Summary Of Shoulders By Naomi Shihab Nye

Nowadays, kindness without guaranteed return is rare. People live their lives with the mindset that they should only show compassion when others return it. The question, “What's in it for me?” Often comes up because people believe that they should only complete favors if they get personal gain from them. Naomi Shihab Nye disputes this mindset in her poem “Shoulders”. She explains a story about a man carrying his child on his shoulders, and how mankind should show each other the same kindness, otherwise the world would feel unbearable. She brings to light a significant issue that the majority of people choose to overlook. This poem executes the message that people should help and care for one another through sound devices, imagery, and figurative …show more content…
She starts the poem off in the first line with imagery by saying “A man crosses the street in rain” (1). This shows the struggle that the man has to not only cross the road, but also in the rain. She hints towards the theme here, implying that life will have hardships that people have to work through together. Nye continues on, and she incorporates touch to allow the reader to sense what's happening in the story. She shows this by writing, “This man carries the world's most precious cargo/ But he's not marked” (6-7). By saying this, she shows that the father acts vigilant with his son without having to be told. This connects to the theme that we shouldn't have to be told to display kindness. In the next stanza, Nye writes, “His ear fills up with breathing” (10). This use of imagery focuses on sound, to convey to the reader that the father feels so encaptured by the boy, and how to care for him, that he can even hear the boy’s breath. She incorporates this to show that people should feel the same way towards each other. Nye uses imagery to show the theme of the poem, and to show how people should care for each other like the father cares for his