Untitled Poem

568 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Parents-children relationship

In the poem Untitled by Lisa Marie Rollins; it illustrates a person looking back and reflecting on their childhood. The reason for this being they are deciding whether or not to return home and reconcile unsettled differences with the parents; specifically the father. The poem itself illustrates themes of alienation of the child by the parents and a child trying to conform to the father’s idea of how to act, causing tensions. All of which eventually result in a strained relationship between parent and child. The themes presented in this poem are universal, in many cultures and countries many families have faced this problem and much of them resulted in similarly to the way it is presented in this poem. In which the parent, after many years, reaches out and the child contemplates whether or not return. The poem itself tries to make the reader identify and sympathies for the child and put blame on the parent for the strained relationship.
In the first line of the poem, it really sets up what the situation is and what the child’s initial feelings towards the father are like. “Come on ...

Show More
Related

  • A Literary Analysis Of 'A Story' By Li-Young Lee

    1200 Words  | 3 Pages

    The poem is written in the father’s point of view; this gives insight of the father’s character and

    Read More

  • Figurative Language In I Go Back To May 1937

    982 Words  | 2 Pages

    Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her

    Read More

  • Comparing At The San Francisco Airport And To A Daughter Leaving Home

    944 Words  | 2 Pages

    Though the poems “At the San Francisco Airport” and “To a Daughter Leaving Home” both deal with the issue of the speaker’s daughters leaving home to begin their adult lives and forge their own paths, the attitudes of the speakers could not be more contrasting. Between their divergent tone and language of the stanzas, the sound patterns, and drastically different use of imagery, each speaker’s willingness to let their daughter go is showcased.

    Read More

  • Sharon Olds' The Possessive

    1266 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...ther is losing her daughter to time and circumstance. The mother can no longer apply the word “my” when referring to the daughter for the daughter has become her own person. This realization is a frightening one to the mother who then quickly dives back into her surreal vision of the daughter now being a new enemy in a world already filled with evils. In this way it is easier for the mother to acknowledge the daughter as a threat rather than a loss. However, this is an issue that Olds has carefully layered beneath images of war, weapons, and haircuts.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Marigolds By Eugenia Collier

    819 Words  | 2 Pages

    It is the first time that Lizabeth hears a man cry. She could not believe herself because her father is “a strong man who could whisk a child upon his shoulders and go singing through the house.” As the centre of the family and a hero in her heart, Lizabeth’s dad is “sobbing like the tiniest child”She discovers that her parents are not as powerful or stable as she thought they were. The feeling of powerlessness and fear surges within her as she loses the perfect relying on her dad. She says, “the world had lost its boundary lines.” the “smoldering emotions” and “fear unleashed by my father’s tears” had “combined in one great impulse toward

    Read More

  • My Wicked, Wicked Ways Analysis

    541 Words  | 2 Pages

    Everything around this point, the narrator is now just reminiscing on the picture. It is becoming more obvious that the father did have an effect on the narrator now that he’s grown up. The very last two lines of the stanza, which is “She does not know/ I will turn out bad,” is the best evidence to really jump to the theme. There is already an immediate foreshadow from the narrator that everything that happened led up to the very moment he’s looking back at the picture. The end result may be a terrible ending, or it could even be an experience that further toughened the narrator, but we can tell for sure that the father did have an effect on whatever happens to the narrator at the end. This whole stanza is able to capture the whole theme that was stated.

    Read More

  • Essay About Love in My Papa's Waltz, Facts, Night Driving, Those Winter Sundays, Digging, and Daddy

    1774 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Loss of Innocence in Rite of Passage by Sharon Olds

    664 Words  | 2 Pages

    ... In fact, the mother even recollects how like an infant he still is as she reflects on his birth and "the day they guided him out of me", representing her denial at her son's pending adulthood. The son's rite of passage to manhood, his acceptance of the role of host and peacemaker and unifier, is a shocking one for both speaker and reader. To unite his comrades, he comments "We could easily kill a two-year-old" and the tone of the poem changes finally to one of heartlessness at the blunt brutality of the statement.

    Read More

  • Comparing My Papa’s Waltz and Listening to grownups quarrel

    1900 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...nal family. The second poem uses harsh details described in similes, metaphors, and personification. The message of a horribly bad childhood is clearly defined by the speaker in this poem. Finally, the recollection of events, as described by the two speakers, is distinguished by the psychological aspect of how these two children grew up. Because the first child grew up in a passive home where everything was hush-hush, the speaker described his childhood in that manner; trying to make it sound better than what it actually was. The young girl was very forward in describing her deprivation of a real family and did not beat around the bush with her words. It is my conclusion that the elements of tone, imagery, and the recollection of events are relevant to how the reader interprets the message conveyed in a poem which greatly depends on how each element is exposed.

    Read More

  • A Father's Unfailing Prescence

    1009 Words  | 3 Pages

    ... overall themes, and the use of flashbacks. Both of the boys in these two poems reminisce on a past experience that they remember with their fathers. With both poems possessing strong sentimental tones, readers are shown how much of an impact a father can have on a child’s life. Clearly the two main characters experience very different past relationships with their fathers, but in the end they both come to realize the importance of having a father figure in their lives and how their experiences have impacted their futures.

    Read More

  • The Poem Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

    816 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem "Girl" by author Jamaica Kincaid shows love and family togetherness by creating microcosmic images of the way mothers raise their children in order to survive. Upon closer examination, the reader sees that the text is a string of images in Westerner Caribbean family practices.

    Read More

  • Parent and Son Relationship in one of Nye, Naomi Shihab´s Poems

    638 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • My Papa's Waltz By Theodore Roethke

    770 Words  | 2 Pages

    The first main theme in the poem is that child is having fun with their father.

    Read More

  • My Papa's Waltz Literary Devices

    672 Words  | 2 Pages

    The readers could also prove that this is not the child’s first experience getting abused by the dad because in stanza three on lines nine and ten it says, “ The hand that held my wrist/ Was battered on one knuckle”, which could mean that that was from the last time the dad physically abused his child or that was from that same night. All the quotes that were stated above gives the readers and the speaker as well the vivid images of a young child that is getting physically abused by his dad and how the child can’t do anything about it because he has no power and he probably doesn’t even know that he’s getting abused. The quotes don’t just have the vivid images attached with it, but it also makes the readers feel a type of emotion towards the child, the dad, and for the poem itself. The readers might feel that certain emotion towards the poem itself because on the last stanza on lines fifteen and sixteen it states “ Then waltzed me off to bed/ Still clinging to your shirt”, which is a representation of how the child still loves his dad although he unconsciously physically abuse

    Read More

  • Imagery of Sacrifice in The School Children

    1138 Words  | 3 Pages

    The first stanza begins by stating,  The children go forward .  They are leaving their mothers behind, going to a place inaccessible to them.  At the moment the children are on their way to school, but as they progress, they will begin to move past the achievements of their parents.  Instead of becoming resentful, the mothers do all they can to ensure this progress continues.   All morning the mothers have labored .  They exert themselves strenuously for the benefit of their children.  They put forth much time and energy at manual labor. The mothers labored in giving birth to their children, and are laboring to raise them to adulthood.  They sacrifice themselves so that their children may have a future better than their own.

    Read More

More about Untitled Poem

Open Document