Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market

"Only you lived through the sea's truth"

"Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" is a poem, written by the famous poet ,Pablo Neruda. The style that he uses in this poem is from the classical times about 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. The 2nd verse paragraph is very significant in the ode. Throughout the 2nd verse paragraph, Pablo Neruda likes to use metaphors, imagery and listing to describe the fish and the ocean.

Paragraph 1

Only you

The poet uses only you to describe the fish and how its experiences in the sea are different to his.

 

Throughout the poem, the poet likes to use the term,"only you", to describe the fish and how its experiences are different to his. One place where you can find this is in the 2nd verse paragraph which says "only you lived through the sea's truth, survived the unknown...". You can clearly see that in this example the only you stands for the fish because it talks about how it used to live in the great, deep sea. Just a few lines under this last example, you can see the following "only you: varnished black-pitched...". The poet again uses the "only you" to describe the fish but to make it even more powerful he uses a metaphor, "varnished", and imagery, "black-pitched". 

Paragraph 2

Only you: varnished, black-pitched, 

The poet uses imagery and metaphor to describe the ocean and the fish.

Paragraph 3

Witness of the deepest night 

 The poet combines two metaphors to strengthen the effect of it.

Paragraph 4

Surrounded by the earth's green froth

-these lettuces, bunches of carrots-

The poet uses metaphors to describe the surroundings of the fish.

"Surrounded by the earth's green froth" takes place in the beginning of the 2nd verse to describe the surroundings that are around the tuna fish in the Market. It implicitly refers to the vegetables which also means that it is a metaphor because "Surrounded by the earth's green froth" is transferring the quality of the green froth to the vegetables. The line that comes afterwards "-these lettuces, bunches of carrots-" is very explicitly listing some vegetables in the market. To make the poem a bit more interesting the poet likes to use metaphors to describe the objects around the fish.

Paragraph 5

Only you lived through the seas truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness

The poet uses listing to describe the ocean.

To make a poem more interesting for the reader, you can use listing with different words that have a similar meaning to give it more strength than just writing it explicitly. This is exactly what the poet does in the following few lines. Pablo uses listing to describe the amazing ocean that was once the fish's home. In the fifth line he starts of by saying "only you", by this he means the fish, and continues but saying the following "lived through the seas truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness...". This line is describing the ocean by using the same technique that I said earlier on, listing with different words that have a similar meaning, and to put it in an explicit way, he talked about the deep, dark and mysterious ocean.

Paragraph 6

The depths of the sea, the great abyss, le grande abîmé

This is similar to the last example because the poet uses listing again.

"Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" paragraph

   "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market" is a poem, by Pablo Neruda, written in the classical times about 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. It is about celebrating something, in this case a tuna fish, and how is was once fast, beautiful and powerful but now it's lost all of this because it's lying dead at a Market. Poetry is all about the language and in this poem, the poet really expresses this. For example, in the beginning of the second verse it says "Surrounded by the earth's green froth". The earth's green froth is implicitly referring to the vegetables in the market which also means that this is a metaphor because its transferring a quality from one thing to another. Underneath the first few lines in the second verse it says "...only you lived through the sea's truth, survived the unknown, the unfathomable darkness, the depths of the sea, the great abyss, le grand abîmé...""...to that deepest night...". In this example there are words with similar meanings repeated eight times to describe the dark, deep and mysterious sea that the fish once lived in. One more example that I found showed a lot of poetical language in just a few words was under this last line which says "...only you: varnished black-pitched witness..." This uses a metaphor, "varnished", imagery, "black-pitched", and metaphorical imagery "witness". In conclusion, this poem uses a lot of different poetical language to describe how once there was a beautiful fish that is now dead and surrounded by vegetables in an ordinary market.

The 2nd verse paragraph

"Laundrette" paragraph

"Laundrette", written by Liz Lochhead, is a narrative poem about people living in a poor part of the city and the one thing that they have in common together is that in order to wash their clothes they all have to go to a laundrette. This poem is all about mood and atmosphere. Each stanza describes someone or something. For example in stanza 6, the poet is using a lot of symbolic and metaphorical language to describe one of the women's lives while she's waiting for her laundry to finish washing. One excellent example of this is on the second line of the stanza which says "Let them stew in their juice, to a final fankle, twisted, wrung out into a rope, hard to unravel". This has imagery and metaphor because it describes the clothes in the washing machine and it has two meanings, one is about the clothes and the second it could be about her relationship with her family. An example that supports the second meaning is in the line under it which it says"...to a final fankle, twisted, wrung out into rope, hard to unravel..." Fankle is slang for knot or a big mess and the fact that there are words with a similar meaning repeated four times means that she has probably made a big mistake in her family which is not easy to fix. Another example is at the beginning of the stanza in which it says "This women is deadpan..." Deadpan means when someone doesn't show any emotion which means she was very upset and depressed about something which in this case is probably her family. One more example that uses symbolism and metaphor is in the last line of the stanza which says "She sees a kaleidoscope" A Kaleidoscope is a toy shaped like a tube that contains small mirrors and colours inside which appears to to change if you twist the tube. It is a metaphor because it is transferring the quality of the colours in the kaleidoscope to the clothes in a washing machine. The poet is also using figurative language in this example.