Kyle's Essay

The Women of Sentimentalism:
An Essay on Three Pieces of Literature and how they connect to the Word Sentimental

TS: “The world is neither wise nor just, but it takes up for its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental.” (Thomas Henry Huxley) SD: Sentimentalism is used by everyone in the world at one point. CM: Ms. Dickinson, Ms. Nye, and Laura all show signs of being sentimental. CM: They each show sentimentalism towards something; Dickinson towards her poems, Nye towards the small things in life, and Laura towards people in general.

TS: The whole tone of the poem “The Traveling Onion” is sentimental towards onions, which Nye uses as a metaphor to the small things in life. SD: Naomi Shihab Nye uses an excess of sentiment towards the onion. CM: She says that she could “kneel and praise” such an insignificant thing. CM: She says that when an onion is cut into “a history [is] revealed”, which is ridiculous of course, but shows her adulation of the onion. SD: She also perhaps thinks too deeply about the onion. CM: In the second stanza she explains how we never appreciate the onion for what it truly is; something "small and forgotten". CM: An example of this is when she says “at meal, we sit to eat / . . . , commenting on texture of meat [. . .] but never on the translucence of onion.” CM: Its very surprising that even a poet could have so much to say about something so little.

TS: Ms. Nye and Laura, a character from “The Garden Party”, think alike because they both tend to exaggerate about things. SD: Laura had the best of intentions at heart, but she went overboard when she concerned herself with the family of a dead man. CM: She praised him as if he was much more than a carcass that was waiting to rot. CM: She even refers to him as “wonderful” and “beautiful” and even calls him a “marvel.” SD: Laura, being the kind soul she is, got so worked up after seeing his body she had come out crying, yet happier than ever. CM: One would think that seeing a dead man’s body would be a traumatic experience. CM: Even when her brother, Laurie, asks “Was it awful?” she answers “No [. . .] it was marvelous.” CS: Being kind and caring is always nice, but there is an ad nauseum for everything and Laura’s prying into somebody else’s affairs got to be very querulous.

TS: Laura was too susceptible and Emily Dickinson seems to show no sensibility at all in her poem “I’m Nobody”. SD: Ms. Dickinson, being known for her often confusing and obscure writings, used little visible sensibility in many of her poems. CM: The readers of her poems often don’t have the faintest clue what she is writing about. CM: However, in lines such as “how public like a frog to tell your name [. . .] to an admiring bog” one has to really pay close attention to make a connection. CM: Maybe the connection is between a “frog” and yourself and an “admiring bog” and meddlesome people. SD: One of the dictionary definitions of “sensibility” is the “awareness of and responsiveness toward something” so maybe she had ulterior motives for making her poems so abnormal. CM: Maybe Ms. Dickinson did have a hidden point behind her poems, but she wanted her readers to use their sensibility to uncover it. CM: However, maybe she simply wrote what came to her mind and didn’t intend for it to have any meaning at all. CS: Sometimes the most beautiful things in life are the simple things and maybe this is what Ms. Dickinson was trying to tell people through her poetry.

TS: Most people are naturally born with a sense of sentimentalism and are led by their emotions. SD: People base what they do on their sentimentalism. CM: Laura’s sensibility led her to care about the feelings of other. CM: Even Ms. Nye’s sentimentalism has led her to care about the small things in life.

Key
Purple-S-V Split
Blue-Appositive
Bold-FAST Words