The Legend Analysis ( Freshmen- Sophmore Level)

Have you ever stopped to think about what is happening in the world around you? Your world? The Legend by Garrett Hongo tells of a winter scene in Chicago where it is “snowing softly” where an Asian man goes about doing his daily business and is suddenly shot by a boy. This essay will pull apart the poem to unveil the key elements to help you to better understand the poem’s diction, tone, sensory images, theme, and why the author chose them.

The speaker of the poem is a bystander who watched as the whole scene unfolds before his eyes. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker sounds peaceful, seeing an old Asian man enjoying his warm laundry in the cool winter air. The tone of the poem quickly changes for the worse when the old man “turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians.” At that moment, a boy comes out of a nearby liquor store with a pistol and fires at the man, hitting home. As those actions take place on paper, the tone becomes rather mournful or sad as the man who was just enjoying life a few moments earlier, was shot.

The speaker uses a play on words that creates both warm and cold feelings as the reader is reading the poem. For instance, the poem starts as a snowy day in Chicago, but then tells of warm laundry and describes the man’s face using the color orange. The speaker also makes a reference to Rembrandt van Rijn, who is a famous painter known for his dramatic use of light and shadows in his pictures. All of these diction choices might suggest the light and darkness in the world.

This poem contains many good sensory images .At the beginning of the poem one can see an old man walking from a Laundromat, feel the warmth of the freshly dried clothes, feel the crinkly paper bag that is holding the clothes, and smell the clean cotton smell of laundry. This whole scene of the man is very simple and is probably written that way to show the simplicity, but happiness in his life. The author uses good and creative word...