Meagan Hale Assignment 2

"Forget Not"

Walking through the halls
I pass my friends by
Their smiles warm the stone walls
and bounce off of the metal lockers
With each passing hour I learn something new
If it will be useful I have no clue
At the genesis I was afraid
What if no one likes me?
What if I fail?
But as I stand here in the present
all of my fears seem silly now
As time passes I find myself looking forward
and forgetting to look back
I learned to calculate velocity and analyze Shakespeare
But the most important lesson was easily
"To thine own self be true"
With each passing day the world gets closer and closer
But before I go
I must remember those I am leaving behind
and cherish them always
Because I when I look back on this time
I will hear our laughter echo in my ears
And I am thankful for that

I wrote my poem with a nostalgic tone. The bittersweet sensation of nostalgia is shown through my diction most strongly when I refer to my friend's warm smiles. I chose to use pathos in my examples such as friends and classes because everyone can relate to these things when looking back on high school and I wanted to make my audience feel the faint warmth that nostalgia provides. Relatable topics draw the reader in and they connect their memories to the poem which makes it more meaningful. Many people also have fear and doubt as they enter a new school, especially freshmen. "What if no one likes me?/What if I fail?" are two questions many people ask themselves at one point in their lives and it is not rare for one of those times to be during high school. We all fail and not everyone will like us as we have all learned and that emotional memory of realizing that makes my audience nostalgic for the time in their life when that lesson was learned. I also chose the Shakespeare reference (though we never read Hamlet) to be its own line, separate from the rest in order to remind my audience that when you are looking back on high school, not to forget about the person you became, and not just your friends, parties, and teachers you didn't like. These choices were to contribute to the overall nostalgic tone of my poem.