Response for Sienna

Sienna’s poem “Lore’s Prayer—To Ella Yelich-O’Conner” is a pretty impressive poem. This is an epistle poem calling out to Lorde, a singer who rose to prominence last year with her hit single “Royals”. To full understand this poem I had to do a little research; I was familiar with the song but I had to look up the lyrics to see what Sienna was referring to a few times. To me, she seemed to be calling out to Lorde, she used the apostrophe “O” when referring to her and she also used exclamation marks four times, making her seem like she was desperate for more Lorde songs. She also used many different poetic devices to make the poem feel complete, i.e. repetition of the line “send the call out! / send the call out!” (3-4). She also used alliteration: “hair, your hoodoo hymn! Sing,” making the sentence sound like the air flow of somebody singing, not to mention the use of onomatopoeia with “hoodoo”. My favorite line is the last one, “Your white teeth teens are waiting. Sing.” This refers to two parts of the song. The song itself about how she likes being young and how she likes getting “buzzed” from different things than what is always being sung about in pop culture. By saying that she is a teen, this refers to wanting to stay young and an earlier line in the poem, “sing of gerascophobia” (fear of growing old). One of the most popular lines in the song is “But every song’s like gold teeth, grey goose, trippin’ in the bathroom.” By saying that the teens have white teeth, she is identifying with Lorde and supporting her. This poem was beautifully written and I found the most interesting thing was that it was in a sense a fan letter to Lorde, but it read like something we would read out of our textbooks; I thought it was that good.