Parsley Symbolism, Imagery & Wordplay

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...

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 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...

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...