One Today- Poem Analysis Essay

Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was devoted the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poetry for Barack Obamas second swearing-in. He wrote a verse form titled One immediately that praised the good and unique things about the United States and withal the everyday people whos daily routines succor to make America the proud country that it is. Blanco uses several rhetorical devices throughout One Today, to a greater extent so in the first few stanzas.An example of figurative language he utilize was the repeating of certain words or similar words in order to create a operate within the poem. My face, your face, millions of faces in mornings mirrors is a line in the poem that best represents this. Blanco also uses personification to give a better description of the beauty that he is describing, such as clean blush of dusk. Another use of figurative language found in stanza four is the repeating of the word pass which he uses to represent the many hard- carrying han ds of America and the things they do to contribute to the eudaemonia of the country.The word choice in the poem is a big part of what I think ties the alone poem together, and creates a theme that carries through each stanza. As you read the poem you will hear the excessive use of the word one which is most often featured at the beginning of a stanza and followed by something that connects everyone in the country together. An example of this is the first line in the fourth stanza of the poem, which reads One ground. Our ground, root us to every stalk of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat and hands . Another example is the use of words that represent movement.Rose, charging, crescendoing, teeming, launching, jetting are all words used throughout the poem that outline the daily movement that occurs in the lives of American citizens. In the sixth stanza of the poem Blanco gives examples of the many different ways that you may hear U. S residents say hello. I think that he did th is to represent the many different cultures that make up the population of the United States, and the vast amount of languages that they speak.I think the tone and voice that this poem has is that of pride and patriotism. The author does this by outlining the good qualities that the United States has to offer. barely he does this is in such away that it does not sound like bragging, because he does not show about all of the beauty or things that America is known for but rather the people who work to make it this way and how these things bring them together. One Today is of course written in a orb manner because of the occasion that that it was written for.That is why it does not contain any humour, abbreveations or informal language. I think that the voice that the author used in this poem fit the occasion perfectly because it was not bad(p) forward, easily ensureable and relatable to any American citizen. The sentence structure of this poem is unlike a cover of poems that you might see where the lines are of equal length and contain the same amount of sylables. Rather than victorious that approach, Blancos poem contained senteneces, and lines that were all of different length.For example, in the second stanza blanco included two very extensive lines that included dashes and commas because he was creating a list. Some of the very short lines feautured throughout the poem occur beacause the sentence was too long to fit into the line before and was continued in the following(a) line. After I applied all of these craft techniques to the poem One Today it helped me to better understand why the author wrote it the way that he did.