Elegy For My Father Poem Analysis

The poem, “Elegy for My Father” tells the story about the circumstances of Meena Alexander’s father being dead. This is the sole inspiration for this poem, it uses countless poetic features and descriptive detail to make it clear and precise. Meena Alexander effectively uses a variety of poetic features, including imagery, sound, and length to make this piece stand out from other pieces similar to it.

Length is the first poetic device included, it is quite important overall. When printed on paper, it spans five pages long. Oddly enough, the poem is divided into five different parts, symbolized as roman numerals. Part I is relatively short, just 2 stanzas, focusing on his bones and how they were like when he died. “Father, when you died, your bones were brittle, fit

“One night returning late, I was a loudmouthed teenager, then I caught you at the dining table, fists clenched, bent forward in darkness.” Later, she questioned whether he loved her, he responded by saying, it is not something that is required to be spoken because she should already know he does love her. Part III is the middle and gets more graphic. It is her description of his life and where he has been in the past. There are three main places he has been to the past, and those are, England, Pakistan, and India. In Part III, the part where Pakistan comes in, she writes “When they cut India in two.” This is relating to the split from India to form Pakistan. The people living there demanded there was a “Muslim India” when this did not happen, they decided to go against the government, and Pakistan was made into a country. In the start of the next stanza, the poet wrote, he was in Karachi as a meteorologist. Karachi is a city in Pakistan or their newly formed country. This is the first hint of separation in the poem, which is then revisited near the end. Later in Part III, England comes