Symbolism

To be honest symbolism is something I often hunt for when I’m reading literature. So often I try to find the significance of the text and sometimes I even feel as if I spend too much time on a particular section, word, or phrase of the text in order to draw some kind of meaning from what it is saying. I feel that many of the text we’ve read in class have such deeper meanings to them than what we give them credit for. Sometimes it’s hard to think that the basics that we discuss about a text is the overall meaning of what the author meant when he or she decided to write that material. In a poem like “The Traveling Onion,” it’s hard to conclude that all the poet is talking about is the literal onion that we so happen to forget about after we chop it up and throw it in our meals, it’s also hard to just take the text as it is after reading a line in the poem that says “I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles.” I honestly believe that this line in the poem goes far beyond the literal meaning. This poem “The Traveling Onion” I truly believe that the poet is using the onion to symbolize how we take things for granted, how we focus so much on the big things in our life and how we complain about how much problem we have or we just focus on the negatives of a every situation and we don’t take time to realize that without these small onions that we have in our lives that we would not have make it as far as we are today. Maybe sometimes I over think literature, but I think if you just focus on the big picture and don’t focus on these small pixels that make up this picture, then you can never fully appreciate that picture.