Ceilie's Essay #16

Ceilie Moore

Mr. Salsich 

English 9 

April 16th, 2009                                  

A True Bond: 

An Essay on a Short Story and a Poem

There is nothing that you will ever have to question less, feel more, never consider stopping, permanently hold in your heart, than the love for a sibling. (Asyndeton) The love comes naturally from the day the other one is born, and from then on, it’s like a bond that is technically forced, but no less genuine. In both “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin and “The Little Brother Poem” by Naomi Shihab Nye, we experience the euphoric (FAST) moments they remember from their childhoods and the sour moments that tested their brotherly bonds.

In “The Little Brother Poem,” Nye uses many types of figurative language to express both her past and current relationship with her younger brother. In the third stanza, Nye refers back to an incident when she was so frustrated with her brother, she pushed him in front of a bicycle, and he suffered serious injuries. (Periodic Sentence) She uses personification as she states, “For weeks your eyes hard on me under the bandages.” She gives human-like qualities to her brother’s eyes by stating this, thus making the statement more powerful and the idea of the pain her brother is feeling more real. Nye also uses a few metaphors to describe her relationship with her brother, one being in the fourth stanza. Nye says, “You’re Wall Street and I’m the local fruit market. You’re Pierre Cardin and I’m a used bandanna.” Although her brother isn’t actually Wall Street, and she isn’t physically a used bandanna, she uses these characteristics and objects to describe who the two siblings are as people. Her brother left home to become successful, while she stayed home in this small town, patting down her sweat with a bandanna and purchasing food at the local market. A final metaphor she uses to both begin and end the poem, is the one referring to Nye “cleaning the house.” She talks about organizing “the pieces of junk [her brother] saved” and how “it’s a large order[…]dumping out a whole drawer at once[…]trying to put [things] back in some kind of shape.” Although at first glance it seems as though she’s simply cleaning out her house, reflecting back on her bond with her brother, she’s actually using the “drawer” and the “junk” as symbols for their life together and every bad thing she’s done to him that she wants to be forgiven for. (Participle Closer) In the poem, it’s sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the language Nye is using to describe her and her brother is figurative or literal, but when you think about it, a majority of it is symbolic one way or another.

Both “The Little Brother Poem” and “Sonny’s Blues” are strong stories about the author’s relationship with their brother, but there is more of a relationship between the tales than the plot of a bond between two siblings. First off, in “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator describes the day his daughter, Grace, fell to the floor and died of Polio. “When you have a lot of children you don’t always start running when one of them falls,” the author explained, “[But] Isabel (the author’s wife) says that when she heard that thump and then that silence, something happened to her to make her afraid.” He is saying that Isabel has this instinctive feeling that when her daughter fell, it was much different from the ordinary trip to the rug that resulted in a bruise or two. This reminds me of when Nye’s brother “disappeared into the streets of Dallas at midnight on foot, crying, and [she] realized he’d been serious.” This quote indicates that there could’ve been other moments when her brother had run away, upset, but there was something specific about this time that made her realize he wasn’t coming home like he usually did, and she was right. In the final scene of “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator has reunited with his brother, who “fill[ed] the air with his life” as his fingers glided up and down the piano. At this moment, the two brothers connect through the achievements of Sonny and reflect back on the dreams they’ve both had, how far they’ve taken them, and how the dreams have reunited them as a family. This scene has a similar plotline to sixth stanza of Nye’s poem, although the outcome of the reunion between the siblings is a little less heartwarming and a little more heartbreaking. (Parallelism) Nye calls up her brother, who is now working as a “Wall Street”-like businessman, something he has always pined for. Out of pure concern and curiosity, Nye called her brother to check up on his new life that he’d left her behind for, and when asking “Are you happy?” he replied with an unsure answer, sounding “small, younger,” and he questioned whether fighting for his dreams was worth it in the end. “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Little Brother Poem” have more similarities than just their storyline, but also the problems the two main characters face and the outcome of their lives.

The relationship between two siblings is one of the purest, most honest relationships you can ever have with anyone. There is no shame in saying how you really feel, no judgment when the other has a moment of shortcoming (FAST) and no question as to how much you love each other. (Parallelism) Although the bond between two siblings is expected to have a fair amount of ugly days, they can never outweigh the beautiful ones.