The poem “My Father, In Heaven, Is Reading Aloud,” written by Li-Young Lee in 1990, has a serious and consistent religious undertone as it chronologically describes the life of the poet growing older alongside his father until his eventual death. Countless possible understandings, expectations, and theories about this poem exist, particularly due to the poem’s tendency to leave the reader with vague qualities. Due to evidence both throughout the poem and the author’s life, the speaker of this poem is most likely Lee himself. Throughout this poem, there is a substantial amount of evidence which suggests that the speaker, or Lee, is remembering the times when his father was alive, the influence that he had on his life, and the changing thoughts …show more content…
The first stanza, in particular, opens with the speaker sometime after his father has passed away. He was envisioning his father doing certain activities in Heaven that remind him of his childhood, like “reading out loud / to himself Psalms or news” or how he spent time “listening for the sound of children in the yard” so he would know when he was needed (Lee lines 1-4). Aside from the constant addition of religious references, such as his father reading Psalms, or the last lines of the first stanza, “As it is in heaven, so it was on earth,” (Lee line 8), an assumption that makes the speakers religious life particularly evident and nearly indisputable is the fact that the author’s father was a Presbyterian minister. However, no matter how obvious the speaker’s religious life is, there is no clear answer as to if the younger version of the speaker does believe in what he has been taught. Despite this lack of evidence, the speaker does reveal in the second stanza that he is afraid of disappointing his father, with the line “[b]ecause my father walked the earth with a grave, / determined rhythm, / my shoulders ached from his gaze” (Lee lines 9-11). This piece of evidence can lead to the assumption that he is fearful of letting him down in every aspect of his life, including his religious
Growing up in an ideal world, a child should never have any kind of burden placed upon their shoulders; but that ideal is just that; ideal. In the memoir First They Killed My Father, the hardening of a child’s innocence is shown as it follows the early years of Loung. The memoir captures moments and feelings that were once constantly questioned and seen as gruesome, to those same instances now just accepted and seen as the norm. The eventual numbed thoughts of a young child show how truly awful some things and some people can be; as just a child the author states that “there were times when such scenes [as bodies being buried] terrified [her], but [she] has seen the ritual performed so many times that [she] feel[s] nothing” (85). These hardened
White, he writes about a place his father took him to when he was just a boy and the memories that they created there. White recollects these memories and adds to them when he brings his son to the exact same place he visited as a child. Growing up it was one of White’s favorite places to visit. White recalls the times he and his dad would wake up early in the mornings to get to the day. With that feeling, White envisions himself as his father and his son as himself.
This shifts the responsibility for his beliefs from himself and onto divine
In stanza three, Son is seeking to make a change; however his commitment and best efforts seem to be lost inside of him. His transition from his bad habits to a better beginning is strengthening the connection between him and God. In stanza four his desire for women and whiskey get the better of him and his uncontrollable anger starts to burst out. This conflict between evil and good make these stanzas stand out and show he wants to draw the devil out of him but just can’t. ‘But the women and whiskey, well, they would not let me
so he is afraid of giving himself away when he is answering the questions from the
He also raises a problem that one may be forced by God to
The words used in this line, especially “there we sat down and wept” truly reflect the tone of sadness in this Psalm. Reading this makes me feel the sorrow being conveyed throughout the story. While both hymns are very different in terms of tones, both use strong words that express the them very well.
In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Porter uses multiple allusions to three of Emily Dickinson’s poems to show the change from total, unwavering Christian faith, to the absence of Jesus as Granny dies. In the story, Porter describes Granny stepping into a cart, whose driver Granny knew by his hands, and whose face she did not have to see, because she “knew without seeing” (Porter). This scene is almost identical to the scene in Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for death-.” This allusion aids in conveying the Christian idea of death as Granny has come to accept it: a tranquil figure, Death, calmly and peacefully carries one’s soul to an eternity where centuries feel like days.
Their love, just like the father’s fear and silence,
“Because I Could Not Stop For Death” by Emily Dickinson is a poem about death being personified in an odd and imaginative way. The poet has a personal encounter with Death, who is male and drives a horse-carriage. They go on a mysterious journey through time and from life to death to an afterlife. The poem begins with its first line being the title, but Emily Dickinson’s poems were written without a title and only numbered when published, after she died in 1886.
The speaker as a child would see his father as a harsh man but as an adult, when he looked back he saw that his father had a love for his family. His father's love could be considered as a hidden love. However in the poem “Piano” the speaker's life seemed great until he looked back at his past to see his mother playing the piano and
The attitudes to grief over the loss of a loved one are presented in two thoroughly different ways in the two poems of ‘Funeral Blues’ and ‘Remember’. Some differences include the tone towards death as ‘Funeral Blues’ was written with a more mocking, sarcastic tone towards death and grieving the loss of a loved one, (even though it was later interpreted as a genuine expression of grief after the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” in 1994), whereas ‘Remember’ has a more sincere and heartfelt tone towards death. In addition, ‘Funeral Blues’ is entirely negative towards death not only forbidding themselves from moving on but also forbidding the world from moving on after the tragic passing of the loved one, whilst ‘Remember’ gives the griever
The Transformation that Changes our Lives The poet Emily Dickinson in her poem, I Felt a Funeral in my Brain that is the first line of the poem, not a special title that Dickinson chose. It tells about the story of the experience of the speaker in the poem who is transforming from place to another. Many readers would take this poem as an explanation of what happens after death, what the dead body feels in the funeral.
The poem is narrated by the voice of the dead. The text is related in a very personal manner, the poem being
The words "my father" are etched into the readers' minds with the use of repetition. Repetition plays the role of psychology as it repeats certain words or phrases to engrave questions and ideas into the readers' minds. Similarly, another instance of repetition can be found in the final lines of the poem, from line 42 - 44.