Poem Analysis of "Poem For My Twentieth Birthday" / blog 62

Lillian Xu

English II

Ms. Guarino

May 26th, 2016

Poem Analysis of “Poem for My Twentieth Birthday”

            Every year people experience a special milestone in their lives which is their birthday. This day marks their journeys of life and represents the growth and maturity they gain during the passing of time. The poem “Poem for My Twentieth Birthday” by Kenneth Koch, is written for his twentieth birthday, describing the thoughts and actions of him, and showing his transformation from a teenager to an adult. This is an important milestone that he must pass in his journey of life. In this poem he wrote about his feelings, emotions and reflection of the past from previous birthdays. The poem shows how the speaker forgot many of the people he met during his life as time went by, also about how he missed his childhood and how suddenly adulthood came upon him which came from his determination to become a man during his childhood.

            As a free verse poem, “Poem For My Twentieth Birthday” has no rhyme scheme or corresponding meters. Different types of figurative languages are frequently used in the poem to give the readers a deeper understanding of it. The poem has three stanzas in total: the first stanza of the poem was a little bit 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 dream of being a man in his future adulthood. The poem "Poem For My Twentieth Birthday" by Kenneth Koch describes the thoughts and actions of the speaker, which shows his transformation 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 dandelions on the grass on the gravestone, which was described as “white on tropical green”(Poem, Koch) in the poem. This detail shows his carefulness after getting older both physically and mentally. He even imagined that the crosses on the gravestones were trying to talk to him as if they were “stuttering” like human, which infers that the speaker thought they were trying to tell him something but were not able to “talk” as they wanted. The speaker used personification here to make the readers feel the resonance with the dead old people. “The years quick focus of faces I do not remember”(Poem, Koch) signifies the long way the speaker had been through. This quote also tells how quickly the time went by in his life, just like the blink of an eye. He had met too many people, and walked by too many people in his life, so he could not remember everyone he had seen in the past.

             “The palm trees [were] 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. The speaker of the poem used personification and simile to compare the palm trees to “deliberate giants” “stalking” him. It is showing the tree’s wisdom and matureness comparing to the speaker’s immaturity and youth. When the speaker was walking on the street, the palm trees made him felt like adults staring at him, which might be reminding him his childhood memories when he was young. His tears started to come up to the rim of his eyes while recalling, which made him “seen through a screen of water”(Poem, Koch). Even if the childhood memories are hard to leave behind, the speaker had still made up his mind to go forward.

            The author expressed his determination of what 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 reality. There must have been an idol that he wanted to be while he was younger, 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. When the speaker was thinking about his future, he was pumped with hope and energy, determined to become a better person, which significantly shows his change made by his growth.

            We are all going to be twenty years old when we grow up. We are going to be forty, sixty, eighty, and possibly die after that. Our childhood memories could be fading, our childhood innocence might disappear, but our mindset will always stay with us. The poem “Poem For My Twentieth Birthday” demonstrates the speaker’s experience of growing up from a teenage boy to a young man who needs to take care of and be responsible for himself. Not only for the speaker of the poem, all of us are going to experience the growth in our lives, and walk pass the milestones one after another. We are going to have the different tastes of our lives, no matter if they are sweet or bitter.