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Parsley
by
Rita Dove
Home
Poetry
Parsley
Literary Devices
Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
Intro
The Poem
Summary
Analysis
Themes
Quotes
Study Questions
Best of the Web
How to Read a Poem
Symbolism, Imagery, Wordplay
The Parrot
Parsley
The Cane Fields
Maternity, Mothers
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Table of Contents
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Parsley Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay
There’s more to a poem than meets the eye.
The Parrot
The parrot is, perhaps even more than the parsley itself, the driving symbol of the poem. It appears over and over again, first in a kind of vague way ("there is a parrot" – where? Dunno. Oh...
Parsley
Well, it's the title of the poem, so that's got to be important, right? Right. It totally is, and in a couple of different ways. First of all, it's a historical truth – Trujillo ("El General"...
The Cane Fields
The image of the cane fields works pretty flawlessly with the politics of enslavement and confinement that are so prevalent throughout the poem. The cane fields, simply put, are representative of o...
Maternity, Mothers
The recurrence, in the second part of the piece, of Trujillo's dead mother is one of the stranger and more unexpected images in the poem. Clearly, the dictator hasn't quite gotten over his mother's...