In “Late Poem to My Father” by Sharon Olds, the speaker, who is likely a stand-in for Olds herself, takes us through the relationship her father had with her grandfather. She then relates this to her relationship with her father. Starting with the title, the word “Late” could suggest that the father has died or it could suggest how she didn’t fully value her father’s love until recently. The poem is written in free verse with no particular pattern or rhyme scheme. There are no stanza breaks, but there is a lot of enjambment throughout the poem. Olds’s syntax and placement of enjambment compliments the poem the whole way through. The first word of the poem is “Suddenly”, as if she hadn’t thought of her father in a long time. The poem can be …show more content…
interpreted in different ways: one being the relationship the speaker's father has with the grandfather and the other being the speaker's relationship with her father.The moral statement is about how the speaker tries to love her father before he became her father (when he was innocent). We know, however, that this is impossible because she cannot go back in time. As a result, the poem suggest that the speaker learned to love a fantasy of her father which helps her love him then and now and also makes her love stronger. In this paper I will argue that this allowed her love for her father to be stronger. In the first line Olds says, “Suddenly I thought of you/ as a child in that house, unlit rooms.” Here, she uses the word “house” instead of “home” which combined with the description of the “unlit” rooms it makes the makes the father’s house come off scary and unwelcoming.
Then she goes on to say how the grandfather is always sitting by the fireplace, silently. The relationship between father and son seems stale, bitter, and distant. This offers a feeling of neglect Olds implies that, the speaker's father was neglected constantly by the grandfather. The poem starts off strong and reads as if the speaker is sad thinking about her father and the relationship he had with the grandfather. Olds states, “You moved through the heavy air/in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,/helpless,smart, there were things the man/did near you, and he was your father.” Olds suggest, that her father had potential to live a different life than he actually lived. Also, the poem presents uncertainty as to what actions the father did “near” his son. Further on in the poem, it becomes clear that she is talking about alcohol. She goes on to say, “the mold by which you were made. Down in the/cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,/picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and/rotted, and past the cellar door”. The grandfather molded him to become the same way that he was, an old guy who doesn’t seem to care for much and is an alcoholic. Olds use of enjambment when she says “Down in the/” causes the …show more content…
reader to question and and ask yourself, down where, and then read “the cellar.” Olds use of syntax with the word “rotted” in that particular sentence alluded to the idiom, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” The speaker thinks that her father has gone through life and accepted the fact that he was one day going to be like his father. This allows the speaker to understand the father’s childhood and also lets her love the fiction of her father as if it is truly him. This all reinforces the point that the love the speaker has for her father is stronger with this fantasy of him. She introduces the idea how the grandfather didn’t love his son and what that caused him to become. Olds says, “and something was/not given to you, or something was/taken from you that you were born with”. Every child deserves to be loved by at least one person in their lives. The father only had the grandfather to give him love and sadly he choose not to. The speaker hasn’t yet clarified what the grandfather did in front of the father when you read it the first time. She states, “even at 30 and 40 you set the/oily medicine to your lips/every night, the poison to help you/drop down unconscious.” Here Olds clarifies that the grandfather was drinking in front of the boy when he was young and innocent. Even when the father is older he still is reliant on drinking his liquor because he uses it to knock himself out every night. Also, Olds uses of enjambment throughout the poem is unreal, again “to help you/drop down…” this causes the reader to raise a question of what it is that the liquor can help him with. Olds then says, “I always thought the/point was what you did to us/as a grown man, but then I remembered that/ child being formed in front of that fire”. When the speaker was young, she always believed that the reason her father drank so much was because of her until she began thinking back to his childhood and the relationship he had with the grandfather. He was molded by the grandfather and became the same person as his own father. As you read further, she says, “the/tiny bones inside his sole/twisted in greenstick fractures, the small/tendons that hold the heart in place/snapped.” This suggests that the father was broken as a boy. The grandfather was able to corrupt the boy when he was still innocent. The habits the grandfather had got passed down to the father and it was embedded in him at such a young age. The speaker wants to send love back to the boy because he wasn’t shown any by the grandfather. It also makes the love she has for him today stronger because she understands his habits and where they came from. At the end of the poem, “And what they did to you/you did not do to me.” By stating this, the speaker is thanking her father because he didn’t treat her the way his grandfather treated him.The poem takes us through a story from a father-son relationship, to a father-daughter relationship that is filled with a love that has gone unnoticed until recently and is now stronger than ever.
Olds states, “When I love you now,/I like to think I am giving my love/directly to that boy in the fiery room,/as if it could reach him in time.” This statement brings into light how much the speaker’s father was unloved and emotionally abused by the grandfather. Ultimately, the speaker hopes that sending her love through the this poem will somehow reach the innocent boy who was sitting in the fiery room to make up for the love that was not given by the grandfather. The words “in time” offer two meanings, one being the literal meaning, she hopes that the love she is sending will reach him in time, and the other being the moral meaning: which is how the speaker tries to love her father before he became her
father. The speaker in the poem takes the reader through a short film that is fiction. In fiction it is easier to make someone fall in love with a character than it is real life. If Olds wrote a biography about her father she may not have loved him for who he was. In poetry the poet is allowed to do whatever they want and make up a complete fantasy. In doing so, Olds found a way to connect with her father and send love to him as a young, innocent, boy, and hope it reaches him in time. In Sir Philip Sidney’s “An apology for poetry” he responds to Plato in saying how important fiction and art is for humans. Sindey lived about five hundred years ago and he is still right today. Without fiction life would be boring and plain, fantasies give life a little more light.
In this poem, “On the Subway”, written by Sharon Olds brings two worlds into proximity. We will identify the contrast that develops both portraits in the poem and discuss the insights the narrator comes to because of the experience. The author refers to several literary techniques as tone, poetic devices, imagery, and organization. The poem talks about a historical view based on black and white skin. It positions the two worlds the point of view of a black skinned and a white skinned. The boy is described as having a casual cold look for a mugger and alert under the hooded lids. On the other hand, based on his appearance the white skinned person felt threatened by the black boy. She was frightened that he could take her coat, brief case, and
Kim Addonizio’s “First Poem for You” portrays a speaker who contemplates the state of their romantic relationship though reflections of their partner’s tattoos. Addressing their partner, the speaker ambivalence towards the merits of the relationship, the speaker unhappily remains with their partner. Through the usage of contrasting visual and kinesthetic imagery, the speaker revels the reasons of their inability to embrace the relationship and showcases the extent of their paralysis. Exploring this theme, the poem discusses how inner conflicts can be powerful paralyzers.
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
When writing poetry, there are many descriptive methods an author may employ to communicate an idea or concept to their audience. One of the more effective methods that authors often use is linking devices, such as metaphors and similes. Throughout “The Elder Sister,” Olds uses linking devices effectively in many ways. An effective image Olds uses is that of “the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,” (5) providing a link to the mother’s expectations for her children. She also uses images of water and fluidity to demonstrate the natural progression of a child into womanhood. Another image is that of the speaker’s elder sister as a metaphorical shield, the one who protected her from the mental strain inflicted by their mother.
The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and
The simultaneous distance and closeness within the relationship between the father and the child are inevitable even in the most tragic and happy events in life. The poems “Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad” by Jan Heller Levi and “In the Well” by Andrew Hudgins are both about the closeness and distance in a father and child relationship. Both poems are written in first person, or in the child’s point of view to emphasize the thoughts of distance and the experience of childhood thinking to the readers. The poems both use similar literary devices such as motifs and imagery to illustrate and accentuate the ideas of each event that the narrator, a child, experiences. Similarities between both poems are the use of water as a motif of the barrier to being farther away from the father, and the use of different synonyms for the word, father, to indicate the amount of distance at each point in the poems. On the other hand, each poem takes its route of distance in completely opposite directions. “Not Bad, Dad, Not Bad” by Jan Heller Levi and “In the Well” by Andrew Hudgins accommodate the similarities for the use of the same motif, water, and the use of several synonyms for “dad” throughout the poems, but also differentiate because they proceed in opposite directions from the beginning to the end.
The poem takes the reader back in time for a moment to a small kitchen and a young boy at bedtime. The dishes have been cleared and placed on the counter or in the sink. The family is seated around the table. The father having a glass of whiskey to relax after a very hard day working in the family owned twenty-five-acre greenhouse complex. He is asked to take his small son to bed. The poem begins, “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy” (Roethke line 1) enlists the imagery of what the young boy was smelling as he most likely climbed aboard his fathers’ large work boots for the evening waltz to bed. It is obvious this is an evening ritual, one that is cherished. The boy is aware of his fathers’ waltzing abilities and he concedes that he is up for the challenge. The irony of the statement, “I hung on like death” (Roethke line 3) is a private one, yet deeply describes his yearning for one more waltz with his father who passed away when Theodore was only fifteen years ...
The diction helps exemplify the imagery even better, the reader can sense how the speaker’s home felt like as well as the father’s hard work. The speaker awakens to the "splintering, breaking" of the coldness. This allows the audience to feel a sense of how cold it was in the speaker’s house. One can infer that the poem is set in a cold city or town during the winter, which gives the reader an idea of how cold it might be. “Slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,” represents how the father battles to keep the family away from harm of the cold and darkness, implying that the speaker grew up in poverty. His father’s “cracked hands” shows how hard his father worked to keep his family safe.
Patricia Young’s poem Boys is a representation of implied heteronormacy in society. Young uses tropes and schemes such as allusion, metaphors and irony to convey the ways in which heterosexuality is pushed onto children from a young age. Poetry such as Boys is a common and effective medium to draw attention to the way society produces heteronormativity through gendered discourses that are typically used to understand sex. Boys does an excellent job at drawing its readers to the conclusion that it is an ironic poem trying to emphasize the over-excessive ways in which we express heterosexuality in daily life.
Fear is an amazing emotion, in that it has both psychological as well as physiological effects on the human body. In instances of extreme fear, the mind is able to function in a way that is detached and connected to the event simultaneously. In “Feared Drowned,” Sharon Olds presents, in six brief stanzas, this type of instance. Her sparse use of language, rich with metaphors, similes and dark imagery, belies the horror experienced by the speaker. She closes the poem with a philosophical statement about life and the after-effects that these moments of horror can have on our lives and relationships.
While reading the poem the reader can imply that the father provides for his wife and son, but deals with the stress of having to work hard in a bad way. He may do what it takes to make sure his family is stable, but while doing so he is getting drunk and beating his son. For example, in lines 1 and 2, “The whisky on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy” symbolizes how much the father was drinking. He was drinking so much, the scent was too much to take. Lines 7 and 8, “My mother’s countenance, Could not unfrown itself.” This helps the reader understand the mother’s perspective on things. She is unhappy seeing what is going on which is why she is frowning. Although she never says anything it can be implied that because of the fact that the mother never speaks up just shows how scared she could be of her drunk husband. Lines 9 and 10, “The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle”, with this line the reader is able to see using imagery that the father is a hard worker because as said above his knuckle was battered. The reader can also take this in a different direction by saying that his hand was battered from beating his child as well. Lastly, lines 13 and 14, “You beat time on my head With a palm caked hard by dirt” As well as the quote above this quote shows that the father was beating his child with his dirty hand from all the work the father has
Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” displays a past relationship between a child and his father. Hayden makes use of past tense phrases such as “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking” (6) to show the readers that the child is remembering certain events that took place in the past. Although the child’s father did not openly express his love towards him when he was growing up, the child now feels a great amount of guilt for never thanking his father for all the things he actually did for him and his family. This poem proves that love can come in more than one form, and it is not always a completely obvious act.
There are a couple of similes the author uses in the poem to stress the helplessness she felt in childhood. In the lines, “The tears/ running down like mud” (11,12), the reader may notice the words sliding down the page in lines 12-14 like mud and tears that flowed in childhood days. The speaker compares a...
Katherine Philip’s “Epitaph,” written in a couplet form, is memorializing her firstborn son who only lived less than six weeks after he was born. In this poem Katherine Philips is desperately trying to renew her faith in life, but she is struggling to do so because of the death of her son. She is attempting to justify the loss of her child, but is also questioning whether there is even a reason for hope. “What on earth deserves our trust?” If you cant trust anything then you have to rely on faith. Even things that we know as certain, like the sun rising in the morning, Katherine seems to not trust, “And so the Sun if it arise…” The “if” implies such a strong sense of doubt that it clearly emphasizes Philip’s struggling attempt to renew her faith in life.