To A Wasp Poem Analysis

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Delicious Taste of Irony With the use of a wide variety of literary devices, Janice Townley Moore is able to develop a deep meaning poem in the poem “To a Wasp”. Moore uses mixture of literary devices like, imagery, irony, metaphor, figurative language and personification in this poem to make a story about a wasp flying into some cheesecake about how you cannot choose death, it just happens. Moore’s poem was a story about a person in a kitchen cooking cheese cake. I assume that it is a lady who is speaker of this poem because this poem was written in 1984 and normally females were the main bakers in the house. A wasp then flies through a very small hole in the kitchen screen and into the cheesecake batter. The wasp ends up getting mixed into the cheesecake and eaten. In the first sentence of the poem, “You must have chortled finding that tiny hole in the kitchen screen”. Moore uses the word chortled which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as, “laugh in a breathy, gleeful laugh, chuckle”. This is the first example of personification that Moore has in this poem. This first sentence is an example of personification because being able to chortle, or chuckle is a human…show more content…
I didn’t start to realize this poem was fate until I re-read the ending of the poem over and over. Moore achieves this final meaning of the poem through the use of metaphor and imagery. Imagery is seen throughout the whole poem. One example of imagery is on line 7 and 8. The poem states, “The mixture whirling your legs, wings, stinger, churning you into such delicious death.” These lines really bring a darker image into the poem. The wasp finds his way into the kitchen, gets stuck in cake batter, and now he is going to be completely mixed with the cake. The poem ends with a fist coming out of the sky pointing at the baker and the wasp. This is a metaphor that
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