Essay Plan: Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom

Essay Plan:

 

Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom by Marcia Douglas

 

How does the writer successfully create an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation in her poem, "Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom"

 

Essay Plan

Introduction: reformulate essay question and, if you have time, briefly introduce the poem.

Paragraph 1 - anticipation of children and natural world + sense of passing time

a) the children are really impatent about the event 

   - all the children 

   -camped on grass

   - watching sun changing colour

b) animals

   - kling- klings

   - fireflies 

    - congregated - like worshippers in a chrch

c) natural world's reaction

  - personification of natural world

  - bending bamboo, the grass bent forward

  - the wind

tension is created through verb choice - watching and waiting.

Paragraph 2 - sights and sounds

  a) contrast between sound and absence of sound

         -- fluttering of wings, gasp of crowd, swelling, swaying = onomatopoeia

  b) the pencil line across the sun

Paragraph 3 - fairy-tale like elements

   - starts in middle of story

   - free verse – dream like mood

   - cocoa bottom - bit of a silly name

   - Granny Patterson

   - something amazing is waiting to happen

 

Paragraph 4 - anticlimax

  - the sense of anticlimax - no one recorded event, children went back home

  - the world returned to normal, no need for electricity

 

Conclusion, the writer successfully creates an atmosphere of excitement and anticipation but then deflates the situation with a surprising anti-climax -  from that moment comes the understanding that human life is temporary - entertaining, yes - but only part of a much bigger picture.

“Some writers leave their creative handprints in dark caves where only later happenstance may, perhaps, discover them. Some writers stamp their entire selves upon the language, upon the culture, upon literature and upon our consciousness in so intimate, singular, well-illuminated and indelible a manner that there can be no mistaking their poems and prose for those of another. Such a writer is Marcia Douglas."

- June Owens/The Caribbean Writer

Marcia Douglas was born in England and grew up in Jamaica. She is the author of the novels, Madam Fate (Soho, 1999) and Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells (Peepal Tree Press, 2005) as well as a collection of poetry, Electricity Comes to Cocoa Bottom (Peepal Tree Press, 1999) which received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the U.K.

 

http://marciadouglas.com