“Sky High” Hannah Roberts

The text “Sky high” contains six stanzas two of an adult and four of a child. In the first stanza H. Robert is reminiscing about her old back yard. “Silver skeletal arms throwing long, summer afternoon shadows on the lawn.” The reader is drawn into the text by the technique of personification, bringing the text to life. The idea of feeling of sense of mystery is shown through the alliteration of the letter “s”.. “..Struggling sapling, surround…spectators…” “Like colored flags in secret code.” The washing on the line seems to be a secret message to the child and shows the reader that the child’s world is exciting and unexplained.

In the Following stanza the writer slows the tone of the poem down by using short sentences and gives the reader an image of how the young girl excavates onto the clothesline.

The title “Sky High”, used also in the first sentence of Paragraph 3 is also a figure of speech. “Sky High” is a hyperbole highlighting the extreme sense of change that Hannah feels as she was once young looking upon the clothes line seeing it touching the sky, now as a young adult seeing it different she feels she exaggerated. Similes are also used to express her feelings “feeling as frilly and nearly as pink as the bathers I’m wearing” The child feels pleased with herself as she feels about her frilly bathers, she also feels as pink as them suggesting pleasure and color caused by her climb, reminding us of the simple satisfactions of childhood. The “veggie patch” is an inanimate object that has been personified which reaches out to the reader “its boughs stretch out to me beseechingly”

Hannah’s informal language indicates her childish ways through her uncertain manner of “I think.” I think comes across as more hesitant compared to the strong statement of the description of the neighbors garden.

Paragraph 5 brings upon the change of the end of her childhood past. Roberts emphasizes her last exhilarating, earth spinning ride upon “the best climbing tree in the backyard.”

Coming back to present tense Hannah examines her hands “the line etched story of life” imprinted upon them through scars and wrinkles telling stories of her childhood and how age has become of her. “I now write my own semaphore secrets…” Once again remising on those times of deciphering semispherical codes, Roberts feels empathy with desire to return to the freshness of childhood pleasures. “A small, pilot light burning somewhere inside..” indicates that she still has the impulse to climb on top the washing line and swing as if she was young. The memories still playing fresh in her mind…