The Complaint of Achilles' Heel Analysis
The tone of the speaker is playful in the beginning, "Everyone's so quick to blame my / tenderness" and the language splits a bit between the physical and the emotional. The peom is mixed with the playful tone at the beginning because it seems the speaker doesn't take the scenario seriously. In the third stanza the poem explains the death of Achilles as though to set up something, "Red with the death of Achilles, felled / by an arrow's bitwhen nothing" After this the poem next lines focuses more on something the speaker can do in the present, commenting on the past, "Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don't / be a heel." The shift in tone is created by the ability to play on with the words. Don't be a heel or bad guy, and well, the actual heel in this case. This line is the core of the poem and the speaker shifts from playful, to a bit serious, then back to playful an unexpected element in a well known tale. The last image, "that I could not hold back its rush of red / birds or the season to which they flew" comes out of nowhere. The tone and mood shifts, but the image going in this direction feels a bit throwaway, just to attract your attention just like the body when the weakness is the heel.
The tone of the speaker is playful in the beginning, "Everyone's so quick to blame my / tenderness" and the language splits a bit between the physical and the emotional. The peom is mixed with the playful tone at the beginning because it seems the speaker doesn't take the scenario seriously. In the third stanza the poem explains the death of Achilles as though to set up something, "Red with the death of Achilles, felled / by an arrow's bitwhen nothing" After this the poem next lines focuses more on something the speaker can do in the present, commenting on the past, "Everyone skips ahead to the moral: don't / be a heel." The shift in tone is created by the ability to play on with the words. Don't be a heel or bad guy, and well, the actual heel in this case. This line is the core of the poem and the speaker shifts from playful, to a bit serious, then back to playful an unexpected element in a well known tale. The last image, "that I could not hold back its rush of red / birds or the season to which they flew" comes out of nowhere. The tone and mood shifts, but the image going in this direction feels a bit throwaway, just to attract your attention just like the body when the weakness is the heel.