Ezra

Ezra

Poetry Explitation for Cabezon by Amy Beeder.

The poem"Cabezon" by Amy Beeder is a prime example of how poetry can hide important messages within seemingly pointless words. At first glance, it appears that Cabezon is just a bunch of words stuck together without much point, but as one examines the poem more thoroughly, these words come together in meaningful ways, through the use of imagery and tone.

Beeder uses a lot of imagery to make points in Cabezon. Lines 3-7 (you, chub & bug-eyed, jaw like a loaf/ hands in your pockets, a smoke dangling slack/ from the slit of your pumpkin mouth/ humped over like the eel-man or geek) are all describing what the person addressed in the poem looks like. These lines are filled with negative images such as bug-eyed, eel-man, pumkin mouth, and chub. These images portray a person who is a mess. Beeder also recognizes that the person in question is smoking. In the context, this can be seen as a sign that the person has taken to smoking because they have nothing better to do, and it appears that Beeder despises this habit. Imagery is also used to describe the persons environment and job. They don't have a very good life or job. Beeder shows that the person's job is not enviable. According to the speaker the person is "the dummy paid to sweep out gutters,/ drown the cats". Killing is held invery low esteem, so stating that the person has to drown cats shows how despicable Beeder think the job is.

The tone of Cabezon is also important to how one looks at the poem. It might appear that Beeder is insulting someone's life, and rubbing in the fact that her life is a good one. An example of this is how at the end of the poem she calls the person 'bighead". This could be seen as a insult, but after closer examination it seems that Beeder is simply reprimanding someone she cares about, like maybe a chlidhood friend who made some wrong desicions down the road. Beeder thinks that the person she is addressing needs to start working for a better life berfore it is too late. She wants them to realize that good things happen to people who work hard to make them happen, not to people who do nothing with their lives and hope for good fortune.

In conclusion, it appears that Beeder is using the person in the paom to ask us all a very impotant question: "What are we going to do with our lives?". She is trying to tell us that to get what we want, we must act upon our hopes in order to get their eventually. I think that this is a very important question, and the imagery Beeder uses is a good example of a bad scenario one could get into it they don't ponder this question.