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Birth, Death, and Inevitability: Poets on Aging

In this essay, the student surveys three poems that focus on age: "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, "Remember" by Joy Harjo, and "Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeats.
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This essay received a B by one of Kibin's paper graders. Click here to see what was done well and what needs improvement.

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This essay received a B by one of Kibin's paper graders. Click here to see what was done well and what needs improvement.

More essays like this:

Not sure what I'd do without @Kibin
- Alfredo Alvarez, student @ Miami University
Exactly what I needed.
- Jenna Kraig, student @ UCLA
Wow. Most helpful essay resource ever!
- Chris Stochs, student @ UC Berkeley

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Bridget's feedback:

"You bring insight to each of these three poems, and the body discussion uses a logical organization that allows you to explore each text at a good pace for your reader. Your introduction takes quite a bit of time to settle into the purpose and thesis, an issue that foreshadows the following: I think you are still trying to decide if the three poems comment on aging (with emphasis on old age) or on life stages. Both appear at various points in your discussion, and the tension manifests most clearly in the second sentence of your conclusion. I sense that the emphasis on aging (decay, lost time) is harder to fit around the first two poems, so I'd like to ask if you've considered changing up the lens to a more explicit framework of life stages (as in the riddle of the Sphinx: infant, adult, old age), which would also be more reflective of the current title of the essay. Doing so may create more organic room to explore the poems' different emphases, rather than see them as entirely commenting on aging (particularly Brooks' poem; related, I am not clear on how it offers advice to "accept your age" unless we make certain assumptions about the "we").

On the other hand, this may be a matter of word choice or revision at the level of language (for example, instead of "aging," maybe "maturing"). Your writing shows good facility with flow, structure, and mechanics, so I suspect the next steps will be a matter of nailing down your approach: that is, clarifying your analysis and making sure your language expresses it precisely. The value of the writing process and drafting is that it can help you find deeper resonances as you keep working with the texts; the risk is to be too committed to the earliest read to the point of bending the source material out of shape."

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