overall effect of having to wait a long time to get to the point. When you do get to the point, you see the picture of lazy jane lying down with her mouth open, and the words look like they're falling into her mouth. So. The words are the rain which takes a really long time to get to her mouth.


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