Nikkei Giovanni and I feel that the poem has meaning to life in the fact that we mistake some things for what they’re really not. The thesis of this poem Is that things can be confusing and hard to understand, and sometimes easy to mistake something for something else. The poem starts off as a woman is driving her car down the road and she sees what she believes to be a possum. The woman thinks about all the times that she has come close to hitting something with her car, whether it be an animal, or some trash.
She thinks of the time when she Is driving and she almost hits an small animal that Is running away from a cat that Is Line #4 “Toying With It’s Life,”. The animal did not make It away from the cat. The woman Is also frustrated that people don’t take the time to care and watch out for little innocent animals in the wild, such as the possum. There are quite a few literary elements in this poem, but I will only focus on three. The first one that I noticed was that there was a sense of personification in a way about the possum.
It relates to life itself and how our Judgment gets clouded In the eat of things. Like how in the poem, Giovanni shows that in the moment, the driver doesn’t think clearly and assumes that the possum is an actual possum, when it is nothing more than a leaf. This shows how fast we Jump to a conclusion, and how much better it would be for us to think things through before we do them. The second key literary element is imagery. There was a lot of Imagery in this poem. How Nikkei describes the leaf at the end of the poem, and how It Is “struggling . O lift Itself Into the wind and live” and how the birds are “living Klan of insinuators think themselves invincible and pay no heed to the rolling wheels while they dine on an unlucky rabbit” I think the imagery really goes to show the detail in the poem and helps you imagine how the narrator thinks and feels when she almost hits the leaf. The line “Coffee splashes over the cup which I quickly put away from me and Into the empty passenger seat. ” The detail In this line really helps you to picture her coffee. This display of imagery really helped me imagine these events.
The third key literary element is the suspense that the author used. The author used pauses to give the reader time to think over what has Just happened, and help them make assumptions on what they should do. This helps the reader in the way that they can do a double-take If they don’t entirely understand what they Just read. This really helps, as you can get a better meaning out of the poem. It helps giving enjoyment when you first read the poem because It adds uncertainty to the poem and gives a better feeling when you read it.
I think all of these key literary elements add up and summarize the thesis at the name time. They show how we can misunderstand things sometimes and how you can avoid doing that if you pay attention to what you’re doing and don’t over-react and not focus on something. If the driver In “Possum Crossing” had paid more a possum, it would have been the leaf that we know about, and there would have been no coffee spilt. I think the poem by itself shows it’s relation to life, but I see that we mistake things for what they’re not at all. We sometimes mistake a sock for a rat, or a tree branch for a ghost/person.
