Day Lady Died

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The Significance of Details in "The Day Lady Died"

Written by Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy to jazz singer Billie Holiday. However, O'Hara's poem is not the typical elegy that the reader may expect. Holiday's death isn't mentioned until the end of the poem when the speaker picks up a newspaper, and even then her name is never directly mentioned. O'Hara also excludes most of the language and details that a normal elegy may include. Instead, he focuses on writing the poem in a stream of conscious style that is written with an emphasis on proper nouns, a conversational tone, and imagery to strengthen his theme that life's small details deserve every bit of our attention.
The Day Lady Died was one of O'Hara's collection of Lunch Poems in which there was a seemingly casual diction and lightness. O'Hara would write these poems during his lunch hour and use a breezy tone to discuss his reactions to things happening in the moment. In this particular poem there seems to be a list of insignificant, loosely connected …show more content…
He utilizes many drawn out sentences with the overuse of the conjunction "and" to make the speaker seemed rushed. This also makes the reader of the poem feel as if they are going through his day to day life and witnessing one thing happen after another. O'Hara writes, "And a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the John door." By connecting ideas in an abrupt way, O'Hara is able to control and shape how we interpret his work. His use of a conversational tone through stream of consciousness is important because it highlights specific details in his writing which all goes back to his theme that small details in life are all worthy of our

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