Ode to Teachers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2010

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Enjambment

Mora breaks the lines to convey both action and narrative progress. For example, in the first stanza, the line break at “so that you wouldn’t see / me” (Lines 4-5) mimics both the speaker’s self-consciousness and the avoidance that motivates the action. This technique of continuing a sentence across a line break is known as enjambment. In the third stanza, Mora uses enjambed line breaks at “I read and reread your notes / praising / my writing” (Lines 16-18) to suspend the reader’s expectations (are these notes of reprimand?) before delivering the relatively surprising development that the speaker has not only begun writing, but has produced writing worthy of praise! Similarly, in the teacher’s whispered encouragement to share their “ideas” and “stories” in order to create a “fresh path” that will “take us to new vistas” (Lines 21-24), Mora breaks up the single statement into several enjambed lines. This approach prolongs the reader’s arrival at that vista and allows them to follow the path as well. Mora’s line breaks and use of enjambment provide a central means of converting the narrative drama of the story into a poetic event, thereby re-enacting the speaker’s own learning process.

Simile

Organizing similes appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. In this first simile, the speaker compares the teacher’s “smile” (Line 7) to “soft light” (Line 8). In the second, the teacher compares the student’s contributions as leading others to “new vistas” (Line 24) “like a fresh path” (Line 23). In the last stanza, the speaker uses the adjectival form of “like” used in similes to compare the way in which they carry the teacher’s influence to the influence of other formative experiences. Similes indicate both the student’s increased mastery of the language and, correspondingly, their enhanced ability to articulate and so conceive their own experience. Perhaps Mora chose the simile’s more overt and explicit form of comparison, relative to metaphor’s more covert operations, in order to foreground this sense of gradual language acquisition.

Catalog

In the second and fifth stanza, Mora deploys catalogs, or lists of terms and/or objects, in part as a way of taking an inventory of the speaker’s experience. In the first of these, the teacher solicits the speaker to share their “neon certainties, / thorny doubts, tangled angers” (Lines 13-14). Pairing the catalog construction with these embellishing adjectives, Mora suggests through the teacher’s list a sense of the richness and abundance of the student’s inner world. The final stanza uses the catalog toward a similar end, though here taken up by the student and expanded significantly. The speaker recalls:

my dog's face,

my sister's laugh,

creamy melodies,

the softness of sunrise,

steady blessings of stars,

autumn smell of gingerbread,

the security of a sweater on a chilly day (Lines 33-39).

Both moves are significant: the student has at once absorbed the teacher’s example of the list or catalogue form in stanza two, and has extended its field of application.