The Lady in the Pink Mustang by Louise Erdrich and The Unknown Citizen by Auden compared - Essay Example

In the poem, The Unknown Citizen, the author has used satire in creating a poem about somebody who no longer exists. Although such poems are expected to be sad, The Unknown Citizen is of the opposite thus full of celebratory praise to the fallen hero. It is a satire in the sense that it is trying to make fun out of the person that is being celebrated. As is the case there is not much that should be great about The Unknown Citizen for we are well informed that he is no longer living as references are made about his past life as well as the monument.

The persona of the poem as depicted thinks that he/she is contributing to the celebration of the fallen hero in style based on the superb comments, but a close scrutiny shows that most of the praises amount to saying that the soldier did not offend anyone during his lifetime. It therefore sounds as if the soldier was a saint on earth who seemed to agree with every opinion and everyone and as such he was a darling of everybody. The praises are no genuine but just a sure way of masking somebody whose records are not there.

It may then be said that the author was just trying to cover the insignificance of the fallen soldier. Even though this poem seems very direct, the author does not literally mean what he wrote as the title, The Unknown Citizen is a perfect reference to states that erect a monument for remembering unknown soldiers who succumb in the war field. It is in this aspect that the unknown citizen may constitute an individual that describes other individuals in a given population. As illustrated in the poem, the author sarcastically brings out the picture of the state mounting a monument for no person.

Historically and as dictated by the societal norms, monuments are in most cases erected as a memorial to an individual with outstanding achievements compared to the rest, but the citizen discussed by the poet has not done any specific thing to make him stand tall from the rest. Just as in the poem The Unknown Citizen, the author of the poem The Lady in the Pink Mustang has used satire to describe the woman as the main character. As described a reader has to be left with a sense of confusion because at first the lady being described seems just a normal lady, but it also emerges that she might be doing some fishy things in her elegant pink mustang car.

The poet therefore pokes fun of the lady as promiscuous hence painting a picture of a person who lives different lives, thus a normal one during the day and a completely different one at night. The author paints a picture of the woman owning the pink mustang as subscribing to the world of prostitution as he talks about the lady “painting her nipples”. Such things are mostly done by prostitutes so as to attract clients. The author therefore ridicules the owner of the elegant car not that she is rich or of class but because she has a weird way of making that wealth.

In the poem many references are made to the lady riding in the pink mustang, thus her body "moving in the dust" and "bare lap" (Clifford, 6), which attest to the fact about scandalous nature of the lady behind the wheels. The author therefore ridicules the relationship that exists between day and night according to the lady’s world. The night is more promiscuous to the lady compared to the daytime, thus she possess a conservative persona during the day and welcomes the wild persona at night.

In the poem the author makes reference of the sun going down and