Forgot your password?  
Related Topics

Kindness Study Guide & Notes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 28 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Kindness.
This section contains 1,314 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Kindness Study Guide

Kindness Summary & Study Guide Description

Kindness Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains For Further Reading on Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Kindness Summary and Analysis

Preview of Kindness Summary:

Lines 1-2

The first two lines of “Kindness” establish a premise that runs throughout the poem: Before a person knows one thing, he or she must know something else. (The “you” in this work refers simply to the universal “you,” or people in general, not to a specific person.) In this case, the real meaning of kindness, which seems easy to understand, is shown to be more complex than one may realize. The speaker suggests, ironically, that to “know what kindness really is,” first “you must lose things.”

Lines 3-4

Instead of explaining what the opening lines mean right away, the speaker relies on an intriguing metaphor to make the point. (A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares an intended concept or thing to something unrelated as a way to clarify the original intention.) The speaker wants to describe how the future can “dissolve in a moment,” so she compares it...
(read more)

This section contains 1,314 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our Kindness Study Guide
Copyrights
Kindness from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
Follow Us on Facebook
Homework Help