Imagery- Using "The Winter Day" by Maya Angelou
"The Winter Day" by Maya Angelou- Sample Alteration.
The kitchen in its readiness
sage, leafy, and amber things
seep their warm essence into the soup.
Tender immolation that offers
redolence to my nose and starts
my tongue to march
slipping in the liquid of its drip.
The day, silver glinted
in dreary rain, begs
at my window and the soup.
This snippet of the first two stanzas in "The Winter Day" were a difficult change. I find it hard to use similar ideas to present an opposite emotion, but I found that searching up synonyms with different connotations helped to change the meaning. In the original version of the poem, Angelou uses a few words to refer to the ingredients in the soup as "ritual sacrifice". Angelou uses words like: blood, leak, ritual sacrifice, snap, odor, and balked. These words share a connotation of violence, loss, hostility, and death that when compared to the idea of a winter day give of a despairing feeling. By choosing words with shared meanings, but give the reader a different image when paired together, the entire theme of the poem's narrative can be changed. Some poems I found could hardly be changed at all, but poems like this, with such strong words of feeling are much easier to alter.
I also had trouble changing the original poem to convey a different emotion. I chose the same poem to rewrite. I enjoyed your rewriting of your poem. I particularly liked the line where you changed it to “sage, leafy, and amber things.” It adds more warmth than the original. I agree that poems with stronger words conveying emotion are easier to change.
ReplyDeleteAngelou is not one I'd want to alter (it feels sacrilege)--but I think you did exactly what was asked of us in an intentional way. In Angelou's original poem, I agree--there is desperation and hostility--and in your version, I see the winter day not as the gray of death, but instead, a warm, cozy, day of reflection. It's fascinating to me how the change of just a couple words can entirely send meaning in a different direction.
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