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Poems that reminisce about childhood
Relation to poem the mother
On pain poem analysis
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Recommended: Poems that reminisce about childhood
The Boy Made of Paper is a poem composed by Jasper Sole. This brilliant piece eloquently portrays the emptiness of living without a mother. Loss is a very distinct and disconcerting experience for everyone. Sole uses a boy to explore loss, and this emotion is powerfully reinforced through delicate and expressive language. The purpose of this poem is discreet until the fourth stanza where the reason behind the boy’s misery becomes blatantly clear; he is "a boy without a mother". There is, however, foreshadowing of the situation that only makes sense once the poem is reread. This is evident in the opening line of the poem; the boy is sitting “alone” each night. The brightness of the mother’s smile seems to be “fading”. She is gone, and the impact …show more content…
As this poem aims to communicate loss, Sole has incorporated an element of loss into each stanza. In the first, the boy is losing his ability to really feel the sun's warmth. We realise it is not physical warmth he needs; the warmth from his mother’s smile is what he desires. In the second stanza, the boy is losing the memory of how that extraordinary smile could illuminate his mind; this light "grew dimmer by the day, fading". In the third stanza, we see how much this is affecting the boy's emotions. He is weeping, tears falling down his frail cheeks and his "blotted resolve weakening"; he is losing his determination to carry on. In the penultimate stanza, Sole’s paper image culminates in a book. The boy becomes this book. Life with his mother was full of "wondrous tales" and "beautiful illustrations", but now that she is gone, these fond tales and illustrations are rubbing out to grey smudges, showing just how empty this boy’s life is now. The substance to his world is lost. Lastly, and possibly the most powerful loss of the stanzas, pages of this book/boy are blowing away in the wind. This boy loses whole parts of himself, letting them be torn from him by the bitterness of the world. They are torn one by one, seemingly slow and it can only be imagined how ghastly this loss is for the boy. The poet causes the empathetic reader to feel enormous …show more content…
The New Zealand born poet (Goodreads, 2015) is known for his ever-changing style and his talented ability to compose beautiful literature from a range of different topics (Amazon, 2015). This poem is a very heart-wrenching piece. Sole has taken an experience that many people have gone through and portrayed it through a young, innocent child. The child being the vessel in this case causes a deep stir of emotions from an empathetic audience, seemingly intensified because we realise this boy is young and faces more difficulties growing up without a mother rather than losing her as an adult. Because of Sole's clear approach to describing the boy's emotions, I see a small insight as to what life would be like when losing a parent. I think it would be extremely hard to move on from an experience like this, especially at a young age that I assume this boy is from the way he is portrayed. He is not old enough to focus on remembering the memories of his mother; he lets the thought of her blow away focusing instead on how empty it makes him feel. I think Sole portrays very accurately what I assume all children would feel when losing a parent; fragile, lost, vulnerable and empty. The Boy Made of Paper is a very successful piece, Sole uses striking language and dramatic imagery to communicate feelings to the reader that they themselves may not have experienced. After reading this poem,
The poem immediately establishes a controlling metaphor comparing the book to a child, illustrating the speaker's inherent attachment to her work while also describing her irritation towards it. Establishing the metaphor by using terms such as "offspring" and "birth", the speaker shows that she is attached to her work, as a mother is to an infant child. (1-2) However, she simultaneously establishes that while the child is imperfect, so is she, calling her mind "feeble." (1) It is this duality of both the mother and the child having flaws that drives the speaker's sentiment of attachment to her work: as a depiction of her thoughts, it is a piece of her, and a flaw in it reflects a flaw in her.
Li-Young Lee’s poem, A Story, explores a complex relationship between a father and his five year old son. Although the poem’s purpose is to elaborate on the complexity of the relationship and the father’s fear of disappointing his son, the main conflict that the father is faced with is not uncommon among parents. Lee is able to successfully portray the father’s paranoia and son’s innocence through the use of alternating point of view, stanza structure, and Biblical symbolism.
Through the death of the speaker’s father in the poem, the suffering on behalf of those who survive after a loved one has passed is highlighted in this work. Death has an immense way of obstructing the physical and biological needs of those left in its wake. Using the psychological criticism analysis one can determine that the motivation behind the poem was mourning the death of the father as a means for the speaker to cope so that their own needs for emotional expression, love, and esteem can be
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
boy who is the son of the lord. The poem ends with the cottage maiden
John Boyne was born on April 30, 1971 in Dublin, Ireland. At a young age he used to eagerly read major literary works as in The Count of Monte Cristo, Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. As of the age of twelve he developed a keen interest in composing literature. As of then he decided to major in English Literature from the Trinity College, Dublin. He then studied creative writing at the renowned institution of Norwich, the University of East Anglia. He was awarded the Curtis Brown prize for his literary contribution. Boyne began his writing with short stories and published around seventy of those short stories. At first he wrote for adult audiences but then in 2006 he shifted his interest to children’s book as he published his masterpiece, The Boy in The Striped Pajamas. John Boyne said “In April 2004 an image came into my mind of two boys
...s despair in accepting that his and his lover's fate was to grow "As weary-hearted as that hollow moon" (38). The fact that this line, and not a happy, upbeat ending, closes the poem further emphasizes the tragedy.
... be casting stones, or holding a conversation. The speaker of the poem does not move on from this emotional torment, yet I do feel as if in his quest for closure he does resolve some of the tumultuous feelings he does have in regard to losing his love.
Many times people express their feelings through words others can understand but in the poem, “Lost Soul” by Brianna Alvarez, she expresses her way of feeling and thought through poetic and literary devices. There is a use of imagery and the theme to imply heartbreak, suffrage, and hopelessness. The poem express how the speaker wants to be left alone of something or someone that has hurt or is hurting them.
Through their poems Plath and Frost have given the reader an insight into the feelings of loss. Through the loss of life, Plath shows that the pain of losing a loved one is forever etched in the memories of people around them; Frost however, argues that although there is pain, it is only ephemeral, and that life soon moves along as it always has. Through the belittling of women in society Plath illustrates that loss can also be a loss of self-worth, losing the very essence of your being. Frost also recognises that ill-treatment can lead to loss of identity and self-worth. Loss then is not just a feeling, it becomes a burden which people carry with them in all facets of their existence.
When facing the harsh realities of life during a child’s development, it hinders their emotional process which can cause confusion and early maturity. In the poem “The Laburnum,” Ted Hughes writes about a child’s rejection of their family being toxic and struggles with understanding the truth. Where lack of control of the situation begins to interferes with the speaker’s emotional growth. The intimacy caused by first and second person point-of-view, the vivid symbolism and intense imagery helps Hughes, create a loss of innocence from the speaker’s emotional distress of suffering in a destructive family. Hughes uses strong emotions from a child going through a parent’s divorce, evoking empathy for the speaker because of the child’s awareness of family issues occurring making the child vulnerable to pain and early development.
Although twelve months have passed the deep loss associated with his grief remains. The child “Came/Early” into the metaphorical light of life and “lived a day and night.” Sadly the infant dies and with “No one to blame” the loss of his child his grief manifests itself in more pain. The tone of loss intensifies as the loss is further explored by both poets. The woman’s self-loss is illustrated through the attempt of idle chat with an ex love towards whom it was “too late to feign indifference.” The mother does not succeed in convincing him or herself that being a mother is a fulfilling role, when “from his neat head unquestionably rises” a metaphorical “small balloon”. The balloon is an image created by the narrator to represent the ex lovers thoughts of being grateful to not be in relation with her existence. This confusion of emotions is also reflected in the father’s grieving in “Pieta”. McAuley uses the repetition of the word “cannot”, in the verse “I cannot tell you,/I cannot understand”, to stress his lack of understanding of his pain which is alliteratively “… so dark and deep.” The reality of the parents’ anguish does not end at the
Roald Dahl’s book “Boy” is a story that is actually written about his own life from early years to days until he departed from school. This was his first autobiographical novel. It is about his experience at school and the system that they had in place. He wrote about some really nasty and cruel characters as well as some characters that we can absolutely love. All of his characters and stories are extremely exaggerated.