Tupac Shakur's poem is about a person rather than an actual rose. He uses the rose as a symbol to represent a person and it can be any person he is not talking about one person in particular. Another thing he uses as a symbol is concrete. That represents the other people in the "roses" life that are bringing it down and don't expect much out of its life. Also another thing he uses as symbolism in the poem is personification. An example of when he used personification is in this line, "Proving nature's law wrong it learned to walk without having feet." By it he means the rose. This is just a few of the poetic devices that he portrays in just this one small poem. You can also say that he starts off the poem with a question like he's trying to hook the reader. Then by the end he starts to state it like if it's a statement instead of a question.
The first form of symbolism that caught my attention is the way he was talking about the rose. When I read about it the first time I was thinking about an actual rose. It didn't sound right in my mind because of course roses can't walk so then I had to think harder. I then realized that he was actually referring to a person. He is actually saying that there is a person out in the world, it can be anyone, and that person grew up in a life where he/she was not expected much of. They might have been told that they won't do anything with their lives and might even have been told to just give up a few times. Then Shakur goes on to say that the person grew up and learned how to deal with the put downs and "breath fresh air" which means that they learned how to exceed other people's expectations. To prove all those people out there wrong and to show them that they can do better than what was expected. By using the rose he is using something incredibly beautiful to everyone who has seen one and is showing that everyone is beautiful either when they have had an easy life or if their growing up like the "rose" and having to go through stuff like "concrete" and learning to "walk" and learning to "breath". That is the most beautiful thing about the poem. When he said this it helped me to understand what he was trying to portray in the entire poem. It is hard to get a message through such a small short and sweet poem. He used very powerful words and symbols.
Another form of symbolism I happened to notice second is that Shakur was using the concrete as sort of a barrier that the rose had to get by. I thought of the concrete to symbolize people that were the ones who were bringing the "rose" down. The concrete is the obstacle that a person might have to overcome in their life. Like I said in the last paragraph, a person who is constantly brought down and never pushed to their potential has a lot of obstacles to overcome before they become successful. He helped me to understand this because the concrete was the main thing that the person would have to get past to break free, learn how to walk, and to breathe fresh air. Concrete is a good way to describe a person who might be holding you back because that's a hard thing to break past and get through. If there was a concrete wall in front of you, you can't just break through that wall on the first try to get to the other side. Sometimes you have to work at it and build yourself up to the point where you break past the wall and go further then what you and everyone (the wall) around you.
I also noticed a writing technique that is hardly used. Shakur used the form of personification just to push this poem to the limit. In the poem he says, "Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk without having feet." meaning that the rose was the one who had learned to walk without having feet. When you use this form what you do is you give an inanimate object human like qualities. He lets the rose walk and of course roses do not have feet and nor do they just get up and walk. I thought this was a clever way to put it. To have it work out in the poem and to add a literary device just to add a little something to the poem. I think that this also helped me to understand that roses walking are not very likely at all so that shows how hard the person has to work to get up and walk past all the people that bringing it down. A rose can't just get up and walk away but a person can and he's trying to show that. He's trying to say that you can and you should.
In conclusion, Tupac Shakur's poem is about a person that grew up in a life where no one believed that they would do anything special with their life and they made sure that he/she knew it. He used a beautiful object such as a rose to describe something beautiful happening, a person going against all odds and proving everything wrong and doing something great with their lives. Just by saying that a rose can get up and grow past concrete, walk without feet, and learn to breath fresh air is a miracle within itself and should be recognized. This is what he meant when he wrote this poem. Shakur meant for the world to see how hard it would be, especially for a child, to do this. Not necessarily grow past concrete, grow feet, and learn how to breathe fresh air but to grow past the people bringing them down to walk away and to do better for themselves. He wrote a great poem and helped me to realize that things like this happen all the time.
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