I read "Perfect Dress" by Marisa de los Santos. The poem can be found on page 444 of our Intro to Poetry book. This poem is full of both tropes and schemes to help create meaning.
"the girl in the photograph, cobalt-eyed, hair puddling
like cognac, or the one stretched at the ocean's edge,
curved and light-drenched, more like a beach than
the beach. I confess I have longed to stalk runways,
leggy, otherworldly as a mantis, to balance a head
like a Faberge egg on the longest, most elegant neck" (lines 5-10)
The rest of the poem is about a teenaged girls diary entry where she wishes she could just wake up beautiful, super-model beautiful, the girls in the magazines beautiful. She seems to have an unrealistic view that somehow the perfect dress would reveal her inner, hidden beauty.
The author, Marisa de los Santos uses a rhetorical question, at the beginning of the poem to get us thinking, she also uses a similie in lines 7-8 and 9-10 above; comparing the body to a beach, and her head to a Faberge egg. Santos also uses imagery when describing the fabric of and the dresses the speaker tries on and looks at at the time she wishes she would just step into her "perfect evening".
2 comments:
BA #6
When reading through this post, I noticed there there was mention of a "rhetorical question," with its only description being that it is used to "get us thinking." This question; "isn't it strange how we want it, despite all we know?" (lines 3-4), works well as point of contrast between a 15 year-old's daydreaming, and a mature woman's retrospect. This one line is really the only counterpoint in the poem that really creates tension between anything the speaker is saying, which makes it rather important. It seems almost as if her question is a way to realistically rationalize or excuse her desire to be beautiful, but in the end of the poem, the speaker gets wrapped up in this daydream herself. "Isn't it strange?"
This poem is about a young girl wanting to be beautiful, but it goes deeper than that. She is Latin, so when the speaker says "At fifteen, / I spent weeks at the search."(lines 15-16), that meant that she was having her Quincenera. That is the coming of age for girls. She wants to feel beautiful, like a super-model. The question that the speaker asks at the beginning: "isn't it strange/ how we want it, despite all we know?"(lines 3-4), is implied to all young women in the world.
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