Traits of Male Fathers The poems I have chosen have certain views on male fathers, views that most Americans would not tolerate. Using many different literary devices in the poems I have read show the perspective that not all male fathers can take care of a family in a way that most modern people in society would watch happen in today’s world. Devices covered in class such as simile, metaphor, end stop, imagery, and the list goes on of many literary devices, are used in the poems to show how the reader comprehends the way the poems are meant to be viewed. In the poems, I chose, by Lucille Clifton, Molly Peacock, and Theodore Roethke ,“Forgiving My Father,” “Say You Love Me,” and “My Papa Waltz” they have common views, themes, and use many …show more content…
After reading “Forgiving My Father” and “Say You Love Me” you can understand that the relationship between the father and children are very negative when first reading them. The way that Lucille Clifton and Molly Peacock use literary devices to show the negative relationship help the reader understand deeper into the relationship and help grasp a better understanding. In “Forgiving My Father” Clifton states “to the paying of the bills like a ghost, asking for more time but today is payday, payday old man” when reading this you can grasp and understand quickly that Clifton is fed up with the excuses that the old man gives every week to her mother when it is payday which immediately shows that there is a negative vibe between the father and the daughter even though the father …show more content…
All three of the poems you can easily pick out the ways the children or the children and mothers can portray negative effects of bad traits of men. People in today’s world classify males in many different categories such as “abusers”, “kind”, “loving”, “caring”, “alcoholic” and the list can go on. In “Forgiving My Father” you can use examples such as “old liar. I wish you were rich so I could take it all and give the lady what she was due” this statement indicates to the readers that the man was a harsh father that never provided for his family, he simply would gamble and waste all the family’s money. This shows that he has no consideration for his wife or his kids. Even though that the father and mother are dead the daughter believes that it is unfair that she was left with such a mess. She wants her mother to rest peacefully as the daughter could see how much her mother stressed about money. In the second poem analyzed “Say You Love Me” there is only one way that this theme can be comprehended. The way the drunk father abuses the children is a bad gender trait that some males have. Peacock writes towards the end of the poem “empty except for confusion until the size of my fear ballooned as I saw his eyes, blurred, taurean –– my sister screamed –unknown, unknown to me a voice rose and levelled off “I love
The poem titled “It was a dream” written by poet Lucille Clifton contains a theme pertaining to the personified defeat of the speaker. “in which my greater self rose up before me accusing me of my life with her extra finger whirling in a gyre of rage at what my days had come to.” (Lines 1-6) What the speaker was intending for reader to infer was a sense a disapproval from a higher power. The speaker endured a situation that altered their perception of life, maybe they stopped singing out loud in fear of their own voice, or maybe they began to distance themselves from every positive thing that occurred in their lifetime for the sole reason that everything good comes to an end. The speaker is changing drastically, but the alterations didn’t
The mother and daughter have a very distant relationship because her mother is ill and not capable to be there, the mother wishes she could be but is physically unable. “I only remember my mother walking one time. She walked me to kindergarten." (Fein). The daughter’s point of view of her mother changes by having a child herself. In the short story the son has a mother that is willing to be helpful and there for him, but he does not take the time to care and listen to his mother, and the mother begins to get fed up with how Alfred behaves. "Be quiet don't speak to me, you've disgraced me again and again."(Callaghan). Another difference is the maturity level the son is a teenager that left school and is a trouble maker. The daughter is an adult who is reflecting back on her childhood by the feeling of being cheated in life, but sees in the end her mother was the one who was truly being cheated. “I may never understand why some of us are cheated in life. I only know, from this perspective, that I am not the one who was.” (Fein). The differences in the essay and short story show how the children do not realize how much their mothers care and love
The relationship between a father and a son can be expressed as perhaps the most critical relationship that a man endures in his lifetime. This is the relationship that influences a man and all other relationships that he constructs throughout his being. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead explores the difficulty in making this connection across generations. Four men named John Ames are investigated in this story: three generations in one family and a namesake from a closely connected family. Most of these father-son relationships are distraught, filled with tension, misunderstanding, anger, and occasionally hostility. There often seems an impassable gulf between the men and, as seen throughout the pages of Gilead, it can be so intense that it creates
At the beginning of the poem, the audience is able to witness an event of a young boy asking his father for story. While the father was deemed a “sad” man, it is later shown that his sadness can be contributed to his fear of his son leaving him. The structure then correlated to the point of going into the future. The future was able to depict what would happen to the loving duo. The father's dreams would become a reality and the son's love and admiration would cease to exist as he is seen screaming at his father. Wanting nothing to do with him. The young, pure child can be seen trying to back lash at his father for acting like a “god” that he can “never disappoint.” The point of this structure was not really a means of clarification from the beginning point of view, but more as an intro to the end. The real relationship can be seen in line 20, where it is mentioned that the relationship between the father and son is “an emotional rather than logical equation.” The love between this father and son, and all its complexity has no real solution. But rather a means of love; the feelings a parent has for wanting to protect their child and the child itself wanting to be set free from their parents grasp. The structure alone is quite complex. Seeing the present time frame of the father and son
As mentioned, the parents’ pains, negative emotions and hatred are presented in the first part. Even from the first few lines from the poem: “Ulcerated tooth keeps me...
“Those Winter Sundays” tells of Robert Hayden’s father and the cold mornings his father endures to keep his family warm in the winters. In “Digging” Heaney is sitting in the window watching his father do hard manual labor, which has taken a toll on his body. In “My Father as a Guitar” Espada goes to the doctors office with his father and is sitting in the office with his dad when the doctor tells him he has to take pain killers and to stop working because his body was growing old and weak. The authors of the poems all look at their fathers the same; they look at them with much respect and gratitude. All three poems tell of the hard work the dads have to do to keep their family fed and clothed. “The landlord, here a symbol of all the mainstream social institutions that hold authority over the working class” (Constantakis.) Espada’s father is growing old and his health is deteriorating quickly but his ability to stop working is not in his own hands, “I can’t the landlord won’t let me” (774.) “He is separated from the homeland, and his life in the United States is far from welcoming” (Constantakis.) Espada’s Grandmother dies in Puerto Rico and the family learns this by a lett...
I have elected to analyze seven poems spoken by a child to its parent. Despite a wide variety of sentiments, all share one theme: the deep and complicated love between child and parent.
There is a special bond between parents and children, but there is always uncertainty, whether it’s with the parents having to let go or the children, now adults, reminiscing on the times they had with their parents. The poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home” by Linda Pastan is a very emotional poem about what you can assume: a daughter leaving home. Then the poem “Alzheimer 's" by Kelly Cherry is about the poet’s father, a former professional musician who develops the disease. These are only two examples that show the ambivalence between the parents and the children.
The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and
In the poem ¨My Father¨ by Scott Hightower, the author describes a rather unstable relationship with his now deceased father. Scott describes his father as a mix of both amazing and atrocious traits. The father is described as someone who constantly contradicts himself through his actions. He is never in between but either loving and heroic or cold and passive. The relationship between Scott and his father is shown to be always changing depending on the father’s mood towards him. He sees his father as the reason he now does certain things he finds bad. But at the end of it all, he owes a great deal to his father. Scott expresses that despite his flaws, his father helped shape the man he is today. Hightower uses certain diction, style, and imagery to
While reading the poem the reader can imply that the father provides for his wife and son, but deals with the stress of having to work hard in a bad way. He may do what it takes to make sure his family is stable, but while doing so he is getting drunk and beating his son. For example, in lines 1 and 2, “The whisky on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy” symbolizes how much the father was drinking. He was drinking so much, the scent was too much to take. Lines 7 and 8, “My mother’s countenance, Could not unfrown itself.” This helps the reader understand the mother’s perspective on things. She is unhappy seeing what is going on which is why she is frowning. Although she never says anything it can be implied that because of the fact that the mother never speaks up just shows how scared she could be of her drunk husband. Lines 9 and 10, “The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle”, with this line the reader is able to see using imagery that the father is a hard worker because as said above his knuckle was battered. The reader can also take this in a different direction by saying that his hand was battered from beating his child as well. Lastly, lines 13 and 14, “You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt” As well as the quote above this quote shows that the father was beating his child with his dirty hand from all the work the father has
Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her
While most of us think back to memories of our childhood and our relationships with our parents, we all have what he would call defining moments in our views of motherhood or fatherhood. It is clearly evident that both Theodore Roethke and Robert Hayden have much to say about the roles of fathers in their two poems as well. While the relationships with their fathers differ somewhat, both men are thinking back to a defining moment in their childhood and remembering it with a poem. "My Papa's Waltz" and "Those Winter Sundays" both give the reader a snapshot view of one defining moment in their childhood, and these moments speak about the way these children view their fathers. Told now years later, they understand even more about these moments.
There is no greater bond then a boy and his father, the significant importance of having a father through your young life can help mold you to who you want to become without having emotional distraught or the fear of being neglected. This poem shows the importance in between the lines of how much love is deeply rooted between these two. In a boys life he must look up to his father as a mentor and his best friend, the father teaches the son as much as he can throughout his experience in life and build a strong relationship along the way. As the boy grows up after learning everything his father has taught him, he can provide help for his father at his old-age if problems were to come up in each others
Both poems express how shocking the reality of mother can be from the parent’s actual feelings and mindset to the decisions and responsibilities that comes with being a