![]() You are so entranced with what you are seeing it now becomes a part of you. It is as if it’s now an absent-minded thing. These feelings come through as her sweeping becomes harder the more terrifying things show on the television. The rhythm in these lines hone in on the anxious feeling of watching soldiers die on screen. ![]() She says, “I got up and swept again/ as they fell out of the sky./ I swept all the harder when/ I watched a dozen of them die…/ as if their dust fell through the screen/ upon the floor I had just cleaned (lines 26-31). She describes the intense way she sweeps coincides with the tension in the news. There is also a rhythm to this section of the poem as it builds in tension.Īlvarez next writes that she gets up and sweeps again during this broadcast. I feel the intensity when its read aloud like the sonnet is building up to something. She also compares the helicopter to dragonflies which is an impressive comparison for the reader. This scene is structured with so much intensity, when read aloud you see the imagery of the soldiers in the helicopters as they land in the jungle. In this passage I see “their helicopters”, “their propellors”, and “seen underwater” as examples of this style choice. This pattern consists of one stressed syllable followed by a long syllable. Alvarez expresses this feeling with the iambic pentameter style by writing, “in the Far East our soldiers were/landing in their helicopters/into jungles their propellors/swept like weeds seen underwater” (lines 18-21). There is anxiety and curiosity that looms in households as families surround the television to get the latest report. Alvarez was born after World War II when there was fighting in the Asian Pacific between the British and the Japanese, but being captivated by a news broadcast talking about war is relevant to any age and time period. The news is broadcasting live from the White House as the President talks about the war in the Far East. ![]() The sonnet then takes a turn as Alvarez describes what is happening in the news. There is slight rhyming to the way she begins this poem which is called a slant rhyme it is not perfect but some of it rhymes. This language is clear for the reader to think she figured it out even though she didn’t know what she was doing. So, without much discussion, she proceeds to step and sweep until the floor is clean. She can infer, her mother wants her to sweep because of how she looks at her when she hands her the broom. It isn’t used every line, but when the poem gets intense, which is where I think the true purpose of this poem lies, this technique is used quite heavily.Īlvarez is handed the broom by her mother, with no true instruction or guidance. The iambic pentameter pattern in, “How I Learned to Sweep”, is used sporadically in her poem. I am unfamiliar with these terms, but when I look them up, they make sense when I read the poem. ![]() They comprise “ten syllables per line, and the lines are in a loose iambic pentameter with slant rhymes (19). She uses the tradition and structure of sonnets but infuses her own voice with it.Īlvarez describes her sonnets as “free verse sonnets”. She learned traditional ways of writing poetry, but she was encouraged to find her own voice in her writing by fellow women writers. ![]() Alvarez says, “By learning to work the sonnet structure and yet remaining true to my own voice, I made myself at home in that form”, (18). To share this story, she uses certain techniques that go against traditional forms of poetry. How Alvarez conveys the true meaning of her poem can be explained through her techniques. Julia Alvarez’s poem, “How I Learned to Sweep” feels as if she is sharing how she learned to sweep or she could be talking about the anxiety she felt while watching a war going on in the news which led to her sweeping away death. ![]()
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