Eldorado Vs Ode To My Socks

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade September 2001

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Why do people search? And is it the final goal or the experience of getting there that people value the most. In reference to Eldorado by Edgar Alan Poe and the poem Ode to my Socks by Pablo Neruda, this question can be asked. The main topic though will be to compare how meaning is created in these two poems. Both of these poems question values. They use an experience to change the way people look at things. Both poems could be seen as offering different points of view. Ode to my socks places value on the experience of the socks and the narrator dreads the goal, which is the putting on of the shoes. Eldorado uses a journey with an unreachable destination and the character wishes nothing more than for the experience to end. How meaning is created will be discussed in reference to this idea as well as structure, imagery, sound and reader's personal experience.

The way these poems are structured is important to their meaning as this helps guide the reader through the experience both poems create. Both poems are lyrical which means that they follow a singular emotion or object. In Eldorado the object is Eldorado, in Ode to my Socks the object is his socks. Ode to my Socks has a very unconventional structure, it has no identifiable form except the fact that it's lyrical. All the lines are short and of different lengths, some lines have only one word.

"˜Outrageous socks, / my feet became / two fish / made of wool.' When read out, the poem sounds disjointed. Neruda uses this to put emphasis on every line, especially on lone words. Eldorado on the other hand has a very obvious structure. It has stanzas with each stanza has six lines with the...