In my poetic analysis class this semester, we read several styles and forms of poetry to assess the devices they employed. We were assigned to write a poem about anything, centered around metaphors, to internalize how they are used in poetry. I took this as an opportunity to work toward a goal I'd recently made: to be more honest and vulnerable in my writing.

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I believe this piece benefitted from my newfound knowledge of rhetoric in that it gives an audience a glimpse into someone else's reality. I attempted to explain a lived experience that most people would not understand without having been through it themselves in a way that could make sense to them. I used simple language and comparisons, rather than complex ones, to be clearer to a reader. They all related and amounted to an extended metaphor to make them easily followable. At the end I also alluded to one of Edgar Allen Poe's most famous stories, The Casque of Amontillado, as an attempt to use something many people are familiar with to illustrate the situation. I do not think I would have been able to communicate my experience as well had I not learned about rhetoric.