Tone and Imagery in The School Children Essay -- School Children Essay

Tone and Imagery in The School Children Louise Glucks The School Children may show some shock for readers as it twists and turns through a school sidereal day marked by eerie abnormalities. Gluck successfully uses visual resource to amaze a deeper meaning to a fourteen-line poem about peasantren, teachers and p arnts. These three groups get in to life through the descriptive poem that allows readers to form their own conclusions. though Glucks meaning is never clearly stated, her use of tone and imagery create an extremely visual work with three dynamic sets of characters. Gluck forever presents the schoolchildren as simple, corking creatures. She portrays them as heading to school with their book bags and afterwards in the poem points out the orderly arrangement of their coats inside their classroom. This social club helps readers perceive the children as wooden dolls or mindless beings that follow instruction. Gluck writes, How orderly they be- the nails on which th e children hang their overcoats of blue or yellow(a) woods (8-10). These lines are divided in a manner that present an image of children reprieve orderly on nails before the reader reaches the final line describing their dress and show the powerful imagery created by Gluck. It is important to note that the children are described as only having two different styles of coats- a yellow wool coat, perhaps for girls, and a blue wool coat, most apt(predicate) for boys. Gluck leaves readers imagining a flock of orderly children wearing similar clothing epoch sitting in their classroom. Joining the schoolchildren inside the classroom are teachers, whom Gluck describes... ...f a June Cleaver figure who is sending a token of appreciation to her child s teacher. Instead they are interpreted to be desperate creatures pursuit for any sign of hope in an environment filled with gloom. The descriptions of these three sets of characters through visual imagery provided an important eleme nt in Gluck s creation of The School Children which is part of her larger work, The House on marshland that was drafted in 1971. Throughvisual imagery she creates a combination of characters that help readers interpret the viable underlying meanings of the work. Gluck successfully uses the schoolchildren, teachers and mothers as vehicles for the various interpretations of her work. In the process, she creates dynamic characters that we are able to understand through symbolism and imagery.