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Analysis Of What Every Woman Should Carry By Maura Dooley

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How this essay will be approached is by first giving a general interpretation of the poem "What Every Woman Should Carry" by Maura Dooley. This will be followed by, with the use of stylistic features, a more thorough interpretation. The stylistic features that will be used are deviation, parallelism as well as cohesion and foregrounding. This will be done by taking a closer look at the only stanza contained in the entire poem which consists of 12 lines. This particular poem could be broken into two parts. Lines one to six appears to deal with the past and six to twelve might specify the present; this will be explained in more depth during the course of the essay.

The content of the poem tells "What Every Woman Should Carry" in her …show more content…

The poem is written in the first person, this is apparent in the first line when the pro nouns "my" and "me" are used. The idea of this also being a female narrator is because the contents of this particular handbag contain female items (tampon in line 3).

However, to look at the poem more thoroughly, the use of nouns and grammar is also important. The first part of the poem contains a total of twelve nouns within four sentences. These twelve nouns only contain two actual persons, the narrators' mother and a referral to Saint Theresa; these two people have similar maternal qualities. The positioning of commas and full stops are equally important as they emphasis the importance to objects and also gives the poem tension. But because of all the commas and full stops, I found it hard to find a repetitive rhythm and will go along with the conclusion that there is not one. There are two very short anaphoric sentences which make those items placed into the bag appear important to the narrator in some way, as if they have more then a practical use to them and are symbolic. These two sentences were "Passport" (line7) and "A key" (line 8). However in the second part of the poem there are 6 sentences containing 10 nouns; these nouns are more spaced apart unlike those that appear as if listed in the first part of the poem. The proceeding lines are more

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