For My Daughter Analysis

576 Words2 Pages

In Weldon Kees’ poem, “For My Daughter,” the narrator speaks of the bleak, dismal, and pessimistic future they envision for their daughter. Kees conveys this poem’s message of the future through the usage of rhyme, cacophony, alliteration and synecdoche. Kees uses end rhymes throughout the poem to compare and place emphasis on certain words. While all of the lines rhyme with at least one other, there is a specific example of end rhyme in lines seven and nine: “Parched years that I have seen / Death in certain war, the slim legs green.” These two lines emphasize the rhyming, ending words in particular, ‘seen’ and ‘green.’ The word ‘seen’ brings connotations of a wise narrator with many experiences of the world, particularly ones they have personally witnessed. As a result, the narrator is legitimizing their pessimism for the future, allowing the reader to understand why they have this somber image about their daughter’s future. ‘Green’ comes with connotations of freshness to the world, like the narrator’s daughter. Often, when someone is completely new to something and overly optimistic about it, without any considerations otherwise, they could be considered ‘green.’ Therefore, the rhyme The narrator reveals that “I have no daughter. I desire none” (14). This sudden twist contradicts the previous context created earlier in the poem, shifting the audience from a single daughter to her entire would-be generation. Therefore, the narrator’s imagined daughter is a synecdoche, as the one daughter stands in for her whole age group. This synecdoche allows for the reader to start with a smaller scale of one person’s future, but expand the message to an entire generation’s future with this final line. As a result, the poem’s tone becomes even more somber. The usage of rhyme, cacophony, alliteration and synecdoche help deliver the poem’s message of a sad, dismal future, as imagined by a member of the previous

Open Document