Monday, October 6, 2014

#1: Response to "Immigrants" poems

These two poems offer very different, possibly opposing, views on how immigrants view coming to America. Frost's poem claims that every ship coming to America has had the ideals of the pilgrims on the Mayflower as their guide, or all immigrants coming to America have come for the same reason as the pilgrims: to explore a new world and lead a better life. By contrast, Mora's poem is about how anxious immigrants are when coming to America, and how much they worry that their children will fit in.

What may help establish these poems even more is the context they were written in. Frost's poem was written in 1920, when many immigrants were coming to America to escape World War I and its after effects. Given this context and the meaning in the poem, its fair to assume that Frost is defending the immigrants, saying that they come with the same intentions as the original immigrants that founded this country. Mora's poem was written in 1986, a time that I'm not very familiar with, but if its anything like today's climate on immigration, Mora is trying to defend immigrants, showing how much they work in order to fit in, how they come with pure intentions.

When looked at by themselves, these poems offer two different messages: a positive one that shows that immigrants come with noble intentions and a negative one that shows how hard immigrants work to fit in. When looked at in the context of the time the poem's were written, these poems are both attempts to defend immigrants, to show the motivations behind why immigrants come here and what they do when they arrive.

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