Speech in National Youth Forum on Responsible Journalism

📌Category: Speech
📌Words: 250
📌Pages: 1
📌Published: 21 June 2022

Plants are a necessity to human life as they supply us with the oxygen we need to strive; however, are plants more than what we may expect? In Olive Senior’s poem “Plants,” plants are depicted as an invasive species undetected by others. Literary techniques such as metaphors, personification, syntax, diction, and imagery are used to portray plant’s in Senior’s view. Senior uses such literary devices to further express the speaker’s idea of the protruding, hegemonistic plant species to his audience.

Throughout the poem, the speaker expresses plants as deceptive creatures through the persistent use of personification. The author explaining that plants seduce humans and invade through imperialistic nature are an example of the human characteristics that the speaker gives the plants to get across their idea. “Plants are deceptive…not like animals, like us always running around, leaving traces.”(Lines 1, 3-4). This quote brings an example from the first stanza that specifically describes the plants just like humans. “The world is full of shoots bent on conquest, invasive seedlings seeking wide open spaces.”(Lines 13-14). This use of personification lifts the plant to an even level of existence to the audience giving weariness towards the plant.

Another use of literary devices to express the theme of the poem is diction. The choice of words are used for the purpose of portraying the plant’s malign nature.. “Maybe you haven't quite taken in the colonizing ambitions of hitchhiking burrs on your sweater, surf-riding nuts bobbing on the ocean, parachuting seeds and other airborne traffic dropping in.”(Lines 17-20). The use of words such as imperialistic, sinister, invasive, and colonizing pushes the audience to acknowledge the plant’s deceptive nature.

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