Experiences of Being Human - Essay Example

 The poem is written with a mixed emotion of appreciation of friendship (between man and environment) as well as the nostalgia of needing to have an emotional connection. Mora on her work in Legal Alien that appeared in her poetry collection that was published in 1984 entitled Chants spoke how horrible it felt once this human connection is lost by just being different in a society that is oblivious of diversity. Mora is of Mexican descent and holds American citizenship by law yet not entirely part of the society she is in because of her two worlds, being a Mexican as well as an American.

This poem exudes raw emotion as it was articulated from the first-person point of view on how Mora felt the emotional alienation when that emotional connection of which Whitman talked about is lost by just being an immigrant. This became obvious in the last few lines of her poem stating; “Sliding back and forth/between the fringes of both worlds/ by smiling / by masking the discomfort / of being pre-judged /Bi-laterally”. pain was best described by using the characterization of the protagonists of the Vietnam War such as the “white vet's image /floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine” and a woman “trying to erase names: [but] No, she's brushing a boy's hair” making it poignantly painful to recall.

The Martian Sends a Postcard Home, on the other hand, combined the familiar and the bizarre as the familiar was seen from an alien’s point of view. Here, Craig Raine highlighted the eccentricity of human experience by the characterization of a martian of which it narrates the similarity and difference between an alien and human being and in a way a commentary or critique of how human beings treat human experience. The Model T has used a symbol (the early version of cars made by Ford) that it differs because it is locked from the inside and that there is “a film to watch for anything missed”.

This passage may have been written casually but this line is actually loaded with meaning. It is the human experience gone by as it is looked on the film (which is really the rear mirror)” and we are mindless of it because “time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box” which made us all regretful and as he Raine tells “No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell”. Perhaps one of the best media of how human beings expressed their deeply seated emotion is through poems.

The authors Whitman, Mora, Komunyakaa, and Raine may have represented the varying human emotion that ranged from the “joyous leaves”, alienation, pain in recalling and indifference or regret and may have used different symbolisms such as the trees, Vietnam Memorial, Model T car or a legal status but all of them converged in their intent to articulate and explore human emotions.