receive this kind of reaction. He or she states that the students opened up like gills. This simile describes the student’s thirst for knowledge. The students were interested in what he had to teach and they were willing to learn. The fourth stanza completes the idea of the classroom as an aquarium, using a simile and an overstatement. The speaker visualizes how he or she and the students, as fish, swim together throwing words through the room with their tails. With this simile, the speaker is trying to say, that he or she has gotten through to the students. The students and the teacher are working together on discussing a poem. The tone of the poem sounds rather joyful at this point. Then the bell rings, and punctures a hole in the door. Again the speaker uses an overstatement, to describe how the bell means the end of the class session, and the attention is directed to the door of the classroom. The fifth stanza is a single line metaphor, which states the order of students leaving the classroom when the bell rings. In the sixth stanza the students go to their next class and the teacher goes home. At this point, there is another change in mood. The tone of the poem has become melancholic. The seventh, and final stanza holds that the speaker turns back into his or her human shape after arriving at home. This is the end of the metaphor, for he or she adapts to his human features again. Also in this last stanza, the speaker is alluding his or her cat’s name to a figure in history, Queen Elizabeth.The author uses two assonances in one line; line nineteen, which draws our attention to the harmony that has built up through out the course of the poem between the students and the teacher. The speaker also uses imagery to appeal to the reader’s senses. The speaker uses words like “opened,” ”reached,” ”drown,” ”puncturing,” etc. The whole poem could be considered an analogy though...
