2. Explication

You Were Wearing
You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse. In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do most boys think that most girls are bad?" I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip. "No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes. Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair. We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville As well as with illustrations from his book Moby-Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno. Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?" I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing. You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees. In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

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The speaker of this poems seems to be a man who is remembering the time he spent with a girl in his childhood. He seems to have a very good memory of the details of the day they spent together. The occasion of the poem could be that the man is talking to the woman he meant in his childhood about the first time they played together. This encounter that he has as a child seems to be very special to him since he remembers the slightest details of the day. They could mean that she has always been very special to him. The audience of this poem is the girl that he talking about in the poem. He refers to her as you and often mentions the word we. This means that he is writing the poem to her. The purpose of the poem is to show the girl in the poem that he really cares for her. By listing all of the slightest details of the day he shows that he was really paying attention and interested in the time they spent together. Subject of the poem is the girl in which the poem is about. The tone of the poem is reminiscing on past. As he is writing the poem he is remembering all of the details of the day he spent with this special girl. It seems to be a time of happiness they he is remembering as well. The poem does not seem to have a central theme. It is more a story that the speaker is telling about an experience he had.

The subject of the poem seems to be the most important aspect. It is centrally themed around her presence and the experience that the speaker has with her. The images that the speaker sees are very vivid even though he sees them through his memory. It is all of the exact descriptive objects in the scene of his experience. Fro example the kind of shoes people wear, the tie his father wears, the shirt the girl is wearing. Even the location of the hotel the girl is staying at is mentioned. The language is rather simple and deals a lot with brand names of things which are capitalized. The language and form of the poem which is written and presented in a simple form add to the poem’s simplistic feel typical of the New York School Poets.