Here is an excerpt from her first day:
“All went well, and I got to Georgetown one evening very tired. Was kindly welcomed, slept in my narrow bed with two other roommates, and on the morrow began my new life by seeing a poor man die at dawn, and sitting all day between a boy with pneumonia and a man shot through the lungs. A strange day, but I did my best; and when I put mother’s little black shawl round the boy while he sat up panting for breath, he smiled and said, “You are real motherly, ma’am.” I felt as if I was getting on. The man only lay and stared with his big black eyes, and made me very nervous. But all were well behaved; and I sat looking at the twenty strong faces as they looked back at me,—hoping that I looked “motherly” to them; for my thirty years made me feel old, and the suffering round me made me long to comfort every one.”
I always like to think of figurative meaning as deeper meaning: what is the narrator really trying to get the reader to understand? Once you have your answer, think about the key words in that excerpt that helped you uncover the figurative meaning-- these will always be figurative devices, so you're already half way through this question. (pro tip: stick to the text to uncover it-- don't stray to far from the information you are being provided)
Lastly, you're being asked to identify literary devices here, do you notice any symbols? Something that usually stands for something else that might relate to that deeper/figurative meaning? Also, think about how the way in which the author phrased these symbols impacted the overall deeper meaning.
Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelly, Coleridge
