“A Bastard Peace”

Written By: William Carlos Williams

Thesis: William uses imagery to involve his audience within his writing, to imagine a picture in mind of how poverty appears. There is always room for transformation though, never give up hope.

LanguageImagery• Symbols

– White Butterfly represents transformation and purity. The speaker sends out the message that there is still hope for the community that they are trapped in, there is hope for the whole society to transform itself out of poverty and into something greater.

– A dandelion was a connection with the symbol of the white butterfly because a dandelion represents strong willed an wishes. Therefore, leading to the assumption that the speaker talks of there still being hope for the society.

– The children represent hope throughout the poem because since the adults don’t have jobs anymore and the children are the only ones attending school, they seem to have a better future then there parents.

Structure

Ended Stopped:“-” Breaks at the end of each 4th line. Uses numbers.Stanza: 4 Lines per stanza

This affects the way the reader reads the poem, with these dashes is stimulates breaks within the poem making the reader to take a breath after the dash in the stanza.

Each stanza begins with a capitalized word except first and last stanza

Technique/StyleJuxtaposition: When contrast is being shown by placing two

items side by side of each other.

Theme: Main idea/message Trapped inside a poor society

Tone: positive Speaker views the poor society, but yet still seems to have some hope in the trapped community through the children and the language throughout the poem.

Mood: The mood of the poem is set off by the tone in the speaker because however the speaker speaks it sets an automatic feeling on how the speaker felt towards poverty and what they had to view and describe.

Point of view: First and third-person perspectives

Sound

• Rhythm: In line lengths• Rhyme scheme within stanzas.

• Alliteration: Consonant sounds repeated throughout the poem.

• Put exclamation marks within some parts of the poem to make the reader read the poem in a loud voice

A Bastard

• The word Bastard has two meanings.• One is the son born from an unmarried

couple.• Another meaning is false, untrue• The poem is abut false peace, because there

not really living in peace.

• The poem is about a poor environment and people living in poverty compare this to a book or a movie that is similar to the poem.

Activity