Ordinance on Lining Up: Poem Analysis

Poetry Unit (A): “Ordinance on Lining Up” “Waiting hurts. Forgetting hurts. But not knowing which decision to take can sometimes be the most painful.” –Jose N. Harris. Choosing the poem that appealed to me the most turned out to be a pain in the neck. We make countless decisions like this every day, and although this is not a life-changing decision, we have all at some point in our lives come across a difficult and stressful situation. The wide range of connections and the accuracy of this message made “Ordinance on Lining Up” by Naomi Lazard appeal to me the most. It was written similarly to a descriptive manual for making choices, whether significant or insignificant. By not taking a side but striving to represent each line correctly, it led the reader to put more thought into the decisions they make every day. And unlike narratives, character portraits, or landscapes, decision-making cannot be searched up for analysis even on the extremely useful Wikipedia. Making choices stimulates our minds to think of the long and short term effects of our decisions, which this poem encourages us to do along with the use of figures of speech, poetic devices, and imagery. The figures of speech displayed in the poem led to a greater understanding of it. Rather than directly stating that she is trying to describe two choices, Naomi personified the lines by stating: “The one to the right moves more quickly, the left line at a more leisurely pace.” This helped the reader imagine the right line as a shortcut and the left line as the normal path. She also suggested that one “may prove beneficial to certain dispositions.” This was one of the main messages of the poem and helped me remember that one choice could always lead to a better conclusion. People are successful because they make good decisions, which come from experience and can only be obtained through bad decisions in the past. She seemed to exaggerate the effects of the choices by using hyperbole