As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love. The first difference between “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” is the relationship they share with their parent, while they both share a parent child relationship, each relationship is
The Tone of “Daddy” and “My Papa’s Waltz” is what differentiates the two child-father relationships in the poems from one another with “Daddy” having a tone of hate and fear
In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.
Furthermore, Sharon Olds and Molly Peacock convey the Tone of the poems to describe the characters emotions. In “Parents' Day” Olds stated “To see that woman arriving and to know
Everyone has a father. No matter if the father is present in a child’s life or not, he still exists and takes that role. A father has a major impact on his child whether he knows it or not, and that impact and example shapes the child’s perspective on life, and on love. The authors, Robert Hayden and Lucille Clifton, share the impact of their fathers through poetry, each with their own take on how their fathers treated them. The poems “Forgiving My Father” and “Those Winter Sundays” have significant differences in the speaker’s childhood experiences, the tone of the works, and the imagery presented, which all relate to the different themes of each poem.
Compare the ways in which poets reflect on parental relationships – Daddy by Sylvia Plath and Mother Who Gave Me Life by Gwen Harwood
Children are often expected to forgive their parents for any mistake their parents may have made, however forgiving and forgetting are not the same thing. How parents nurture their children has a significant role in those children’s lives. Children may have forgiven, but forgetting is a not always as easy or even possible. Theodore Roethke’s poem “My papa’s waltz” and Lucille Clifton’s “forgiving my father” recalls the speakers’ respective childhoods and treatment by their father. The poem shows that even through time it is not as always easy to forgive and memories make people incapable of letting go. Lucille Clifton’s poem “forgiving my father,” a daughter recollects the animosity she has for her father. She is here to collect for all his wrongdoings not just as a father but a horrible husband. Theodore Roethke’s poem “My papa’s waltz” leaves the reader to interpret his feelings through “a waltz” - dance. It is unclear whether there was love between Roethke and his father. However, the reader understands there was fear. Clifton’s “Forgiving my Father” uses a more direct approach to let the reader knows her thoughts towards her father; both poems show that forgiveness is required to move forward. However, one never forgets.
Parent Child Relationships in Before You Were Mine, Kid, On My First Sonne, and The Song Of The Old Mother
Authors tend to write on subjects that they know the most about, or subjects that affect them on a personal level. Authors and poets use various aspects of life for the basis of their works, such as life experiences, romances, and family roles. Poems like “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden and “Forgiving My Father” by Lucille Clifton feature one of the most important roles in a family: a father. The two poems differ vastly in many regards, but many similarities surface among them and a common theme resides between them. Through the similarities they hold, the poems represent a common theme of regret for one’s lack of action.
“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
Firstly, In "My Father's Song," the tone is nostalgia, it's a perfect demonstration of emotion the speaker feels about his father. "My Papa's Waltz," poem's tone is playful and light created by the pleasant rhythm iambic, which makes the poem short and sweet. The tone is promoted through word choice, Both writers use similar word choice to strengthen the theme of admiration. In the poem, "My Papa's Waltz," gives us a both and negative feeling, he uses words such as "Still clinging to your shirt" this shows that he hangs onto his father's shirt, not wanting to let go after his father waltzing him off to bed. His descriptions of the dance give us a fun, playful feeling. Despite the fact the waltz is tough, he still loves his dad. In "My Father's song," the speaker remembers his father’s voice. The speaker describes his experience as “His voice, the slight catch, the depth from his this thin crest, the tremble of emotion in something he has just said to his son, his song” (Ortiz 3-7). The speaker remembers every detail about his father. The child misses his father and cared profoundly about him, especially more tonight “Wanting to say things, I miss my father tonight” (1-2)
The relationship between a parent and a child can be a complicated, difficult to understand concept. Factors such as complications that occur in the lives of either of the figures, separation from the other, and the protection the parent is willing to give to the child all contribute to the idea of this messy relationship. However, all these factors seem to fall away in comparison to the immeasurable amount of love the parent and child carry for each other, and the strong relationships that last a whole lifetime. In many poems, authors such as Theodore Roethke, Li-Young Lee, and Rita Dove use literary devices such as imagery, tone, symbolism, metaphor, and simile to show the unbreakable bond between parents and children.
The first stanza uses concrete imagery to depict a working man “with cracked hands that ached” (3), the speaker’s father, starting a fire. The second stanza starts with warm connotations of the fire rescuing his home from the cold; however, the stanza ends with the speaker expressing his fear, a figurative coldness, of “the chronic angers of that house” (9). The third stanza completes the epiphany that the final line of the first stanza, “No one ever thanked him” (5) hints at. It is at this point that the speaker understands that his father expresses his love differently. While the speaker was looking for an overt expression of his father’s love, his father, a working man, can only show his love with the means by which he is familiar. To the father, love is an expression of actions, actions that the speaker is oblivious to during his childhood. By the setting being early Sunday morning, it shows that the father’s actions, as a symbol of his love, are omnipresent and supersede his own desire for rest. The final lines of every stanza reflect the speaker’s growing realization that he was indeed loved by his father, that he initially didn’t recognize his father’s actions as an expression of this love, and that his obliviousness to this unfamiliar expression of love helped contribute to what
The poems “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden are two poems that both describe a father’s relationship with their son. My Papa’s Waltz suggests that a boy’s farther that is an alcoholic and regardless of his alcohol abuse his son clings onto him as they dance together. In “Those Winter Sundays” it is implied that a boy is reflecting on how hard his farther worked, but he had not been appreciative and had taken his father’s hard work for granted. Though the relationships are very different, both poets use writing techniques and literary devices such as imagery, form, and sound to effectively describe the relationships between a farther and son. “Those Winter Sundays” uses figurative language
The poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, these two poems express uniqueness and similarities. In the poem “My Papa’s Waltz” a young child describes his time spent with his father. In the poem “My Father’s Song” a grown man remembers the previous memories of time spent with his father, when he was a child. These two poems coincide through tone, word choice, and figurative language to show the relationship between a father and son.
When I read “Once More to the Lake” by E. B. White, I was jealous of the father and son’s close relationship as it reminded me of my grandmother and mother’s close relationship. When I was younger I always loved hearing stories about my mother’s childhood because i didn’t feel close to her due to her job. She would often tell me stories about her mother, my Lola, who had died a month before I was born. They were best friends, and my mother would tell her everything. At first they were nice to hear, but as I grew up the memory of the stories became a burden, a constant reminder of my inability to share my feelings, thoughts, opinions, and experiences with my mother. It made me feel guilty that I could not give her the relationship she had with