Electricity comes to cocoa bottom. Presentation by Eduardo and Adrien

Electricity comes to cocoa bottom Then all the children of Cocoa Bottom went to see Mr.Samuel’s electric lights. They camped on the grass bank outside his house, their lamps filled with oil, for sunset, watching the sky turn yellow, orange. Grannie Patterson across the road peeped through the crack in her porch door. The cable was drawn like a pencil line across the sun. The fireflies waited in the shadows, their lanterns off. The kling-klings* swooped in from the hills, congregating in the orange trees. A breeze coming home from sea held its breath; bamboo lining the dirt road stopped its swaying, and evening came as soft as chiffon curtains: Closing. Closing. Light! Mr. Samuel smiling on the verandah — a silhouette against the yellow shimmer behind him — and there arising such a gasp, such a fluttering of wings, tweet-a-whit, such a swaying, swaying. Light! Marvellous light! And then the breeze rose up from above the trees, swelling and swelling into a wind such that the long grass bent forward stretching across the bank like so many bowed heads. And a voice in the wind whispered: Is there one among us to record this moment? But there was none — no one (except for a few warm rocks hidden among mongoose ferns) even heard a sound. Already the children of Cocoa Bottom had lit their lamps for the dark journey home, and it was too late — the moment had passed.

So what is the meaning behind this poem? From the poem we can see that cocoa bottom is a poor village as the people are still running on oil lamps, but there is this one person that is wealthier than the others and he managed to get electricity in his house. One of the major clues in the poem that show where cocoa bottom is in the world, is the bird “Kling-Klings”. Activity: Using google images, find where the Kling-Klings are from and you will have found where this village is. (3mins) Here is a clue of what the bird looks like! >>>

The structure The poem has been written in 3 stanzas and each one of them describes different steps of their night. - The first one talks about everyone getting ready for the show with the electricity lights. - The second one talk about how everyone is amazed by the light and how everything is behaving around them. - The last stanza is describing the feeling of the people while heading back to their home.

Similes in the poem “And evening came as soft as chiffon curtains” Chiffon curtains: These curtains are very soft and flow along with the wind. This could mean that the evening was calm and that there was no wind so in other words, the weather was good and it was the perfect evening to show to the people the electric lights. The author did this in order to emphasize that the experience of this night was amazing and the weather was perfect. Furthermore, the words “closing, closing” at the end of the sentence meant that the night was coming very slowly and this suggest that people were bored of waiting as when you’re bored time goes by slowly and people had been camping earlier in the afternoon just to see these lights.

Language Language The vocabulary choice of the writer is important on the way he is describing his/ her environment. The writer describes the surroundings with detail and aspects of every single object around. Not only the animals had human description, but objects also had, like the cable or the bamboo. The writer is also talking about the way how people behave and how they are affected from it. The poem might not be as exciting when seeing electric light, but if you think back then, when everyone had oil lamp and seeing their emotions, it would be surprising.

Images Images/Meaning The birds and the fish have been given human feelings for an object. They are excited and impatient just about an object that is untouchable. Electric light.