The poem, “Taught Me Purple” by Evelyn Tooley Hunt demonstrates the difficulties and emotional stress of sustaining and improving a family’s lifestyle while in poverty. Hunt discreetly entails the hardships of a struggling mother and her child. Despite their desperate position, her mother must strive for a better life, teaching her daughter more about the world outside their own. While the mother teaches her daughter about the hopes of one day living a better life, the mother continues to work day and night unable herself to achieve the desired outcome. She is discouraged by her failed attempt to improve their lives, and surrenders the task to her daughter.
Both the daughter and her mother living in poverty and their plethora of challenges can be expressed through keywords to describe and reveal their surroundings. One key word that expresses their lifestyle and environment they lived in, was “filthy street”. “Beyond the filthy street” illustrates that her mother was teaching her daughter about the opportunities and treatment that she could earn. Orbit and tenement are shown in the poem as, “The tenement her orbit”. Both orbit and tenement have a connection; tenement displays their lack of comfort and money, and orbit is an infinite circle.…show more content… “My mother taught”, a phrase demonstrating repetition, may seem to be in the first two stanzas ,but in the third stanza “taught” is used in a different phrase. By using imagery Hunt gives us the opportunity to imagine and interpret their environment and story. “Broken molding” was used in the poem to imagine the type of housing they lived in. The most concerning word in the last stanza and the second line was “died”. In the poem, the mother died by reaching for beauty, but the meaning of died can be depicted as an emotional death. After the mother died, she didn’t want to fail again, so her solution was to just give