Elma Mitchell

Elma Mitchell portrays people as easy things to describe, as long as the intellect is not involved. In the first stanzas, she makes use of the senses: touch, taste, smell, sight. The sense of hearing is left aside because it inevitably involves the intellect.

Throughout the poem, she builds up the notion that people could be easily defined, like in a dictionary or an encyclopedia. She uses the structure of the poem to emphasise that: things are listed as mere information about people, unlike what is generally seen in a poem. The poem is mainly seen as impersonal and informative.

Although this poem seeks to define people through the senses, in the last stanza the persona fails to analyse people through the sense of hearing because the intellect is not reliable since then we judge and come up with misleading conclusions. She criticises the judgement human beings usually pass, unless their intellect is not involved. She also points out the activity of drawing as an effective way of defining people.

To conclude, the writer seeks to effectively describe people, pointing out that hearing – and consequently writing – aren´t suitable, so she creates an ironic situation since she is a poet writing this poem in order to describe people.