Prp- Univ- Button Jane Hirshfield

Poem Response Project 5

Title: “Button”

Author/Poet: Jane Hirshfield

p. 148

1. The poet of this poem, uses a variety of techniques to describe this humble everyday object, relating to us in many levels various and in different meanings. For one the poet personifies the button, making it come to life. This is actually one of my favorite tools in writing and one I use quite often. Right from the start she writes “It likes both to enter and to leave” and also “It likes the caress of two fingers” and you can see have she gives this ordinary inanimate object “life”. She also uses metaphors, along with personification and similes, to paint a vivid portrait for our minds of what she is trying to convey and see the everyday “life” of a button and all its characteristics. Lines like “its sleep is curled like a cat to a patch of sun” are perfect examples of this.

2. In the poem the author describes the object in this piece, a button, by using personification and describing the button as a living thing. The sort of thing the poet describes the button as is a cat.

3. A button, one would think is a plain object used in everyday life. This particular author took the most underrated everyday object and brought it to life by telling its “story”. Although it is not an actual living thing, the author, I suppose tried to imagine what the button if it were a living thing and the kind of things it would “feel”, encounter and characteristics it would have and then relate it as vividly as possible to the reader. And she did so quite fantastically if I may add.

4. I’m not really sure what is meant by the term “work” in the question, but from what I can understand, I see the author paint a picture, very elaborately and gives her own personal interpretation of the buttons character. She does this with phrases like “it doesn’t care about its nature”, “brevity and longevity mean nothing to the button”, and “the exhilaration of the washing is its wild pleasure”. This...