I Ask My Mother To Sing

584 Words2 Pages

"I Ask My Mother to Sing" is not a long poem, only 14 lines long, but has a deep world understanding. This poem speaks of experiences the boy wishes to have based on stories he has heard about them. Lee gives us a vision that the poem is possibly about him being a child and asking his mother to sing as a form of comfort or a way to show love. This pattern continues as he speaks about his childhood until we can see the shift of what this poem is to embody in the second stanza. In the following three stanzas, Lee shows us memories that these songs gave him insight into and shows how singing helped his mother and sister deal with the grief of his father's death. This poem is about remembering his father and how his sister and mother like to do …show more content…

Lee can remember that his father was at one time a part of this musical sharing as a way to either show love and affection or to help calm Lee when he was a child. In the following stanzas, Lee is still a young child who wishes he knew of the places that were his father's favorite. This is powerful because it shows us that maybe these places are not places the family will visit because of the memories or how his father enjoyed the little things in life and being in the elements living life for how it is. In the next stanza, Lee shows us that even though he has never been able to experience these places for himself he loves to hear their memories of it, and how one should enjoy the simple things in life. Here Lee uses the examples of waterlilies and how they fill with water only to dump it into the water around them. This is a comparison to how this song sung by his mother and sister pour into memories that they have each developed of their father who is no longer with them. The last two lines of the poem, which are in its own stanza, are very powerful. Lee wanted us as readers to recognize its importance to because there are only two lines in this last stanza compared to the four lines in all the other stanzas. The last lines

Open Document