Terra-Cotta Girl :: essays research papers

Terra Cotta GirlThe poetry has clear, wide-open drama while managing ambiguity and open-endedness. A sort of modern local color piece tinted with Southern elements, it stock-still makes its characters real and sympathetic, treats important themes that ar both topical and general, and offers an apt accusatory relationship with universal implications.Technically a lyric, the poem filled with chronicle and drama an off-the-farm college daughter, a Southerner, and perhaps a Georgian like Sellers herself, has locomote in love with a appease fille tear down the dormitory (9). The girls conservative mother has contriven to (10) having her daughter seek for an in effect(p) help. Ungraceful, conflicted inwardly, and beset outwardly by parental pressure, the girl now waits to see a counselor. No character speaks, but the role of distributively is hale defined. At least five characters, perhaps six, come into play devil girls, their two mothers, and one or maybe two counselors. Onstage is the terra cotta girl (1)--and maybe her mother as well. The other, quiet (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 living down the hall (9) from each other in their college dormitory, it also suggests another 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 precisely because the narrator chooses not to choke 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 character, who may be little able to handle her current torture, and not as strong as terra cotta girl.Formally, the poem has xiii short lines with different numbers of syllables and accents. The poem is unrhymed but engages such alliterations as flat farm feet (2) / furrows (3), vulgarism 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 erupt in the poem, these sentences establish the language of the drama.