Magpiety

1 Pages 301 Words

The main idea of my essay is that the speaker in the poem “Magpiety” by Philip Levine has realized that half of his life has passed, yet he has not yet lived it. A part of my argument is that he feels that he has wasted half of his life because he is sixty-four looking back on thirty-two and wondering why he was rushing.
One of the biggest problems that I had at this point in the writing process was that at first, I didn’t have enough evidence to support my thoughts. However, after revising several times, I found the evidence needed. Another problem I had was relating different sections in the poem to one another. There were many lines in the poem that could be interpreted in many different ways and I had to sift through and pick the best suited ones for my topic of argument.
The point that I feel I have made successfully is that the man in the poem has not lived life to the fullest. The man noticed that his life was moving fast, and he tried to slow down but had an anxiety attack of some sort. Though we do not necessarily know what it is about, it can be interpreted in many different ways.
The question that I would like answered from the reader is what they think about my use of evidence. As I said before, I had trouble coming up with evidence to support my thoughts, while strongly abiding to them.
If I was going to start revising, I would focus on the magpie a little bit more, I would consider in depth how the last lines of the poem are significant, and I would go more into how the man hasn’t lived his life to the fullest....