Analyzing The Poem 'The One Girl At The Boys Party'

In the poem “The One Girl at the Boys Party” shows us different examples of imagery that highlights the speaker’s acknowledgment of her daughter’s following stages of maturity and puberty. The poem references that the parent takes the girl, which is a math whiz, to a pool party where boys are instantly drawn to her. This is a stage of puberty when boys start having feelings for girls and so forth which arises a lot of sexual tension since it’s new and unfair to them. The kids start diving into the pool, and the parent envisions the daughter working math problems in her head to analyze her height to the diving board and the amount of water in the pool as mentioned in this stanza, “they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract her height from ten feet, divide it into hundreds of gallons of water.” As the girl gets out of the pool, she knows that the girl is looking at the boys and recognizing their appeal as in this stanza, “she will see their eyes, two each, their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes, one each.”

By the speaker describing the girl as “my girl” and “her sweet face” as well as the hamburger and fries pattern on …show more content…
The speaker states that when they arrive at the pool party, the girl “stands there smooth and sleek, her math scores unfolding in the air around her.” Math is a significant part of the poem’s overall idea. She is brilliant so much so that math follows her to the pool party and she can quickly make calculations while diving into the pool. She also begins to calculate the facts of the two boys features around her as stated above. After that moment, the poem’s density of mathematical metaphors becomes sexual considering that she’s most likely reaching puberty soon. For instance, at the beginning of the poem the speaker references the girl’s body as “smooth and sleek” as well as “body hard and indivisible as a prime number” and the boys surround