Literature III Poetry Assignment

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· Good draft, Angelica. You give us a great sense of the poem's message and theme, and highlight a couple of individual lines for close analysis, too. But you need to look more closely at more specific details of the text. You have a couple of paragraphs with no direct quotes, and you should be sure that every body paragraph has direct quotes, to keep your analysis grounded in the specific words of the text. For example, you say nothing about the very ambiguous final stanza, which explains the title, because the speaker compares his father to a guitar. It's hard to figure out why the speaker would relate his father's heart disease to something that makes beautiful music, but that's a  paradox  (a common poetic device) that you need to try to say something about.

Sometimes you quote key lines but don't say enough about them. This is the case when you quote lines from the second stanza that compare the stress of losing a loved one with the stress of having to make the rent--"On the night his mother died/in far away Puerto Rico/ my father lurched upright in bed,/ heart hammering/ like the fist of a man at the door/ with an eviction notice" (lines 11-16). Why does he compare one form of stress common to everyone, regardless of income, to a form of stress experienced only by people who must struggle to pay the bills with exploitatively low wages? (Remember also to insert forward slashes to indicate line breaks when quoting poetry, as I just did with the above quote). 

Address these couple of issues and your analysis will be more complete.

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