Terra-Cotta Girl :: essays research papers

Terra Cotta GirlThe poem has clear, wide-open manoeuvre while managing ambiguity and open-endedness. A sort of modern local gloss piece tinted with Southern elements, it nevertheless makes its characters real and sympathetic, treats important themes that ar twain topical and general, and offers an apt objective relationship with universal implications.Technically a lyric, the poem filled with narrative and drama an off-the-farm college girl, a Southerner, and by chance a Georgian like Sellers herself, has fallen in love with a letup girl down the hall (9). The girls conservative come has seen to (10) having her daughter seek for an expert help. Ungraceful, conflicted inwardly, and beset outwardly by paternal pressure, the girl now waits to see a counselor. No character speaks, simply the role of each is well defined. At least five characters, perhaps six, come into play two girls, their two m some other(prenominal)s, and one or maybe two counselors. Onstage is the terra co tta girl (1)--and maybe her mother as well. The other, softly (9) daughter and her mother, along with a counselor (perhaps the same one), running a parallel to the scene we are witnessing.Although the poem shows us the girls as sprightliness down the hall (9) from each other in their college dormitory, it also suggests some other indirect possibility that, at the very moment of the present action, this other girl, the quiet one, is just down the hall waiting to see another counselor during two parallel sessions that the mothers have seen to (10). Perhaps, the other girls mother is with her, too. The other girl may be quiet hardly because the narrator chooses not to give her a separate story. If this is the case, her terra cotta lover stands in as her delegate. The phrase quiet girl draws the image of a shy(p) character, who may be less able to handle her current torture, and not as strong as terra cotta girl.Formally, the poem has thirteen perfectly lines with different number s of syllables and accents. The poem is unrhymed but engages such alliterations as flat farm feet (2) / furrows (3), soil has seen (10), and weep for the waste (12). All of the alliterated sounds are voiceless, which projects the current situation of the girls. The thirteen breath units of the poem divide into two clear sentences. With no stanza break in the poem, these sentences establish the language of the drama.