ANALYSIS

ANALYSIS

For me the genre of the kanji-ku is the most interesting aspect of the poem. With my analysis I want to show, that the Japanese symbol really does represent an innate meaning and that it fits together with the content of the poem. I want to show how the tools support the meaning, how colour, instruction, movement and arrangement work together to create a special atmosphere and to hint at what associations Deena Larsen might have had with the word ‘Child’, when she wrote the poem.

When I first looked at Children’s Time the colours immediately caught my attention. The brightness of the purple, green and yellow that compose the Japanese symbol already reminded me of an image painted by a child. They create a happy atmosphere and even the links match with them. Before you click on one of the words of the poem they appear green. As the colour green is associated with hope and curiosity in the western culture it fits very well here. It symbolizes the hope that lies on every child and the curiosity to explore everything, which is also typical for a child. If you have explored a link it turns black though, in a symbolical way that means that there is no curiosity to see it any more. Then, when reading the text I found out that the design also perfectly matches the content of the poem. The colourful, curved lines with the blue spots sprinkled around them seem to represent the water slides of the swimming pool, the “colored tubes of air and water”.

In addition to the colours the image of the slide is supported by the arrangement of the content. Already the instructions, which appear when you click on the title Children’s time, are written in vocabulary associated with the swimming pool. It says that you should "slide" your mouse on the image. So just by moving your mouse you already imitate the movement of the kids at the pool and you already get the feeling that the world, or in this case, the text is passing by without having enough time to watch it closely. Still, in the instructions you also get the possibility to stop the constant movement. You can symbolically stop the slide or fall or if you want to see it like that also the growing process of a child. You can stay there in the “Children’s time”. You can “hold the mouse button down while you move the mouse. This will prevent new text from being loaded as you move the mouse pointer over the image.” [1]

Finally also the arrangement supports the content. The lines talking about the “hight of summer” for example are also put on the highest point of the sign and the line “legs, lives intertwined” is depicted at a place where a lot of pieces come together. Then the depiction as a hypertext, as a network without a beginning and an end fits very well here. It shows, that children are living in the moment without thinking about the future or the past. The use of language supports this thesis, as all the words are in the present progressive, in a time that indicates movement going on at this very instant, in many cases even various movements at a time, movements which haven’t finished yet. And even though the word ‘endless’ is mentioned quite often it remains doubtable if the movement and the poem do not finish at some point because usually childhood does not last forever.