Poem Analysis / blog 58

Lillian Xu

English II

Ms. Guarino

May 20^th, 2016

Poem Analysis of Poem for My Twentieth Birthday

            On every year people have experienced in their lives stands a milestone in their heart, representing the growth, maturity and the passing of time. The poem Poem for My Twentieth Birthday by Kenneth Koch is written for his twentieth birthday, which is an important milestone standing in his journey of life. In this poem he wrote about his feelings, emotions and reflection of the past on this special day. The poem showed how the speaker forgot many people during the past years, how he was missing his childhood, how suddenly he thrust into the adulthood, and his determination of being a man in his childhood dream. The poem has three stanzas in total: the first stanza of the poem was a little bit of depressing and sad when the speaker was walking through the graveyard, the second stanza of the poem was describing how he thought of his childhood, how he would leave them behind and move forward, and the third stanza of the poem is about his determination of behavior in his future adulthood. This poem describes the mental and physical movements of the speaker transforming from a teenager to an adult on his twentieth birthday.

            In the first stanza, the speaker was “passing through the American graveyard”(Poem, Koch). At first, I was wondering why did he walked through a sad place like that, because people usually go to happy places and have parties with their friends on birthdays, but when I read it for more and more times, I realized that the speaker might be trying to cherish the memory of his childhood and bury his childish innocence. He observed many things that he had not noticed before, such as the tiny flowers and dandelions on the grass, which was described as “white on tropical green”(Poem, Koch) in the poem. This detail showed his carefulness after getting older both physically and mentally. “The years quick focus of faces I do not remember”(Poem, Koch) signifies the long way the speaker had been through. He had met too many people, and walked by too many passengers in his life, so he could not remember everyone he had seen in the past. This quote also tells how quickly the time went by, just like the blink of an eye.

             “The palm trees stalking like deliberate giants”(Poem, Koch) in the start of the second stanza. Palms were sour when they were not ripe yet, but they became sweeter after they grew riper. This is a similar progress of human growth too, when kids were young, they were often naughty and not mature, and they were often hard to communicate with. After they grew older, they would usually became more understanding and tolerant, which easier for others to communicate with. When the speaker was walking on the street, the palm trees made him felt like adults staring at him, which reminded him of his birthday and his childhood memories when he was not yet a mature person. His tears then came up to the rim of his eyes while thinking all those.

            The author expressed his determination of how he wants to be in the future in the third stanza. Even if his adulthood had came quicker than what he expected (“thrust into the adult and actual”), he still expected himself to do more actual things (“expected to perform the action”), and not to think too much about anything other than the facts. There must be an idol that he wanted to be while he was young, so he was then determining to be the man in his childhood dream (“the man standing upright in the dream”). As what the speaker wrote in his poem, he wanted to be a realist rather than an idealist. It is a significant change from a teenager to an adult, because younger kids were usually thinking about unrealistic stuff and imagining for many things, while adults were always thinking about real life problems like jobs and money because they have different aspects of reading their lives.

            This poem was written as a free verse poem, so there is no rhyme scheme or corresponding meters. It has three stanzas and 10 lines in total. Figurative language was used in some of the lines to give the readers a deeper understanding of the poem. The speaker used personification in the second line of the first stanza; the crosses were “stuttering” like human, which infers that the crosses on the cemetery were trying to say something but were not able to “talk” as they wanted. He also used personification in the first line of the second paragraph, comparing palm trees to deliberate giants “stalking” him. It is showing that the trees were older and more mature than the speaker of the poem when it was his twentieth birthday, and it is showing the tree’s wisdom comparing to the speaker’s immaturity. The speaker had put a lot of his emotions in it by describing the environment and his mental movements. When he was in the graveyards, he was definitely feeling sad about those people buried in there and his childhood buried since that time. On the street while having the palm trees beside him, he thought about his childhood and shown how difficult it was to leave those all behind. When he was thinking about his future in the third stanza, he was pumped with hope and energy, determined to become a better person.