The joy of conceiving a child is a beautiful thing. How is it that a man and a woman can come together and create such a creature? How is it that a woman can carry life in her for nine months? Many children are their parent’s joy. Even through the cries, the puke, the feces, and everything. Somehow we still find the heart love them uncontrollably. Many commercials show on television about children overseas dying due to starvation and diseases. What is a parent to do when they lose that very thing they created? What do they do when their son or their daughter is suddenly taken away from them or in more serious cases they die? Infant death is one of the saddest things that a parent can go through. I cannot even imagine the pain and the hurt that an infant death could cause towards loved ones. This is the situation we find in Dana Gioia’s poem “Planting a Sequoia.” In this emotional poem, the speaker describes the process of burying an infant loved one. The setting was in Sicily, which is an island in Italy. The poem is told from a father’s perspective. It addresses how the planting of a sequoia will continue to live and grow as a symbol of the first son’s birth, which is now dead. A sequoia is said to be one of the longest living trees and is said to live longer than humans. Dana Gioia was describing in the poem how when every other family member has died off, the sequoia, which is buried for the speaker’s son, will forever remain through generations.
The title of this poem foreshadows what is going to take place in this story. In “Planting a Sequoia,” the narrator is in the process of planting a tree, a sequoia to be exact. In Sicily tradition a man is to plant a tree to celebrate of his first son’s birth – An olive...
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...l life. By planting the sequoia it allows a memory to life forever even when things around it continue to die.
The poem can be very touching to those who understand its true meaning. Dana Gioia was able to take this poem that was about a death of a young boy and turn it into something beautiful allowing him to live forever. This story is not only about the mourning of a lost soul, but about the beauty of life itself. Dana also allowed to reader to understand the compassion she had for the speaker. Without verbally saying it she used symbolic images to interpret the hurt and pain the man experienced from the loss of this unborn child. Instead of the common Sicily tradition for planting a tree for the first born child, the speaker does what he feels will honor his son. The sequoia is planted to compensate for the time he has lost and to outlive the child’s family. T
Knowles foreshadows the boys’ loss of innocence through the war, and their constant jumps from the tree. While getting ready for the war the boys practice and show off their skills on the tree by the Devon River. These jumps are done for fun yet the boys see them as a routine, something that has to be done. Knowles brings the theme of the loss of innocence in the novel for the first time by portraying Finny as the defender who gets the boys out of trouble by saying they had to jump out of the tree (22). This foreshadows how the innocence of the boys will be banished from themselves and their world. The tree also symbolizes the Forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Just like it is forbidden to eat the fruit, jumping from the tree was not allowed as well. By jumping from the tree the boys symbolically accept their loss of innocence, just like Adam and Eve accepted theirs.
In the second stanza the poet describes the tree as thin, dry and insecure. Insecurity is a human nature that has been used to describe a
"Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth, new wood, new life, new compass, and greater girth." This means
Hence, the poem's tone contains elements of remorse as well as impassivity. The traveler's detached description of the mother, "...a doe, a recent killing; / she had stiffened already, almost cold" (6-7), and the wistful detail with which he depicts her unborn offspring, "...her fawn lay there waiting...
... seeing and feeling it’s renewed sense of spring due to all the work she has done, she was not renewed, there she lies died and reader’s find the child basking in her last act of domestication. “Look, Mommy is sleeping, said the boy. She’s tired from doing all out things again. He dawdled in a stream of the last sun for that day and watched his father roll tenderly back her eyelids, lay his ear softly to her breast, test the delicate bones of her wrist. The father put down his face into her fresh-washed hair” (Meyer 43). They both choose death for the life style that they could no longer endure. They both could not look forward to another day leading the life they did not desire and felt that they could not change. The duration of their lifestyles was so pain-staking long and routine they could only seek the option death for their ultimate change of lifestyle.
The children have not been exposed to the outside world where in such places, death was not taken lightly because it was not accepted as a norm. Also in the larger more connected city centers, there were places to go and people to speak to about how they were feeling. The children soon realize that the teacher which has been sent to them cares about their wellbeing and grief process, where the three previous may not have put so much regard into the topic. As the children and the teacher reach Yolandes grave, the teacher feels the isolation in a literal sense, “We came to a wooden cabin standing in isolation among the little trees.” the teacher saw how many of the children lived and realized how detached the children really are. The children however, know that this is where Yolande lived and have accepted it because it is how most of them live. The children evidently grieve and accept death much differently because of the isolation. The teacher observes the child “The child had a delicate little face, very wasted, with the serious expression I had seen on the faces of most of the children here, as if the cares of the adults had crushed them all too early.” The teacher immediately connects with the child and decides to ask the children to pick roses in order to
Betty Smith’s novel A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is a tale of poignant family relationships and childhood and also of grim privation. The story revolves around the protagonist of the story, young Francie Nolan. She is an imaginative, endearing 11-year-old girl growing up in 1912, in Brooklyn, New York. The entire story revolves around Francie and the Nolan family, including her brother Neelie, her mother Katie and her father Johnny. An ensemble of high relief characters aids and abets them in their journey through this story of sometimes bleak survival and everlasting hope. As we find out, the struggle for survival is primarily focused against the antagonist of this story, the hard-grinding poverty afflicting Francie, the Nolan’s and Brooklyn itself. The hope in the novel is shown symbolically in the “The “Tree of Heaven””. A symbol used throughout the novel to show hope, perseverance and to highlight other key points.
Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina is a short poem composed in 1965 centered on a grandmother and her young grandchild. Bishop’s poem relates to feelings of fate, detriment, and faith that linger around each scene in this poem. There are three views in which we are being narrated in this story; outside of the house, inside of the house, and within the picture the grandchild draws. The progression of the grandmother’s emotions of sadness and despair seen in stanza one to a new sense of hope in stanza six are what brings this complex poem to life. Bishop’s strong use of personification, use of tone, and choice of poetic writing all are crucial in relaying the overall message. When poetry is named after its form, it emphasizes what the reader should recognize
Although, I wished that the poem included more about the resurrection. It was good that it discussed Jesus return and the Day of Judgment, to encourage man’s repentance and salvation in Christ. I wondered if this poet who must have lived sometime in the Early Middle Ages actually had a dream where he imagined a tree speaking to him about the death and resurrection of Christ and then he wrote it down. If that was the case, then I can understand why the poem is not perfectly accurate and somewhat jumbled, when compared to scripture. Often our thoughts are jumbled, when we dream. The order of events seems to be a little offset. For example, the earth did not tremble, until after Jesus spirit left Him. The poem appears to put the trembling ahead of Jesus death. However, there is a lot of the good, the true, and the beautiful in this poem. It celebrates the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross and it encourages us to look to Him on the cross, so we don’t forget how much He loves us. Also, it encourages us in our faith and knowing that Jesus will return someday, to take us into eternal glory with Him. It was good that the poem concluded with the Dreamer feeling enthusiastic about the cross, looking forward to eternal glory, and desiring to share the good news with others. This is the way that
Analysis: This setting shows in detail a location which is directly tied to the author. He remembers the tree in such detail because this was the place were the main conflict in his life took place.
This essay is anchored on the goal of looking closer and scrutinizing the said poem. It is divided into subheadings for the discussion of the analysis of each of the poem’s stanzas.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
The imagery of an aspen tree that Celan employs in this poem makes it clear to the reader that his mother was killed and that she was killed before she was able to grow old. This ties into the theme of loss of generation. Paul Celan’s mother did not ever get the chance to become an elder, and she was unable to see younger generations of Jewish people develop as many of them were also killed with her.
The phrasing of this poem can be analyzed on many levels. Holistically, the poem moves the father through three types of emotions. More specifically, the first lines of the poem depict the father s deep sadness toward the death of his son. The line Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy creates a mental picture in my mind (Line 1). I see the father standing over the coffin in his blackest of outfits with sunglasses shading his eyes from the sun because even the sun is too bright for his day of mourning. The most beautiful scarlet rose from his garden is gripped tightly in his right hand as tears cascade down his face and strike the earth with a splash that echoes like a scream in a cave, piercing the ears of those gathered there to mourn the death of his son.
Imagine growing up without a father. Imagine a little girl who can’t run to him for protection when things go wrong, no one to comfort her when a boy breaks her heart, or to be there for every monumental occasion in her life. Experiencing the death of a parent will leave a hole in the child’s heart that can never be filled. I lost my father at the young of five, and every moment since then has impacted me deeply. A child has to grasp the few and precious recollections that they have experienced with the parent, and never forget them, because that’s all they will ever have. Families will never be as whole, nor will they forget the anguish that has been inflicted upon them. Therefore, the sudden death of a parent has lasting effects on those