Teddy's essay

4/17/09

Teddy Purnell

Mr. Salsich

Room 2

Brother Blues:

An Essay About "Sonny's Blues" and "The Little Brother Poem"

"Sonny's Blues" has pain and sorrow between two brothers. "The Little Brother Poem" is an apology from a sister to her younger brother. This story and poem have many similarities, although one is written by a woman, and the other by a man. Two perspectives, one main idea(sentence fragment).

Naomi Shihab Nye uses many metaphors in her poem. In the middle of "The Little Brother Poem", she writes, "you're Wall Street and I'm the local fruit market." She says that she is the local fruit market; Her brother is Wall Street. The fact that she relates herself to the local fruit market and her brother to Wall Street without using "like" or "as" shows that this is a metaphor, not a simile. Nye writes, "you're Pierre Cardin and I'm a used bandana." She always makes herself feel inferior to her brother in this poem. This might explain why she is saying sorry for everything; she has finally realized that she was just jealous of her brother's accomplishments. Towards the end of the poem there is yet another metaphor. She writes, "dumping out a whole drawer at once." The metaphor is the drawer being all the things she's apologizing for. Nye uses many metaphors to emphasize her point in this poem. James Baldwin, on the other hand, uses more similes.

"Sonny's Blues" and "The Little Brother Poem" are similar in many ways. In "Sonny's Blues", James Baldwin writes, "I think I may have written Sonny the very day that little Grace was buried." This shows how much he is comforted by being with Sonny. In "The Little Brother Poem", Nye is comforted by having her younger brother; telling him that "when [he] was born [she] was glad". Another quote in "Sonny's Blues" is when he says that "Sonny's fingers filled the air with life, his life." This is saying that the room wouldn't be the same if Sonny wasn't there; it would be lifeless, bland, colorless, eerily quiet. Nye feels the same way about her brother, writing about missing the times when "[he] ran miniature trucks up [her] arms telling [her] it was a highway". Baldwin writes, "And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger(simile), and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky." He is in awe of Sonny and his accomplishments. Nye is also in awe of her brother, and feels inferior to him. Both the stories are about awe, yet written from different perspectives.

The poem and the story are each in different settings, by different gendered authors, but with the same themes. The siblings are sorry about something involving the brother when they were younger, although they are now grown up. They are in awe and amazed (maybe a little jealous) by something that their brothers did. Their love for their siblings makes them try to be with them, no matter what their past together was like.