Childhood in Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend Called Felicity by John Tobias

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Childhood Sweet, luscious, and juicy watermelon running down a boy’s face in the heat of summer; shining unicorns in the sun; and tobacco pipes made out of straws and chestnuts; bring about childish characteristics. When just briefly mentioned, they do not seem significant. Although, these aspects of childhood are found in the poem Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle Received from a Friend called Felicity by John Tobias, and they guide the poem to be what it is. Using these aspects, Tobias used different combinations of enjambment and caesura, to represent the persona’s childhood as a whirlwind and continuous. Initially, John Tobias uses enjambment in the poem, to represent a whirlwind of activity happening in the persona’s memories. In lines 5 thru 15, there is no punctuation, so this means that the excerpt is read without any given pauses. When read aloud, it is very difficult to say the passage in one breath. It must be read quickly to do so, and this pulls the speech along so that its meaning and sounds go by in a rush. Rushing is generally associated with wasting one’s time, and then skipping over ideas. Due to this, the reflection about the persona’s past memories of pipes and climbing trees is rushed, so that their experience in that time seem very short, compared to their current life. Once again, the poem contains enjambment to create a mess of activity, but near the end of the poem, a transition from enjambment to caesura emphasizes the final line’s importance. While using enjambment, the persona describes taking a bite of the pickled watermelon in lines 42-44. Activity is taking place in this rush of words as seen by the action words “unscrew”, “slice off”, and “linger”. At the beginning of the lines, they repeat “And”, which has a similar pattern to the beginning of the poem, where words that begin with W, appear in consecutive

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