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What are the first two lines of Mary O'Neill's poem "What is Red"?
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The first two lines of Mary O'Neill's poem "What is Red?" are "Red is a sunset / Blazing and bright." These lines introduce the poem's use of vivid metaphors to explore the color red, appealing to the senses and evoking various associations. O'Neill's poem, part of her book Hailstones and Halibut Bones, uses imagery and personification to convey red's significance in everyday life, transforming it into more than just a color.
The first two lines of Mary O'Neill's short poem "What is Red?" are as follows:
Red is a sunset
Blazing and bright.
I would like to go a slightly different direction than the other two answers. The poem does indeed describe all kinds of different things that are red, but I would like to focus on the two specific lines asked about in the question. I would like to focus on them from a scientific point of view.
It's interesting that sunsets tend to be red despite the fact that our sun is a yellow star. It's also interesting that sunsets tend to be red even though throughout most of the day the sun makes the sky blue. In fact, the sun is emitting all of the colors of the rainbow at once, which makes white light. So why, as the poem states, are sunsets red?
It...
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all has to do with something called scattering. During the course of the day, sunlight is moving through Earth'satmosphere almost straight on. That gives light a "short" distance to travel. In that space, blue light is scattered the most, so the sky looks blue. As the sun begins to set, it is shining on you at a different angle, and light must penetrate through the atmosphere via the "long" distance. I'll attach a link to a diagram. In that long distance, red and orange light have more opportunity to scatter, which is why you see sunsets as red.
References
The poem “What is Red?” is included in Mary O’Neill’s children's book Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Color, which she wrote in 1961.
The first two lines of the two-stanza poem are
Red is a sunset
Blazing and bright.
The first two lines are written as a metaphor and set the tone of the poem, which is a series of metaphors describing what the color red “is.” By writing the poem as a list of metaphors, O’Neill appeals to the reader's senses through vivid imagery so children can identify with red as a color with a variety of associations. As she makes her list of common—and less common—items associated with the color red, the reader can see, hear, and feel “red.” It becomes much more than a color. At first, the reader is told “red is a sunset,” but as the poem progresses it becomes, among other things, “a feeling,” “a brick,” “hotness,” “lipstick,” “a signal,” and “a Valentine heart.”
In addition to metaphors, Mary O’Neill uses personification in the poem:
And when you’re angry
Red runs through your head.
This is an example of personification because Mary O'Neill says the color red is capable of running, a human behavior.
Throughout the poem, the author demonstrates how important the color red is in everyday life.