Custom «Wishes for Sons & Singapore» Essay Paper Sample

Personal experiences hidden in personal pieces of writings like poems are the best evidence and facts about our life. Value of a poem from historical perspective is immense. It is not simply a history told by a few lines, there can be much more than that in one poem like Lucille Clifton's "Wishes for Sons" and Mary Oliver's "Singapore'.

"Wishes for Sons" by Clifton is like an intimate letter to future sons and men from a representative of all womanhood, a woman and poetess. The form of the poem which lacks good grammar, rhyming and capitalization is like an emphasis on angry tone of the poetess. Tone and form of Oliver's "Singapore" is similar to that of Clifton's poem. Unlike Clifton, who feels anger, Oliver feels disgust to what she sees in the airport. Her poem is interruptive: the poetess is jumping from reality to her imagination. However, the Oliver reveals women's nature from a different perspective than Clifton does. While Clifton wishes men to try to experience what every woman has to go through on regular basis: "I wish them cramps. I wish them a strange town and the last tampon" (1-3); Oliver wants her readers to admit that a woman can wash ashtrays in public restrooms (disgusting job to most of us) and, at the same time, to be beautiful and tender personality inside: "the light that can shine out of a life" (35).

Clifton speaks more about physical side of woman's nature and all the problems it entails. Unlike Clifton, Oliver refers to woman's soul and inside beauty despite disgusting reality of her work and possibly life. Even though the poem by Clifton seems too straightforward revealing a very intimate fact of every woman's life which is menstruation, figurative language might have made the poem difficult to comprehend. Today women are more open and straightforward than women of the past centuries. Like Clifton they are not afraid to speak for themselves facing reality.

Struggling for her place and equal rights with a man, a contemporary woman uses different methods. Sometimes, a woman has to be much stronger than men to endure all the hardships of life like those revealed by both poetesses in their poems. Clifton is not afraid to tell the most intimate wishes: "let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to" (10-14). Men will never experience what a woman has to go through, but they can think of this and try to understand women, at least. Similarly to Clifton, Oliver shows what men experience much more rarely what is woman's everyday work. A man cleaning an ashtray in a toilet is seen much rarer than a woman doing the same job.

Thanks to these two talented women writers, Lucille Clifton and Mary Oliver, we got a complete picture of a woman, her unique physiology and psychology. However, many wonders of woman's nature a man is yet to discover.