Tuesday, June 24, 2014

What are some examples of juxtaposition in Louise Erdrich's poem "Jacklight"?

Juxtaposition is used often in Louise Erdrich's poem
"Jacklight." One very useful web site defines juxtaposition as
follows:


readability="16">

The arrangement of two or more
ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar
narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense,
or character development.
(http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_J.html)



Juxtaposition
appears, for instance, in some of the following places in Erdrich's
poem:


  • In the juxtaposition of the prose of the
    opening epigraph with the verse of the succeeding
    poem.

  • In the sudden shift from active to passive phrasing
    in the transition from line 5 and line 6.

  • In the sudden
    shift from plural in the lines 1-7 to singular in lines 8-9.

  • In the sudden shift back to plural from singular that
    occurs in line 10.

  • In the phrase "night sun" (line
    11).

  • In the sudden shift from an emphasis on "we" in the
    first three stanzas to an emphasis on "they" in stanza
    four.

  • In the shift from the largely attractive imagery of
    the first three stanzas to the largely unattractive imagery of stanza
    four.

  • In the abrupt shift that occurs midway through line
    18: "We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt." (A similar shift occurs in
    line 21.)

  • In the sudden shift back to an emphasis on "we"
    that occurs in line 28.

  • In the sudden shift back to
    "they" that occurs in the final
    stanza.





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