Sample Paper 2

2. Structure matters!

        “I'm Nobody! Who are you?” and "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--" have great structures to grab readers' interests.  "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" is divided to two stanza and four lines each stanza; "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--" is one stanza only that has eight lines in total.  Two poems both have good arrangement, because in "I'm Nobody! Who are you?", the first stanza sets up an environment and the second stanza mainly reveals the strong emotion.  In first stanza, it is like a scene that one person introduces herself/himself and excitingly find that the other person is similar with her/him.  The first stanza is more setting up the background of the poem, and the fourth lines of the first stanza transits to revel the emotion from describing the pictures.  Emily starts two exclamatory sentence "How dreary" "How public" to show a strong negative feeling of being public or being "Somebody".  Moreover, Emily used a metaphor to compare the action of self-exposure to public with the frog, and it help readers to understand the theme of the poem more.   "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" is in one stanza only, because it is the poem that seeks to persuade people that people are too fragile to receive all the truth at once because truths sometimes are explicit and cruel enough to hurt people's values.  The idea is too abstract to be portrayed in details in another stanza.  Besides, when the stanza is long, readers' minds are concentrated.
        To make the poem more persuasive, capitalization plays an important role.  In "Tell all the truth but tell it slant--", Emily Dickinson capitalized every word that describe light and truth, such as "Truth", "Delight", and "Lightning".  The poem we know focus on persuading how bright the truths are, and the capitalized adjectives emphasize the theme of the poem and also grab readers' attentions.  Therefore, the poem easily convinces readers when the readers notice and pay attention to the idea.  Capitalization also works well in "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"  In the poem, Emily changed every "nobody" to "Nobody" and "somebody" to "Somebody".  Reader can interpret "Nobody" and "Somebody" as names, and reader can also interpret the two words as other meaning.  Whatever the interpretation is, the author's goal is achieved, which is engaging the readers to compare and contrast "Nobody" and "Somebody".  Therefore, capitalization successfully cause the readers' interest.