assignment
Temptation, young love, addiction, admiration, abuse- these are all things that lead to drug using and love affairs. Some people are able to leave someone because they realize how they are ruining their life, others fall into the sense of needing others and let drugs like cocaine and heroin over take and ruin their life. In her poem “Bonfire,” Ellen Hopkins uses imagery and alliteration to paint the picture that love and addiction can destroy one’s life. When kids are in their younger years dolls are something most little girls are quite fond of not only for their company, but sometimes for their beauty. Hopkins uses the phrase “posies porcelain, and perfume,”(1) to describe the offers reasons that many men have given her.
This shows the obsession that a guy can have with a girl before trouble arises. By bringing them flowers, fine articles. An expensive perfumes, it won’t be hard for someone to win over a girl’s heart. The use of alliteration the Hopkins uses effectively shows how with these three words one man can enter the life of someone so innocent. Fire, something so beautiful yet so destructive can mesmerize someone. In her poem Hopkins states, “but the burned together brighter than a bonfire, his kiss her kindling, her flesh his fuel” (1).
This phrase helps paint a picture of two people in love not only being good together, but using drugs together. This alliteration helps show how the use of drugs begins, because they are burning brighter than a bonfire, not only their love is burning, but whatever drug they are using is burning. In the last line Hopkins uses imagery in the line “she sits, sipping gin from the porcelain, beneath a fine sift of ash”(1). This line not only paints the picture of a girl who has died. But it shows a picture of a girl using the same porcelain mentioned previously in the poem that won her over by this guy.
The same guy that won her over and let her to ruin her life with drugs. Ash representing not only the ground she is beneath the representing the things they bring together. They bring their love, and they burned many drugs together that led her to her death. This phrase itself shows Ellen Hopkins. That the admiration and addiction to not only a person but to drugs can ruin one’s life. Ever since literature started there have been love stories.
Ever since civilization there have been addictions. In the poem “Bonfire” by Ellen Hopkins these two conflicts collide and it ends the life of a woman who was beautiful and was going somewhere. Hopkins uses imagery and alliteration to paint the picture that love and addiction can destroy one’s life. Addiction is a problem, if attention is not brought to it, or nothing stops it, we end in the ashes in the bonfire.
