The Swimming Pools By Thomas Lux

The Swimming Pools by Thomas Lux is a poem that talks about the rich and the poor. Lux use 5 kids at an apartment complex pool, one fat kid, one insecure girl, and three other kids to represent the different social and economic classes we have in society today. Lux compares these kids to the poor, the lower middle class, and the rich. He uses the innocence of the kids at the pool to get the idea that the rich always are cruel to the poor, and he uses the insecure girl to show the sympathy the lower middle class has for the poor because they are so close to them when it comes to social and economic class. In the poem The Swimming Pools, Thomas Lux gets his theme of the top always has it easier than the bottom across by using literary devices such as symbolism, hyperbole, and diction. Lux uses the characters and setting in
Usually to a reader a swimming pool has a good connotation, but for this poem Lux uses it negatively and gives is a new connotation to help him get the mood of the poem across. He gives a swimming pool a negative connotation by using words and phrases like, sneers, terror, fatal, kill, cruel, rage, and fear. These words help describe how some of the characters Lux uses are feeling at the swimming pool which gives the pool its negative connotation. Lux also gives the word "Winter" a positive connotation to the overweight boy when he says, "he takes the sneers, prefers the winter so he can wear his heavy pants and sweater" (Lux). Winter has a positive connotation now because the boy prefers it to the summer months because he can stay inside in his warm clothes and not be ridiculed for his weight. He also uses the denotations of words like fat and loneliness to help describe characters. Overall, Lux's diction helps him describe and give new meanings to the words and phrases he uses in his