The Only Son By Katharine Tynan-Hinkson

644 Words2 Pages

“The Only Son” is a poem that combines both of Katharine Tynan-Hinkson’s main themes throughout her works, religion and motherhood. The name itself is an allusion to Jesus, the “only begotten Son” (The Holy Bible: King James Version, John 3:16) of God. Tynan-Hinkson was paralleling the mother’s strong feelings for her son with God’s strong feelings for Jesus. In Katharine Tynan-Hinkson's poem "The Only Son", she uses capitalization, punctuation and syntax to accentuate her extensive Catholic background and strong maternal themes.
Katharine Tynan-Hinkson was an Irish-born Catholic who grew up in the mountains of Dublin. Her family was very close and she adored her mother and her mother's role in the home ("Katharine Tynan"b, n.d.). Because of …show more content…

Some sentences are a stanza long, while others are less than a line in length. Tynan-Hinkson’s use of a full range of lengths indicate that mothers are sometimes able to think long enough to make a full, coherent thought, but other times, their thought come across as choppy and incomplete. This allows the reader the ability to feel when the mother is tense and worrisome and when she relaxes and believes that everything will work out fine. Tynan-Hinkson ties her religious beliefs into the syntax because the shorter sentences typically occur when God is actively doing something. She seems to say that when God is going to act, it will be succinct and worry free. Immediately following an action of God’s, the mother relaxes and the sentences get longer and more developed. Tynan-Hinkson was trying to convey the message that God has the power to calm even the most worrying personalities in their worst-case scenarios.
Katharine Tynan-Hinkson had very strong beliefs and opinions. She was able to transfer those beliefs to her writing with rhetorical devices and get her readers to understand not only the poem, but also where she was coming from on a personal level. Tynan-Hinkson’s message is very apparent in most of her poems and she wanted to show the world how powerful women and religion can

Open Document