There Is Always More Than Meets the Eye

In everyday life false judgment is not hard to find. Everybody in the world has a different perspective and way of portraying themselves to the public, the way you look does not always show who you really are. This essay will discuss and analyze the poem “The Beggar & the Tourist” by Shahriar Shahriari that is about not judging a book by its cover. The song “The Way I Am” by Eminem talks about the same topic but with celebrities and their fans. The meaning of both will be discussed throughout the essay. These two poems are based on judgments on many points of views like media, values and society.

Exploring the similarities and differences between them will help explain their meaning. The poem “The Beggar & the Tourist” clearly shows how looks can make people wonder what kind of person you are and how valuable is to society. This can be seen at the beginning: “What a simple existence, purposeless and futile my opinion” (Shahriari 2) this was addressed by the tourist when he saw a bum just staring into the sky. The poem clearly states how some determine a person’s value to society basing on looks, without knowing or speaking to them ever in their life. This kind of mentality can affect how and with who you socialize.

In this case the bum thinks the tourist is as useless as him because he lives as a slave of society when he stated in the poem: “He saw a young man busily running around in futile pursuit/Only to fulfill what he was taught, someone's ideal to suite” (Shahriari 3). Eminem in his song “The Way I Am” talks about the judgment between fans and celebrities in the part of the song: “I'm so sick and tired of being admired / That I wish that I would just die or get fired / And dropped from my label and stop with the fables” (Eminem 62-64) In this verse Eminem is talking about him being tired of getting so much attention.

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All that attention gets in the way of him being able to live a normal life and he would rather get a new job than to live by the expectations of the fans. They expect him to always be a nice man when he is just simple human being like the rest of the world that have their ups and downs. It also expresses a hard critic on society and media when he says: “When a dude's getting bullied and shoots up his school / And they blame it on Marilyn... and the heroin / Where were the parents at?

And look where it's at / Middle America, now it's a tragedy / Now it's so sad to see, an upper class city / Having this happening” (Eminem 52-55) This entire verse talks about the Columbine shooting tragedy and how the media tries to cover it up by blaming the music that they listened and the drugs they used. Eminem criticized the media on why they did not stop to think maybe it was their parent’s negligence to prevent the bulling against their kids. He also criticizes how if that same scenario happened in a lower society class the media would not have cared that much.

There are lots of differences and similarities between these two poems. The most obvious similarity between the song and the traditional poem is the prejudgment and both authors criticize it from different perspectives. The difference between them is the subject is addressed in the prejudgment. In the “The Beggar & the Tourist” it is between a bum and a suit tourist and in the song “The Way I Am” it is between celebrities and their fans. Both poems have very noticeable social critics such as the significance of life and how looks can affect how people think of you.

The world suffers from this social outbreak because it is taught since childhood how poor people break the law and rich people do not, how black people are bad and white people are good. Since we were born society has always been telling us what to do depending on our ethnicity, status and personality. These are examples of the most common prejudgments of society that have to be changed and the objective of the poems is to open the eyes of people and make them realize how this is happening.

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