He is saying the offices are standing for a duty or obligation. He also uses repetition in this line when he says “What did I know" twice showing the speaker's feeling of regret for not understanding how hard his father worked every single morning. Also in lines 13 and 14 explains that the speakers childhood was unhappy. He didn’t know much about love so he was not able to appreciate it whenever his father showed him love. In the poem the speaker stated, “And polished my good shoes as well” (Line 12).
In addition, the speaker’s remorse is seen in the third stanza. It states, “Speaking indifferently to him,/ Who had driven out the cold/ and polished my good shoes as well./ What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” After explaining that his father never took a break from being the provider of warmth, fought the bitter cold while he laid in bed and waited for the fire, and labored on his day of rest despite the pain he felt from regularly engaging in hard labor, the son states that he spoke indifferently to his father. The speaker makes no mistake with this order, as it highlights his selfishness, showing that he now recognizes this
I believe the fact that the death of his wife was so sudden that he is having a hard time dealing with it. Overall depends on what you go through and how well you deal with it. One way is like the way you feel about life. The husbands feelings are all over the place this is not good for the man’s health. The man is sad because he lost his beloved wife.
He may say to himself, “no more killing, no more life should be taken away, at least from me,” but it is unavoidable. He lost his beloved one. He uses what he adores to kill another one that he loves. This feeling, this emotion, is just too strong to bare that he lost his hope to live, lost his direction to live on. The fact that he died from cancer is a metaphor that signifies he is tired of this life and ready to take off.
The passage is written as if women are the bad people and will always want more if given the opportunity. The man who spoke is geared to presway the listeners to think the way he does. He wants all other men to feel that women don’t deserve the rights and if you give them, they will become superior over the
In the beginning, the composer states: "Let a woman in your life, and you 're up against a wall" (Loewe 11). The metaphor shows that that if a man lets a woman in his life it will cause him countless problems. He will not be able to control her, and instead she will take control over him. The metaphor also shows how a woman has no boundaries and cannot think of anything than herself. This is opposite to the man as he describes himself as patient through the metaphor “A patient man am I, down to my fingertips” (27).
In addition, he describes his son as something he took and now he must give it back. He wonders if he lost the feeling of being a father .He asks him why people get upset about death, they should envy it. He says that his son is lucky to escape the world 's misery and the pains of the body. Even if he could escape those while being alive, he could not escape the aging process. In addition, he wishes his son to rest in peace.
The man had the opportunity to make a difference with his life, and instead he simply went through the motions and blended in with the rest of the world. The poem also describes that he did not divert from the norm in his views. The speaker states, “Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views” (9). Instead of thinking outside of the
It never arose to me that there will be a day that I would have to comfort my dad for her loss. I remember my father telling me, that all he ever wants from his life is to be with his mother to take care of her. Everyone in our family thought that my father took good care of her when she was alive and even after she left. However, deep down I knew that he was never satisfied with the extent of care and love that he was able to give her, but I never let these words out. It is moderately true in most family’s cases because the children get married and they have their own family responsibilities and the responsibilities towards the old parents starts to fade in the process of making a new
He asked the employees why they had let such an incident pass and their prompt reply was, “Who is she to you?” When the onlookers were asked why they had not said anything, they replied that they were of the notion the man was the woman’s husband. The brutal reality that unmasked was that humanity is very close to extinction. If they are not related to you, you can safely let them die. If he is your husband, father, brother, uncle or any other relative, he can beat you blue and black. All your pleas will go unheard.