Shannel Camacho

English 102

Professor Corona

October 17, 2014

Marks

Linda Pastan

How did you respond to this poem emotionally?  Which words caused your emotional response and pull to this poem to be so strong?  Discuss the general premise of the poem:  what is happening? Why did this particular experience speak to you as a reader?

Before reading the short poem Marks I tried to predict what the reading was going to be about with the title the author gave the poem. My predictions concluded that the title meant that there was a particular moment in life, in which the protagonist became traumatized naming it marks, as in scars that will have to be dealt throughout the characters life. As I commenced reading the poem it was very straight forward what the main character was going through, many symbolic words were use to describe the characters emotions. I personally connected in many ways with this character and her emotions towards life. I felt bad for the female/ narrator. She was living a life based on the satisfaction of others. She does what she needs to do to please others and she takes everyone else’s judgment to heart. For example line number 5 through 8 states “My son says I am an average, an average mother, but if I put my mind to it I could improve.” That stanza is a perfect example of her taking others judgment about her, personal. My emotional response came about in the last stanza where the narrator states, “My daughter believes in pass/fail and tells me I pass. Wait ‘til they learn I’m dropping out.” I interpreted these lines to mean, from the narrators perspective as, my daughter thinks that if my job as a parent had to be graded, and it were between a passing and a failing grade, I would pass, but what she doesn’t know is that I am leaving. I can manage and do all that have to do, but I am letting go of this life style because I am unhappy. What’s going in the poem is that the narrator is describing her everyday mother/wife duties as if it were being graded. She gives a quick description of what it is that she does and what her “grade” in that category would be. Overall she is good at what she does, only thing about it is that she is unhappy. This experience is trying to gives us a moral that “regardless of what you do you will always be judged, but do not do things to please other people if it does not make you happy.