In the poem “summer Solstice, New York City,” Sharon Olds uses similes and metaphors to reveal the humans have a need to protect and preserve life as a community.
Olds begins to use literary terms early in her poem to emphasize how protection is an important and recurring aspect in everyday life. When the suicidal jumper threatens to jump off the building, one of the police “put on a bullet-proof vest, a black shell around his own life,” (8-9). The policeman putting on the bullet proof vest portrays how everyone uses the protection that they can get to preserve their life. In addition, the man threatening to to commit suicide leads to the speaker saying “the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,” (6). Olds uses this metaphor to express how when the man threatens to end his life, the world comes “turns on” and everyone works together to protect and preserve life. …show more content…
The speaker compares the man hanging over the edge of the building to his leg being hung “...over the lip of the next world…” (18). If the man jumps from the building, he will fall into a new and alternative world. Furthermore, when the speaker describes the net spread across the floor, they illustrate it as the “net with its implacable grid was unfolded near the curb and spread out and stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth,” (20-23). Olds connects the net catching the man to receiving a birth, and that once the man hits the net, he will come into a new world, where he is