The Giver

Perfectly Imperfect

Author's Note: In The Giver by Lois Lowry, Jonas lives in a dystopian society where everything is perfect.  Everyone does the same thing and there are no worries or big decisions for the citizens.  When you are twelve, a job is assigned to you until you reach a certain age where you are just the Old.  You don't really have a say in your life.  That is what this piece is all about. My voice is from the perspective of someone from the Community.  In this piece I will try to use more semantic devices, such as metaphors, similes, and personification. Syntactic devices such as parallel, repetitive initial, and ending patterns.

Laughter, love, emotion: that is why life is worth living and if we can't have that, we are nothing.  When you are told not to dream, or not learn about something when you haven't been told to learn yet, you start to think.  Why can't I go on? Why can't live my life? We are all equal, but almost too equal. 

Our government strips away the color from our lives, literally.  Living in a black in white world is perfect, until you see what could've been.  We fear the pain, we fear the sadness, we fear the unpredictable.  The only way to prevent such a wonderful feeling that tells you that you are learning, death of emotion.

Dreams are what give us ideas, new thoughts, imagination, but if we can't dream what would our world be.  We would never have a way to improve.  Time would stand still, pulling the ropes on our society, holding us back from a better future.  We were created to make mistakes and feel the pain that helps us move on.

In a dystopian world like this, love does not exist.  There is nothing to love about this world, you can't love the boring gray skies, you can't love the lack of emotion, you can't love when there isn't love.  The Community is a black hole, sucking out the life of their world.  A billion memories of love would not fix anything for this place.

When you live in a place like this one and notice that there is something bad about this type of world, you have to go as Jonas did.  Sacrificing your life is not all terrible, because you never know the possibilities unless you try.  In a dystopian society you have no freedom, emotion, or life.  A boring world without color, a lifeless area of flat grounds, a dead face of no emotion -- it's sad because we can't live the life we were meant to live.  In a world so perfect, it is technically imperfect.

 

Author's Note:  In our world we cry, we fail, we experience pain; it's nothing to fear because we dust ourselves off and get back up on our feet.  There is always more to explore if we don't have fear and we don't give up.  That is one thing that I learned from The Giver and that inspired me to create this poem.  I tried to keep a pattern with the number of syllables and the first line of every stanza. 

Moving Forward

Always something past the mountain,

There is something more to explore,

Water that shoots from a fountain,

Or maybe it's something much more.

Always something past the waves,

Islands with treasures waiting,

Discovering hidden caves,

Knowledge we are creating.

Always something past the rainbow,

A leprechaun's bucket of gold,

The secrets your dying to know,

Ideas that you were never told.

Always something past the stream,

Land discovered long ago,

Finding out you life long dreams,

There's a path for you aglow.