Happiness Claims Writing

Prompt

In the following poem, "Happiness" by Paisley Rekdal, the speaker uses the experience of cultivating a garden to understand hardships she has weathered.

Write three defensible claims about how Rekdal uses literary elements to express the speaker's complex attitude toward her experiences. Be sure to incorporate at least. one piece of evidence from the text to support your claim. Your evidence can be a bullet point.

Response

Metaphor of the Garden

In Happiness by Paisley Rekdal, the garden serves as a metaphor for the Rekdal's own emotional environment, portraying the duality of resilience and vulnerability.

• "the living and the dead both snap off in my hands?" This line shows how the garden can be very fragile. The speaker is able to very easily break something, if not handled with appropriate care.
• "I keep a beautiful garden, all abundance, indiscriminate, pulling itself from the stubborn earth." This line shows how the garden can represent her emotions of resilience, as the garden is "deeply rooted"

Irony

In Happiness by Paisley Rekdal, Rekdal uses irony through the neighbors to demonstrate the garden's ability to provide consolation to herself and her emotions. - The speaker believes that her garden can show them "Here is consolation. Here is your pity," but this message is lost on the neighbors, who have a different perspective for what consolation should look like.

Tone and Diction

In Happiness by Paisley Rekdal, the colorful diction and imagery of the poem widens the range of emotions the speaker feels, from the joy of "abundance" to the sorrow of "the dead."