Essay Questions

What could be the feeling described in the poem entitled "What It Feels Like’’?

The feeling remains unnamed but it is clear that it affects the author and the way she interacts with other people. The author compares the feeling with a watermelon that she swallowed. This may indicate that she had some control over the feeling and it was her choice to swallow it or to accept it in her life. The next detail is that the author mentions how the feeling lodged itself in her heart thus signifying that it also originated from her heart and may be related to love. All this may indicate that the feeling described here is envy. The other reason why we can assume that the feeling is love is because the feeling is also called as being Green, a common usually associated with envy.

How is desire described in the poem with the same name?

Alice Walker choses to talk about desire in one of her poems and she describes the way desire makes her act and feel. The author compares herself with a person standing on the edge of a body of water, wanting to submerge her toe in the cooling water. Soon enough, she finds herself completely submerged in the water, with no way of escaping it. The water in this instance represents desire and the author’s inability to control herself when it comes to staying away from it. Through this comparison, desire is portrayed as something dangerous, which has the potential to kill a person. The author also compares desire with dried leaves and dead insects, useless things that must be swept away. This transmits the idea that for the author, desire is more of a nuisance, something that she must purge herself of.

What are some of the broken things mentioned in the poem "I Will Keep Broken Things’’?

In the poem entitled "I Will Keep Broken Things," the narrator complies a list of all the broken things considered useless by the others but which she decided to keep. The first thing she mentions is the old slave market basket. This may represent some stories she heard about slaves and the way they were treated and by deciding the keep the basket, she decided to keep alive their memory. The next thing she mentions is the "memory of you’’, probably in reference to an old lover. The last two things mentioned in the poem are general and mentioned only as being "you’’ and "me’’. This suggests thus that the author sees herself as well as being a broken thing she must hold on to.