How do poets convey their central idea of bonds between family and acceptance of new beginnings in the poem “Praise song for my mother” by Grace Nichols and “Long Distance” by Tony Harrison The poem Praise song for my mother, written by Grace Nichols, a South American poet, explores a mother’s endless providing for her children, the basic requirement and importance of mothers and the love between a mother and her child. The persona is remembering and reflecting on their relationship throughout the poem. It also touches on topics of death and migration. The central theme in the poem Long distance by Tony Harrison, is about acceptance of death and dealing with grief. He talks briefly about society's expectations of bereavement, hardship of loss and moving on. Both Praise song for my mother and Long Distance have the themes of parental relationship, love and reflection. They both also have similarities in central themes of letting go, moving on and death of parents. The title long distance might be a euphemism for death. In Long Distance the persona’s father is still in disbelief about his wife's death and hasn’t been able to let go and accept. He kept his role in their relationship and continued to do routine activities as he ‘kept her slippers warming’ and ‘put hot water bottles by her bed’. The poet uses the warm objects as a representation of his ‘raw love’. The father has acknowledged the persona’s embarrassment for his as he ‘clear’s away her things’ and pretended to ‘look alone’ for everyone. This displays societies judgmental and …show more content…
The imagery for the first and second stanza is quite different and ambiguous contrastingly the visuals for the third and fourth stanza are more dominant representations of a mother and relatable. They also evoke images of a tropical island
The poems “Forgotten” and “Hanging Fire” demonstrate the possibilities of the similarities and differences that two different topics can represent. The two poems ‘Forgotten” and the poem “Hanging Fire” by Audre Lorde, share a similarity of a parent's absence. In “Forgotten” the text states, “...nobody else’s dad had gone away nine years ago./ Nobody else’s dad had been so loved by a four-year-old./ And so forgotten by one/ now/ thirteen.”
(1) The poem was written in the early 1900s, and is told through the view of the persona, most likely a small child who is experiencing the unannounced absence of a parent, who they loved very much, who did not say goodbye. This story is told through the setting of the persona’s house which is even when the persona says, “I rushed out of bed… I say waiting near the door of the room.” The individual dramatic situation of this poem is at the end of the piece when the persona realizes that the missing loved one would come back for their “gold-mounted ivory walking stick” instead of saying goodbye to the persona, as seen in the lines, “You might come back from the station to look for it/ But not because/You had not seen me before going away.” This poem describes the relationship of the central theme with the other poems by using many examples of symbols and smilies.
For instance, in Confetti Girl and Tortilla Sun, both lose a parent. Which gives them a sense of hopelessness. In Confetti Girl the dad and the daughters have trouble connecting. In the beginning of the passage, it states “Mom always had after-school projects waiting for me. ’Can you help decorate cookies?’she'd say.
'Mother. Any distance' depicts a conventional mother-son connection in which the mother is shown as being possessive and hesitant to let go of her kid. However, the speaker discusses her traditional attachment to her mother in Before you were mine. We observe Duffy refer to her mother as "Marilyn," implying that she was admired prior to becoming a mother. It gives the impression that she destroyed her life and eliminated the excitement.
Everyone has a father, whether their relationship with him is good or bad. Webster’s Dictionary defines the word father as follows: a man in relation to his natural child or children. “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden are two poems with themes set around a father. These poems deal with accounts of the poets’ fathers as they reminisce about certain scenes from their childhood. “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays” show similarities and differences in structure, literary elements, and central idea.
The conflicting interests of the mother and the father result in a situation where one must make a sacrifice in order to preserve the connection in the family. The flat depressed tone of the poem reflects the mother’s unhappiness and frustration about having to constantly
Frances Scott Key’s, “Star Spangled Banner” and Langston Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again” are poems from two American poets, but describe two very different American viewpoints. Using the poems’ structures, and poetic techniques, and overall messages, both Keys and Hughes demonstrate their unique perspectives about America that are both historically significant to helping readers better understand our country’s history. Our National Anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner” was actually a poem originally titled “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” by Francis Scott Key who was actually a lawyer who wrote poetry as a hobby. Francis Scott Key wrote, “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” on September 14, 1814 after witnessing the British fleet’s bombardment
The poem begins with the speaker looking at a photograph of herself on a beach where the “sun cuts the rippling Gulf in flashes with each tidal rush” (Trethewey l. 5-7). The beach is an area where two separate elements meet, earth and water, which can represent the separation of the different races that is described during the time that her grandmother was alive and it can also represent the two races that are able to live in harmony in the present day. The clothing that the two women wear not only represent how people dressed during the different time periods, but in both the photographs of the speaker and her grandmother, they are seen standing in a superman-like pose with their hands on “flowered hips” (Trethewey l. 3,16). The flowers on the “bright bikini” (Trethewey l. 4) are used to represent the death of segregation, similar to how one would put flowers on a loved one’s grave, and on the “cotton meal sack dress” (Trethewey l. 17) it is used to symbolize love and peace in a troubled society.
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 poem 's content points not to just a single memory, but an entire sexual affair from the speaker’s youth—chronicling the erotic encounters that would eventually lead to his lover’s “footfall light” and both of them “silent as a stone”. Thus the memory is also clouded by the nature of erotic
Sometimes in life you must break free to see the world. Like the poem “The Bird, the Star, and the Flower” by Milena Salazar, the song “Breaking Free” by Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, is about breaking away freely like a bird from the ordinary onto finding a new destination. “We 're soarin ', flying. There 's not a star in heaven that we can 't reach” (Breaking Free) “I am as free as a bird; I hope to touch the stars one day; I see myself soaring over the sky” (The Bird, the Star, and the Flower) The main theme is to soar, explore, and fly onto a new journey like a bird or a star.
Essay for Mother “Oh, I Long to See My Mother in the Doorway” (Paley 82). The short story Mother written by the American writer Grace Paley starts with these lyrics. In this story, the author depicts a daughter recollected her mother and missed her very much after her death. After reading this story, I found an interesting fact about the relationship between parents and their children. In my opinion, the children often misunderstand their parents while their parents keep worrying about them.
The unusual image of “-humming in her eyes-” suggests a mother’s lullaby. The use of the dashes breaks the poem’s rhythm, bringing out the mother’s emotion. It is tragic that she can’t bring herself to sing but wants him to rest peacefully. The poet compares this mother to other mothers in the refugee camp to amplify her love for her child and therefore the suffering she has to go through while watching him die.
This creates a dissimilarity between some of the poems and how death is presented. Long Distance is about the pain of remembering someone who has died naturally. The poem describes the narrator’s father’s failure to come to terms with the death of his wife. Although she has been dead for two years he still renews her bus pass and warms her slippers. His son cannot understand this behaviour, but the final stanza reveals that now that both his parents are dead, and despite how he felt earlier, he still keeps their phone numbers in his “new black leather phone book.”