The Fruits Of Love

3 Pages 678 Words

The Oranges of Romance

Imagine that it is winter and cold outside. Nervous electricity flows around you, and love is a new and exciting experience. In your heart, you feel warmth you have never known before. This is the moment Gary Soto captures in his poem “Oranges”. The feeling and power of adolescent love is created using tone, contrasting imagery, and symbolism.
First, the use of tone in “Oranges” clearly helps to set the theme of the poem. Children often talk with simple sentences that directly state what happened. The speaker’s choice of words and raw simplicity in the way he tells his story illustrates his youth and the honesty that comes with it. Everything he says, such as “The first time I walked with a girl, I was twelve”, is straightforward and simple, much like childhood love. Children tend to have more pure and simple feelings for one another than adults do because their lives are simple and uncomplicated. The tone of the speaker helps the reader comprehend those simple feelings of adolescent love.
For his next technique, Gary Soto uses contrasting imagery to portray the feeling of adolescent love. Within the first seven lines of the poem, the narrator tells you that it is a cold, gray December day. The first time the oranges are introduced, the narrator simply tells you that he is “Weighed down with two oranges in my jacket". The bright image and color of the oranges immediately begins to infuse light, happiness, and love into the scene by contrasting with the cold, frosty December atmosphere. The oranges have the ability to do this because of a connotative connection with the bright color of the oranges and light. Later, the narrator notices that the girl’s porch light is always on despite the weather or the time of day. This image again brings up light that in turn reflects back to the brightness of the oranges. Then the girl appears, “Pulling at her gloves, face bright with rouge". The brig...