A Formalist reading of There is a girl Inside Essays -

A Formalist reading of There is a girl Inside' Over the years in many different ways poetry have been analyzed . One su ch approach is the "New Criticism ," or the "Formalist Criticism " , which is based on the writings of Coleridge. Formalism is a school of literary criticism where the main focus is in the text itself and in the structural purposes of a particular text rather than the straight forward analytical meaning . Neither author's intension nor reader's response is major here as in both cases personal association can overlook the organic unity. So, i n the formalist reading of a text , it is analyzed without any external influence . "There is a girl Inside" comes across best when studying the poem with the formalist approach. The formalist reading of this poem focuses in the poem's form and elements like f oregrounding, parallelism, deviation, and structural contents like image, symbol, metaphor, simile, stylistics, tone etc and how all these can stand together for an organic unity of the poem , which may be overlooked, and analyzes it to see what its effect is on the meaning of the poem. There are other aspects taken into consideration, like studies the use of Defamiliarization as a mean to figure out the disruption to the habitual perception of the world which provide a new and different meaning to a text and how the author incorporates "ironic awareness" into the poem, taking into consideration the speake r and the speaker's indications for th e organic unity. In "There Is a Girl Inside" , there is the notion that the speaker is an old woman who is in a dilemma of embracing maturity as she still fee ls young and vital inside herself. So, the main tension in the poem is probably the gap between youth and age, in between where the speaker is aware of the difference in her inner and outer surface . Through the conflict in language of youthful vitality with the language of aging and decay , the central theme develops and structuralizes . In the poem, the words "girl", "randy" refers to a free woman out of the shackle. The multi dimension al narrative of the poem reveals the dream of a miraculous transformation, the "second coming" of youth or revival of youth , despite her "bo nes" and "gray hairs". T he paradox of timeless youth here keeps the tension strong and rebounding. A close examination of the poem's formal elements will enable the discovery of the spe cific nature of the theme, and how the poem establishes it . The first thing to notice is the images within the poem. The images of wolf, green tree, forest, bones, nun, gray hairs, harvest, honey, thyme, wild wood showcases the a lteration of youth with images of age . The final f ive lines of the poem consist major images of youth, fe rtility, and sexuality, which evoke the sense that y outhfulness can overpower age and decay . There are total of five full stops in the first two stanzas, but there is only one comma in the third stanza and no punctuation at all in the final stanza until get ting to the period that ends the poem. This dramatic decrea se in punctuation suggests acceleration, excitement, and power reinforcing the emphasis on the victory of youth over age in the final stanza of the poem . For the girl inside to be a "green tree in a forest of kindling" is a metaphor that speaks of impending doom. That young tree, must eventually be made into kindling, cut down and burned up. But for now it is a sort of symbol of resistance, a growing and perfect thing not yet destroyed."Green girl" implies that the girl is naive and virgin to the world. " patient as a nun" refers that Nuns take a promise of chastity, poverty and obedience which means that they renounce the material world. The image of the nun forms a bridge between the inexperienced girl and the old woman. And as a nun waits patiently for her reward, so the woman and the girl inside have both waited patiently for