Parent Child Relationships in Before You Were Mine, Kid, On My First Sonne, and The Song Of The Old Mother

2228 Words5 Pages

Parent Child Relationships in Before You Were Mine, Kid, On My First Sonne, and The Song Of The Old Mother

All of the poems are about emotions and parent child relationships. In

Before You Were Mine, the girl idolises and loves her mother. Whereas

the man in Kid feels angry towards his father, and resents him too. In

the poem On My First Sonne, the father loves his son a lot and feels

grief for his dead son. Which is different from The Song Of The Old

Mother as in this the mother is angry and annoyed at her children. I

shall look for similarities and differences in the parent child

relationships that are in all four of the poems.

The use of structure in Kid shows the past and present in a

chronological way, it’s like a monologue. I know this because the

lines one to five are about past events from when he was a child,

“when you gave me the order to grow up.” The middle lines show the

present “you baby, now I’m the real boy wonder.” This is effective

because this shows the father son relationship between them from the

past, when Kid had suffered to the present where he has learnt from

the mistakes in his life.

This structure is similar to Before You Were Mine as it is also

structured in a chronological way. The mother’s life has been explored

this way in each verse. Firstly, the mother’s childhood has been

mentioned, “Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs.” Then in the

second verse, the mother is an older dating teenager who falls in love

“in the ballroom…I knew you would dance like that.” Finally, the last

verse describes her as a mother “…You’d teach me the steps on the way

home from Mass.” Each verse is like snap shots which are clearly shown

wherever the mother was in her life she is in eac...

... middle of paper ...

... he will never get too attached to

anything he loves ever again. I think this is a sad poem because the

parent loved his son so much he was his pride, his joy. His son meant

everything to him and because of his son’s death; he’s never going to

love anything like this again. This makes me think that you should

make the most of what you’ve got in life and hold onto it because you

don’t know what’s round the corner. This is similar to Before You Were

Mine because in both parent child relationships feelings are shown.

The feelings which are shown are love and care for one another. Before

You Were Mine is about a girl who is looking at a photo, she is

reflecting back all the positive memories of her mother. She idolises

and loves her mother a lot. This poem is full of such joyful memories

which make you think, you should always love your family no matter

what.

Open Document