Poetry Ch. 5 Figurative Language (1)

"I have prepared my sister's tongue."

The poem "The Joy of Cooking" by Elaine Magarrell uses metonymy. The speaker uses metonymy to describe the shortcomings of his siblings. In the first stanza, the speaker prepares his sister's tongue. The tongue's description allows readers to infer things about his sister. One thing the metonymy hints at is that his sister uses foul language. I gathered this because he prepared it and scrubbed it. Usually, children get their tongues washed with soap to teach them not to curse. The fact that the tongue needed to be "scrubbed and skinned" implies that it was dirty. The speaker uses metonymy to describe his sister's bad habit of using foul language. The speaker also uses metonymy in the second stanza when he has his brother's tongue. I think that the metonymy hear is describing his brother when he describes the heart. The heart is "firm and rather dry, slow cooked." This implies that according to the speaker, his brother's heart is not used often and isn't very appealing. Also, the heart only serves two, unlike the beef heart that serves six. This implies that the speaker's brother's heart is small. By the speaker's metonymy, we can gather that the speaker has some background in food and has some pent-up feelings about his siblings.