Hurrdles

the poem Hurdles by Katia Kapovich the author tells the story of a young girl in a race to maturity. The thesis of this poem is that the games and fun we have when we are children is easily forgotten when we grow older and move farther away.

The ethos or the creative identity is a young girl about the age of sixteen years old. The young girl imagines herself in a stadium in the dead of winter with a drizzly cold rain falling. She is running a race against three other girls who she describes and declares herself as an underdog. The voice is told trough third person omniscient. The girl describes how the surroundings and the mood before the race as well as the changes that take place soon after the race.

The logo is the race. The narrator tells how this is her last race she looks back at the race in a past tense voice and recalls the race. The plot is she runs her last race and at the end she feels that it meant nothing to her. She tells how she moves the next summer to study literature and she ponders if the other girls are still behind her running through the snow.

The pathos of the poem is the reader's response after reading the poem. The poem makes the reader feel an emotional and spiritual response. The emotions come from how she describes the cold damp day and the dismal surroundings. The reader gets a feeling of great importance running the race, but shortly after the race it feels as if it was a loss instead of a win. The spiritual loss is the realization of becoming a women and moving away no longer were they small girls running to the school imagining that they were running a race. Now they were adults, women that will separate and go their own ways.

In conclusion the girls where growing up no longer just school girls playing games but women who split their ways in search of their future. The narrator feels much sorrow that she is no longer just playing around and wonders if her friends are following her path. The