The Song

Author's Note: In this essay make sure to look what I thought the tone was. 

Think if you were on the ocean, catching some waves, I bet you could feel the wind blowing in your face. When I read the poem "Song for a Surf-Rider," by Sara Van Alstyne Allen I felt that there was a lot of tone and figurative language within it. When you run through this poem and go back to how you felt when you were reading this you will be reminded of how vibrant the poem really was. 

There was different kinds of figurative language in this poem, one of the main kinds was personification; it helps give a clear image of what's going on. The author really wanted us to feel like the wave was a human. To show how she did this she referred to the wave saying him or he. Another example is when she said "We race together, the sea and I." When I read that personification I really felt like the wave was a human. 

One other kind of figurative language that was used in the poem was metaphors. The author really compared the waves and sea to a horse, "I ride the horse that is the sea." The quote, “His hoof beats echo on the sand,” shows how the author uses personification to make it seem like the sea is a horse. These two kinds of figurative language are used a lot through out the poem. 

Tone is how the writer feels and how they show their attitude toward something through their writing. Tone helps the reader understand how the author feels and possibly get the feeling of how the author is feeling themselves. Within this poem the author used tone. The tone of this poem I would have to say is friendship. Sara Van Alstyne Allen wrote this poem to show friendship, like how the sea and the person work together. Great writers use tone, they use it to make people feel emotion within writing. 

Tone and figurative language was shown a lot throughout this poem. Remember to always look for figurative language and tone in poems and short stories that you read. Look for how the tone really affects the piece and see how it makes you feel about that story. The tone can really change how you feel about the story.