In the poem, “Taught Me Purple”, Evelyn Tooley Hunt comments on how living a life of poverty negatively impacts a person's feelings of self-worth. The poem describes an underprivileged mother attempting to teach her child morals and ideals. She attempts to teach her child that there is more to life beyond the filthy streets and broken molding. Throughout the poem, Hunt expresses the laborious struggle the mother undergoes to escape the grip of poverty. In the poem, Hunt describes the hardships of living a life of poverty using several key words. In the first stanza, she uses orbit and circle to describe how poverty entangles the mother in a perpetual, never-ending cycle. Her life revolves around trying to escape poverty. Hunt utilizes words like tenement, broken molding, and filthy street to describe the inadequate environment that underprivileged people live in. These words show that those in poverty often live in small, overcrowded apartments with old, broken molding. Many of these words all portray the hardships of living as a lower class citizen. She uses the word “reached” in the last stanza to suggest that the mother makes an effort to obtain beauty. The use of “reached” emphasizes that beauty is not close to the mother, so the mother has to reach, or make an effort to achieve beauty.. The mother tried…show more content… It describes the undesirable, unpleasant environment of poverty. Words like “filthy streets”, “broken molding”, and tenement help the reader understand the disagreeable state of living that the mother and child are living in. These descriptive words help to explain why the mother did not feel pride, or self worth in their current state of being. Repetition of the words “teach” or “taught” emphasizes that the mother makes a great effort to teach and prepare her child to live