Literature

The little boy and the old man
1) This poem’s underlining message is that the young and old are being neglected by the middle aged people, and middle aged people only care about their present, not their past, as a child, or their future, as an old man. This poem shows how the middle aged only care about themselves and people of their age, and often ignore the others around them.

2) The poet uses repetition to show the similarities between the old and the young. The old man says the same thing as the little boy, telling us that they do the same things, but one is because of old age and frailness, the other is because he is young and he does not know. At the end, the poet says “the little old man”, a metaphor that symbolizes the similarities of the young and old, all getting ignored by the “grown ups”.

Messy Room

1) I would say that the poem is humorous. The persona exaggerates everything that he sees in the room, like the “overstuffed chair”, the “smelly old sock has been stuck on the wall”, and he criticized all the clutter and mess, then, he said that the owner of the room must be ashamed, only to find out that the room was his own.

2) This poem shows how easily people picks up other’s mistakes, but not their own, and how quick they are at spotting and criticizing on the mistakes. To a certain extent this poem highlights hypocrite. The persona says that the owner of the room would be ashamed of himself, but the actual owner of the room was himself.

Cloony the Clown

1) The irony in this poem was that the clown was not successful in making people laugh when he wanted, and when he told the people about his failure, people laughed at him, when he was not trying to by funny.

2) Shel Silverstien tells us of the sadistic nature of humans that laugh at others failure, instead of marveling others success, or in this case, laughing at the clown’s acts and jokes.

3) The poet used a aabb rhyme to give the poem a playful tone, telling us that the clown was funny, but when he was sad, that rhyming pattern also tells us of his sorrow. The poet also used repetition of “ and every time he…. Everyone…” to tell us that the people really did not like or enjoyed what the clown did. He also repeated “they laughed” over and over again, to tell us of the extent of funny people thought his failure was, and added to his sorrow. The poet used exaggerations like “laughed until they had a fit” and laughed until their jackets split” to tell us of the laughter too.


I think I would choose “Messy Room”. This poem tells us of a very harsh and sad reality of people. Every time when someone were to make a mistake on stage or while performing any form of art or something like that, people would tend to catch and spot mistakes then to actually open their hearts to accept and enjoy, and simply see the bright side of things. People like to be negative towards others than to be positive, not knowing that they themselves might apply to their own criticism, but they would still criticize.