The "Planned" Event: The Importance of Tone
             Examining a poem in detail can bring out new meanings and ideas. Through careful analysis, the true meaning of a poem can be revealed. Sharon Olds' poem, "The Planned Child" (824) is an example of interpretation and meaning becoming more evident after analysis. In the poem the speaker's attitude changes from animosity, to uncertainty, then to appreciation. The poet illustrates these attitude changes through use of description and diction.
             In the first stanza, Olds vividly animates the speaker's disgust of being a planned child. The speaker finds her conception an unemotional, insignificant event. "She had taken a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry..." (lines 1 and 2), "...and made a chart of the month and put her temperature on it, rising and falling to know the day to make me..." (lines 4-6). The speaker is dissatisfied with her planned conception. She states, " I hated the fact that they had planned me" (line 1). "-I would have liked to have been conceived in heat, in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex, not on cardboard, the little x on the rising line..." (lines 6-9). The words "hated" (line 1), "cardboard" (line 2 and 9), and "little x" (line 9) depicts how the author presents an attitude of disgust with diction in the first stanza.
             The start of the second stanza displays the speaker's attitude of uncertainty through an ordinary event. As the speakers friend is "pouring wine" (line 11), her friend makes a statement "(you) seem to have been a child who had been wanted" (line 12), that starts the speaker to reevaluate her position on her conception and birth. "I took the wine against my lips as if my mouth were moving along that valved wall in my mother's body..." (Lines 13-15), also descriptively illustrates t...