Dying Young Essay

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“To an Athlete Dying Young” Reading analyst The title of the poem is “To an Athlete Dying Young”. I chose this poem because I could really relate to the title because I love to play sports. Now that I saw the date this poem was made I am now interested because it was made in 1896 before football and basketball. The first line talks about how this man got celebrated after he won a race. The poem has a second person speaker, the “you” who is talking to the person the poem is about. Not just is he cheering for the man but it sounds as if a whole crowd is cheering alone with him. I searched the title on Google and saw that a columnist wrote a story on ESPN about this star running back dying at the age of 18. The second stanza says “And set you at your threshold down, Townsman of a stiller town”. I did not know what threshold meant so I looked it up and found that is meant a strip of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room. Now I know that the people are carrying the man who won the race to his doorway to his home. Also I looked up “stiller town” and found out that it was a metaphor for a cemetery. The third stanza mentions that the man of the race was a “smart lad”. I now know the man is in fact, a teen or a young adult and he is smart. I did not understand this line “And early though the laurel grows It withers quicker than the rose”. I looked up the rate at which a laurel grows and it is around 3 feet a year, which interprets how his popularity is growing big but it won’t last a long time. The fourth stanza helped me confirm the conclusion I had in the third stanza. It says “Eyes the shady night has shut Cannot see the record cut”, which means that all the people will forget about the race the man won over night. This explains the title to me, this athlete will die young metaphorically because people will

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