Krystal Perez
7 April 2014
ENG 1121-D428
Essay #2
Lost Innocence
Some people don’t know what innocence is until they lose it. The beginning of a person’s life is inherently marked with being innocent. “Lying Fairies” is a poem found online by an anonymous writer, written about a young girl who starts to lose her innocence at a young age. As one reads, one can see that the more the young girl experiences, the less pure she gets. In this poem, the author states major things that happen in a young girl’s life that makes her feel vulnerable at the end. The author’s use of plot, imagery, symbolism and theme helps this poem come together at the end.
The author of “Lying Fairies” sets up the plot of the poem with a sympathetic tone while sequencing major points in a young girl’s life as she gets older. The author starts the poem with a young girl at the age of twelve, and goes on to write about how this young girl’s life changes as she gets older. The author continues to count up the girl’s age and mentions the certain things that the girl is doing the older she gets. At twelve and a half years old, the young girl is said to be always riding her bicycle as unknown fingers, which we can only imagine to belong to boys, are holding onto her waist. By the age of thirteen, the girl is already smoking and hanging out with boys in the backseat of cars. The girl starts to pay more attention to boys than her school work. At “thirteen and two and a half quarters,” the young girl is now afraid to grow up anymore and wishes that she could go back to being four years old. The older she is getting, the more she smokes. She starts to write poetry to express her emotions since she feels like she can’t tell anyone about the “depression” that she’s going through. “Parental discipline terrifies her…,” the author states, which could possibly mean that the young girl gets in trouble with her parents a lot. The author ends the poem with the girl being fifteen, saddened from a love gone wrong and now depressed with having nobody to console her.
The plot of this poem is well told through the element of imagery. Imagery is a technique used so writers can paint a picture in their audience’s mind to aid in understanding the writing better. In “Lying Fairies”, the details that the author provides give the reader a clear picture of what to visualize. The poem states things like, “She misses being four and dressing up like a pumpkin because fairy godmothers existed…” The girl in the poem missed being an age when things weren’t real. It seems as though that at this age, she was able to make things up when things got difficult for her. This shows how much she has grown and how much things have changed for her. It then states that “she’s thirteen and summer smells like rolled up joints,” to her now. As a reader, with this information and use of imagery, one can picture a four year old dressing in pink and playing make believe to an instant picture of a teenage girl smoking her problems away.
The poem “Lying Fairies” shows a symbolic side. The poem starts, “An abyss built of butterfly wings and emptiness…” In my opinion, butterflies are usually associated with childhood. Children draw butterflies because they are found to be “pretty”. The author describes an abyss filled with butterflies and emptiness, and in some way that could symbolize the young girl’s soul. The older she gets, the emptier she is inside. The poem ends by saying, “Her butterfly wings, snapped a long time ago.” It seems as though the author put in the butterfly wings to correspond to her childhood innocence. After everything the poem stated that the young girl had gone through, her innocence has snapped, comparing it to the wings of a butterfly. Symbolism lies within another line in the poem when stated, “Her walls are a frenzy of beige and cream, painting over princess stickers peeled from childhood corners.” By saying this, the author was trying to prove her point that with age, the girl was starting to leave her childhood in the past. Only at the age of thirteen, she started painting her walls a different color just to cover up the stickers that were once on her wall from when she was little. Also, the fact that she colored her wall beige and cream shows how solid and matured the young girl was starting to believe that she was becoming.
One major theme that could be found in “Lying Fairies” is the theme of lost innocence. It seems as though the author was trying to portray the idea that as a person gets older, changes are inevitable. The author mentions that at fifteen, the girl forgets what smiling and crying feels like anymore. Smiling is associated with childhood because it’s what children spend most of their time doing. I believe that the author mentions the young girl’s ability not to cry anymore because it’s normal to see a child cry but as she gets older, crying is a sign of weakness, and she doesn’t want to show weakness. The author’s repetition of the age fifteen can possibly mean that this is when the girl is aware of the loss of her innocence. She is a teenager now, and she feels as though she is depressed and that nobody understands the emotional pain she is going through, which she didn’t have to feel as a child.
The author uses plot, imagery, and symbolism help the reader understand the story better in order to tie it all together in the end with the theme of innocence. In my opinion, the more things a person experiences, the less pure they become. In the poem, the young girl was having fun growing up, but then came a time when she was scared to do anymore growing up. I believe that when you’re suddenly aware of how much you’ve changed from a child, you are aware of how much less innocent you are. Things change, people change, and lives change. Growing up is something we cannot escape.
