An Analysis of a Personal Parental Relationship to Poetic Parental Relationships The relationship between a son or daughter and their parents is a significant component of both the child and parent’s life. Today we see that a majority of these relationships are positive, however this does not suggest there are not any negative relationships with kids and parents. My personal experience with both my parents has been a great one which I am thankful for, others are not so lucky. There are numerous poems which depict both the exceptional and unfavorable connections between a child and parent, two poems which stood out to me happen to be Mother To Son by Langston Hughes and My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke. They each have very contrasting messages of parents, while Roethke’s writing presents what could be described as an abusive relationship, Hughes’s poem reveals a loving mother with a description of what she has been through. An abundant amount of similarities and differences can be found between my personal experience with my parents and both poems by Hughes and Roethke. As mentioned before, my parents and I have a remarkable relationship. Both my mom and dad treat everyone in my family with respect and push my sisters and I to try our hardest. I feel that Langston Hughes’ poem Mother To Son partially shows this as well. Mother To Son is a poem saying that life is not easy for this mother, unexpected trouble come out of nowhere, but this mother still keeps trying, she
Examples may be found in poetry, such as the poem “Crystal Night” by Lyn Lifshin. This poem is about the tragic pogrom called Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. Within the poem is the phrase, “a whole family / in shards and this / is just the beginning.” Although this seems to be a very dismal expression, there is an underlying representation of endurance. During this point in the Holocaust, family was one of the few positive prospects anyone had left to cling to.
While the mothers in neither Dobson’s nor Harwood’s poems are entirely content with the situations, they have found themselves in, they have ultimately chosen to make the necessary sacrifices because a mother’s love for her child is
Families “Crumbling” Down: Allusions to a Classic Fairytale Families are fragile and without the proper stability, they can easily fall apart. Two flawed families are portrayed in “The Farmer’s Children” and “Hansel and Gretel”. Hansel and Gretel have a wicked stepmother, and a father who obeys her selfish orders. Similarly, Emerson and Cato have a careless stepmother, and a clueless father. In both tales, this leads to families falling apart.
Did you know, an estimated 3.5% (2.5 million) of children under the age of 18 in the united states have experienced the death of a parent? The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander, is a novel written in verse. It follows a Middle-schooler named Josh, as he goes through problems such as his father’s health problems and his brother’s girlfriend. In the book, Josh realizes that family is one of the most important things in life and that when things go wrong, keep going. The author of The Crossover, Kwame Alexander uses poetic structures, like enjambment and dialogue, to show the themes that family is one of the most important things and to keep going (respectively).
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
Oftentimes parents struggle with feeling like they are not doing enough for their kids, overshadowing all the things they do provide for them. This insecurity is shown in the poem, “A Story”, which follows the thought process of a father who is struggling to feel as though he is doing a good job at raising his son. Written by Li-Young Lee, the poem explores the father's feeling of being an inadequate parent, being incredibly pessimistic over the things that he is not able to provide. Overall, in his poem, Li-Young Lee uses literary devices such as rhetorical questions, imagery, and metaphors to convey how the father feels towards the relationship he has with his son: even though he yearns for a loving connection with his son, the father is
The relationship between father and son is one that is both sacred, yet complex as each side of the relationship faces hardships. This relationship between a son and his role model, a father and his child, is one, has its ups, but one must also know it has downs. In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” Roethke’s use of ambiguity through diction allows room for the audience to interpret the text in a positive or a negative way, representing the relationship between a father and a son, which on the outside can be interpreted in an either positive or a negative way. Roethke’s use of diction creates an element of confusion for the audience of his poem.
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” are similar because they focus on the same subject. However, they differ in how the speakers’ feel about their relationship with their parent(s). In Plath’s “Daddy”, the speaker is a daughter thinking about how her father treated her. She tells about how she felt trapped by him and how she tried to ‘kill’ him, line 6 of the poem, but he dies before she has a chance. The ending of Plath’s poem implies that she got married to a man like her father.
Sometimes the relationship between two generations is very complicated. “My Father Is a Simple Man” by Luis Omar Salinas and “A secret Lost in the Water” by Roch Carrier explore these universal themes, the greatness of love together with the unavoidability of conflicts between two generations through the depiction of the speakers’ personal experience with their fathers. In “My Father Is a Simple Man”, the speaker expresses his love for his father deeply by highly complimenting that his father has sincere “kindness and patience” (Salinas 23) to take the speaker on “lifelong journey” (Salinas 9-10). In the end of the poem, the speaker firmly believes that he should “have learned” (Salinas 36) something from his father which states a manifestly
Although “Papa” may not be the most sensitive man around, but he is still to be a hero in his son's eyes. Referring from the title of “My Papa’s Waltz”, “Papa” does not seem like he’s being violent intentionally but not accidentally hurting his son. This poem also, symbolizes dance in the relationship of a father and
In the poem, My Papa’s Waltz, the speaker, Theodore Roethke, writes about a father and son waltzing. Further investigation suggests there is more going on than a waltz. The poet utilizes figure of speech and a negative toned vocabulary throughout the poem. Thus, alleviating the reader of the harsh truth of an abusive relationship whilst never dehumanizing the father.
In the final analysis, most readers of this poem tend to deduce a dark theme of physical violence due to its tone, word choice and imagery. Nonetherless, Roethke balances positive and negative tones of the poem to give it a rich and ambiguous quality. The exceeding tendency to paint the picture of child abuse deprives it, of this quality. “My Papa’s Waltz,” illustrates a special and powerful moment, shared between a father and a son through a waltz.
I am not a father so I cannot express the love for a child. “My son the Man” is a short 16-line poem. In the poem, Sharon compares her son to Houdini and explains how he has grown up. Sharon expresses deeply about her son growing up and leaving her and it is hard for her to watch her little boy become a man. I can kind of relate to this because my mom still looks at me as if I am a little boy.
In the poem, My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke, is known to be a controversial story about a father and son relationship. The speaker in this poem has contradicting emotions about his father and the tone told throughout the story can be ribald yet many readers find it all just a happy memory. The main subject of My Papa’s Waltz is a young son who loved his son but still feared him. In this poem the speaker will illustrate the family views using a certain word choice and the tone he uses. The specific diction will highlight the real truth between the father and son relationship and what it means.
Amir’s relationship with his father is a complex one. On a hand, Amir admires his father and is proud to have as his father. On another hand, he hates his father because he feels like he is incapable of amounting to (meeting up with/ rising to/ fulfilling) his father’s expectations. Amir said: “Most days, I worship Baba with an intensity approaching the religious. Butright then, I wished I could open my veins and drain his cursed blood from my body.”