“From the Diary of An Almost-Four-Year-Old” In life we experience many things. Most of the things we experience we experience them as children. We see things for the first time that we have obviously never seen before. We see things that bring us Joy, sadness, anger, and excitement, a variety of emotions. We might see things that should not be seen, things that we cannot take back and we might also see good things. As children it is a given that we shall see with two eyes.
Imagine living in this world with one eye or even worse being blind. How would you feel only being able to see with one eye or not being able to see at all, In this poem “From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old” this little girl experiences just that. In this poem the speaker is talking about getting shot in the eye by a solider. The speaker is concerned of what she might see. The speaker is asking herself if she will see half of everything. We know the speaker gets shot by a soldier because she says, “l did not see the bullet but felts its pain exploding In my head.
HIS image did not vanish, the soldier with a big gun, unsteady hands, and a look in his eyes I could not understand” (7-15, ‘Ashrams). The speaker also talks about how she can see the soldier so clearly with her eyes closed that we might have a pair of eyes In our head. The speaker says, “If I can see him so clearly with my eyes closed, It could be that Inside our heads we each have one spare set of eyes to make up for the ones we lose” (16-21, ‘Ashrams). The speaker also states her birthday is coming up and on her birthday she will get a glass eye.
She says things might look weird with the glass eye because when she looked through marbles things looked different, round and fat. The speaker ends the poem saying a little baby also lost her eye and wonders if the soldier shot her too. In the poem the speaker uses iambic trimester. The speaker tries to lure the reader in by using emotion. The speaker makes you feel sad for the little girl because she got shot in the eye and is only about to be four. The speaker uses big words to show the girl has lost her Innocence which also makes you feel sorry for the little girl.
The speaker also states that a nine month old baby also lost her eye which triggers even more emotion. No one likes to think that there are children getting hurt, especially not babies. In this poem the speaker is talking about what would happen In the war, there would be a variety of things that would happen, Old and young people would get shot or worse. Mostly children under the age of 15 were killed in this war. How this relates to the poem is that the little girl lived in this time. The little girl states that she Just looked at the solider and he shot her in the ye.
The speaker says this, “l hear a nine month old has also lost an eye, I wonder If my solider shot her eye too-?a solider looking for little girls who look him In the eye (28-33, ‘Ashrams). It’s wrong if the soldier shot the little girl for no reason, not 1 OFF children in the whole world losing their lives, lives that don’t have to be lost and when a soldier decides he has the right to take the life of a child it is Just wrong. The speaker in this poem also has the little girl use big words that most four year olds wouldn’t use or understand. The speaker does this to show that the little girl has lost her innocence since this incident.
The speaker also shows that the girl is little by saying, ” next month, on my birthday, I will have a brand new glass eye, maybe things will look round and fat in the middle-?I have gazed through all my marbles, they made the world look strange” (22-27, ‘Ashrams). It shows that the girl is little by having her talk about marbles, marbles are a type of toy maybe a toy a child should not be playing with but a toy, it describes how she looked through the marble and how the oral looked looking through the marble the way the speaker talks in this stanza sort of shows the little innocence the child has left.
In the poem not Just the words make it weird for a three year old almost four year old to be talking like that but how the speaker is thinking. Most three year olds almost four year olds do not think about life in such a way they should be care free and thinking about toys or who or what they are going to play with. As we go on with our lives it’s Just a regular day for us, we do things we would normally do. We are humans we don’t think about all the wars going on or how many people get killed each day and in what different ways.
We are so self-absorbed nothing else in the world really matters to us then what goes on in our own lives. Now take this three almost four year old girl who lost her eye from getting shot by a soldier, most of us do not know what it is like to have one or no eyes to see out of . How would you feel only being able to see with one eye or not being able to see at all, in this poem “From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old” this little girl experiences Just that.
