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Birthday Cake

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Submitted By bkgirl
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For many people a birthday marks a day of festivities: inviting family and friends over for a celebration with a meal, presents, and the popular cutting of the birthday cake. However, I believe that Paul Goodman’s “Birthday Cake” depicts a painful and upsetting scene with the celebration of a birthday. Through his choice of words, images portrayed in the poem, and symbols, Goodman reveals a dark point of view on this special day: birthdays celebrate death rather than life for the old. The first clue of the painful reminder of death is the use of anaphora in the first stanza. Goodman repeats “too many” four times in three quick lines: when the candles on the icing are one two too many too many to blow out too many to count too many

The first time the phrase is used, Goodman is referring to the candles on the cake—there are too many candles. Candles on a birthday cake represent the age of the birthday person; too many candles indicate old age. Goodman emphasizes the amount of candles with a pun by using the words two and too, successively. The speaker is reminded of his old age with the excessive amount of candles. Anaphora continues when Goodman reiterates, “now isn’t it time,” in the first and last line of the stanza. This first stanza ends in a rhetorical question, “isn’t it time to give up this ritual?” I noticed Goodman used ritual as opposed to celebration, or any positive word associated with a birthday. Ritual is more closely associated with religion, in particular a ritual burial. For the speaker this is a ritual birthday, which holds a negative context compared to the positive one in celebration or festivity.

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