Instructions on Not Giving Up Essay Questions

Spring as a symbol of hope is one of the most frequently used tropes in poetry, and across art. Does Limón successfully avoid cliché in this poem? If so, how?

One could argue that Limón injects new life into the "spring as hope" metaphor through the clever oppositions and tensions in the poem. Her dismissive attitude towards the spring flowers is unusual, leading us to approach the subject with fresh eyes, and she creates suspense and drama through her syntax that draws the reader's attention. The way her language turns towards the "strange" and abstract in lines 11-12 also seems to admit that hurt is ineffable, and so she does not try to water down or oversimplify human suffering with a trite comparison.

The poem's title promises us "Instructions on Not Giving Up." Where can these instructions be found in the poem? Where does Limón's speaker find the inspiration for them?

The poem resists the urge to provide overtly obvious "instructions," but offers a powerful example, through the tree with new leaves, of how to continue living. Our hints can be found in the phrase "continuous living" and "I'll take it all," a kind of zen acceptance that life will go on. Our task is not to change or resist everything that happens to us but to persevere and grow. Growth is a key part of our "instructions," since the central images are of trees, which regenerate leaves every spring after winter. This reassures us that our own journeys through pain will be cyclical too; "I'll take it all" is not a lesson to stoically ignore hurt in our lives, but to know that we will regrow after. Limón finds this reassuring strength in the trees on her street, in the slow but steady way the leaves return.