Today, there are many different interpretations of the word love. Love could be as simple as a four-letter word, or as infinitude of caring and emotions. There is a difference between being in love with someone and loving someone; and a difference in the people you share that with. Love shared between two best friends or a husband and wife is the type of love you want to last for a lifetime, however, there is never a guarantee that it always will. But the love between a parent and child, or between any family members is the type of love that is infinite. In the poem, “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”, written by Galway Kinnell, Kinnell creates a story about the love between two parents and their child. The author writes about this recognizable …show more content…
But as the poem goes on, you come to realize that there is a hidden secondary situation taking place. The more obvious parts of the poem is the two parents having sexual intercourse, and the child feeling all alone in their big house. Once the child comes into the parent’s room, we actually get to see them transform into the loving parents that they are. The author illustrates the exact moment in when the child barges in on his parents love making session. “But let there be that heavy breathing / … and make for it on the run- as now, we lie together, / after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies” (Kinnell (917). For some readers, it may be easy to see and comprehend this surface situation. The child is the product of their being, and this poem is about the love the whole family shares. The author uses euphemisms to display an image of affection and compassion versus a nasty and indecent love. Kinnell’s main focus is on the love and devotion between the parents. He conveys his focus through such words like “after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies / familiar touch of the long-married” (Kinnell 917). The act of their gentle and quiet love is what wakes their …show more content…
Through love we can see that an everlasting relationship can be built. While reading this poem, the reader starts to feel a growing connection to the mother, father, and child line by line. By the end of it, one may feel as though they are so closely connected, that they can see themselves as the characters in the story. This poem speaks the truth about a relationship that is universal for any human
"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," said Robert Heinlein (YourTango). Affirmative, love can be really powerful in which the value of love from others is the greatest ecstasy in life. Love is existence everywhere around us; we are born to love and love to die with the love of family, lovers, and friends. In Galway Kinnell’s poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” Kinnell writes about the love between parents and child, and it was published in 1980. Kinnell was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He is married, and has a son and two daughters on his own, so that the poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” is relating to his own married life as he mentions about his son, Fergus, in the poem. Galway Kinnell is an excellent poet for his poems are always “connect to the experiences of daily life” (Poetry Foundation). The main theme of this poem is the speaker of the poem portrays a serious and resentful attitude towards the speaker’s child interrupting their act of passion, but eventually leads into a sentiment of commitment and innocence when the speaker realized that the love of a child is significantly more important than sex. In “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps,” Galway Kinnell uses tone, diction and irony to express the humorous and admiring outlook of sex, and also the effects of children on sex intercourse.
Stanza two shows us how the baby is well looked after, yet is lacking the affection that small children need. The child experiences a ‘vague passing spasm of loss.’ The mother blocks out her child’s cries. There is a lack of contact and warmth between the pair.
At the beginning of the poem, the audience is able to witness an event of a young boy asking his father for story. While the father was deemed a “sad” man, it is later shown that his sadness can be contributed to his fear of his son leaving him. The structure then correlated to the point of going into the future. The future was able to depict what would happen to the loving duo. The father's dreams would become a reality and the son's love and admiration would cease to exist as he is seen screaming at his father. Wanting nothing to do with him. The young, pure child can be seen trying to back lash at his father for acting like a “god” that he can “never disappoint.” The point of this structure was not really a means of clarification from the beginning point of view, but more as an intro to the end. The real relationship can be seen in line 20, where it is mentioned that the relationship between the father and son is “an emotional rather than logical equation.” The love between this father and son, and all its complexity has no real solution. But rather a means of love; the feelings a parent has for wanting to protect their child and the child itself wanting to be set free from their parents grasp. The structure alone is quite complex. Seeing the present time frame of the father and son
The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and
Love can come at unexpected times, through current situations or through memories, and they will always have that permanent effect on us, just like a tattoo. Because of strange stanza breaks, unusual imagery, and elongated punctuation, the reader can determine the deeper meaning of the poem. The two-lined stanzas signify short-lived loves, and the stanza breaks depict the break-ups and passing of loved ones. The imagery of skulls and the metaphor that love is a tattoo shows that love never deteriorates. And lastly, the poem is only two sentences long, so this shows the fluidity and never ending power of love. Too often people take advantage of love, but what they aren’t aware of is that their experiences with each and every person they have loved tattoo their mind to make them into who they are, much like a tattoo permanently inks one’s skin to commemorate a
If I were asked who the most precious people in my life are, I would undoubtedly answer: my family. They were the people whom I could lean on to matter what happens. Nonetheless, after overhearing my mother demanded a divorce, I could not love her as much as how I loved her once because she had crushed my belief on how perfect life was when I had a family. I felt as if she did not love me anymore. Poets like Philip Levine and Robert Hayden understand this feeling and depict it in their poems “What Work Is” and “Those Winter Sundays.” These poems convey how it feels like to not feel love from the family that should have loved us more than anything in the world. Yet, they also convey the reconciliation that these family members finally reach because the speakers can eventually see love, the fundamental component of every family in the world, which is always presence, indeed. Just like I finally comprehended the reason behind my mother’s decision was to protect me from living in poverty after my father lost his job.
There is no greater bond then a boy and his father, the significant importance of having a father through your young life can help mold you to who you want to become without having emotional distraught or the fear of being neglected. This poem shows the importance in between the lines of how much love is deeply rooted between these two. In a boys life he must look up to his father as a mentor and his best friend, the father teaches the son as much as he can throughout his experience in life and build a strong relationship along the way. As the boy grows up after learning everything his father has taught him, he can provide help for his father at his old-age if problems were to come up in each others
When the poem is read aloud, the explicit rhyme and rhythm of the lines becomes extremely obvious. In fact, the bouncy rhythm is so uplifting, it occasionally makes the audiences feel like it is too predictable and straight-forward. An example would be “bright with chrysolite”, the word “chrysolite” feels like it is forcefully implemented for the sake of the rhyme. This is somewhat similar to a children’s tale. Most children’s tale as we know it, conveys messages straightforwardly and are easily understood by children, it also has an amiable tone and a merry mood that engages the children 's attention. Similarly, the rhyme and rhythm of this poem is very obvious and explicit, creating a delightful, casual mood that appeals to a young audience. Even though the legend dealt with deep insights about parenting that are intricate and puzzling, the father delivered it in such a gratifying, simple manner that made even the most dark and dreadful matters: like the description of precarious beasts and vicious monsters to sound like a blissful adventure of friendly animals. The sole purpose of this contradiction between the tone and message is to make this seemingly strong and serious topic more tolerable and captivating to the son of the father. Unsensible, impulsive youth is very similar to restless children, a long insipid lecture about deep insights is very difficult for them to buy into. In the same time, a harsh, threatening warning will only make them obey unwillingly, and creating a doubtful relationship will make them uncomfortable to communicate or appeal to their parents. Clearly, the percipient father recognized the ineffectiveness of these unsuitable parenting methods. Instead, he conveyed the message in a uncomplicated, friendly way that made his son to accept his teachings more comfortably. A
I have elected to analyze seven poems spoken by a child to its parent. Despite a wide variety of sentiments, all share one theme: the deep and complicated love between child and parent.
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
Love is a concept that has puzzled humanity for centuries. This attachment of one human being to another, not seen as intensely in other organisms, is something people just cannot wrap their heads around easily. So, in an effort to understand, people write their thoughts down. Stories of love, theories of love, memories of love; they all help us come closer to better knowing this emotional bond. One writer in particular, Sei Shōnagon, explains two types of lovers in her essay "A Lover’s Departure": the good and the bad.
The author uses imagery, contrasting diction, tones, and symbols in the poem to show two very different sides of the parent-child relationship. The poem’s theme is that even though parents and teenagers may have their disagreements, there is still an underlying love that binds the family together and helps them bridge their gap that is between them.
Relationships between two people can have a strong bond and through poetry can have an everlasting life. The relationship can be between a mother and a child, a man and a woman, or of one person reaching out to their love. No matter what kind of relationship there is, the bond between the two people is shown through literary devices to enhance the romantic impression upon the reader. Through Dudley Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham,” Ben Jonson’s “To Celia,” and William Shakespeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” relationships are viewed as a powerful bond, an everlasting love, and even a romantic hymn.
Great feelings like partnership, remembrance, and parenthood can accompany love, but feelings like heartbreak, torment, and grief can also accompany love. “A strong affection for another” is not an all-encompassing definition for love. Love is happiness and fairytales but is also pain and sadness. No dictionary could truly define human emotion, as words are to simple to convey the overlapping complexity of the feelings we experience. Love is what builds us up and what breaks us down, but most importantly, it is what makes us