Poem...

Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

I chose this poem because it makes the most sense out of any poem I read. I think poetry is very confusing and I have trouble understanding the meaning of it, so i tried to choose a poem that I could understand and didn't have to look up words in the dictionary.

The title, Where the Sidewalk Ends, makes sense in this poem because it said at every 4Th line pretty much. It is also what the poem is about. It's about the ending of a sidewalk or end of an era, end of something. So the title makes a lot of sense after reading the poem a couple times.

Two poetic devices that stand out to me are rhyme and imagery. Rhyme in this poem is very important to the flow. The rhyme in the first stanza, "And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright," makes the flow of the poem graceful and the reader may find it easier to read. Imagery is shown throughout the poem and it makes the reader in vision everything the author is writing. The second stanza describes this beautifully, "Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends." The reader can picture this like they're in fact there on the side walk. These devices add to the poem as a whole.

I think the tone of this poem is somewhat sad but also excited. Sad that the sidewalk is ending and that it has to end sometime, but happy that they are moving on. When the author describes the sidewalk and puts detail into what it looks like shows how much he cares about the sidewalk. The reader might then see him not wanting to leave the sidewalk. But I also see in the word choice that the sidewalk has to end sometime and that their is something else out there.