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After Making Love We Hear Footsteps Analysis

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"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own," said Robert Heinlein (YourTango). Affirmative, love can be really powerful in which the value of love from others is the greatest ecstasy in life. Love is existence everywhere around us; we are born to love and love to die with the love of family, lovers, and friends. In Galway Kinnell’s poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” Kinnell writes about the love between parents and child, and it was published in 1980. Kinnell was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He is married, and has a son and two daughters on his own, so that the poem “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” is relating to his own married life as he mentions about his son, Fergus, in …show more content…

The speaker is frustrated and expresses this frustration through humorous diction, but when the child finally appears at their doors, the speaker’s language becomes more kind. The speaker smiles and appreciates that the child “hugs and snuggles himself to sleep” when he is between his parents (line17). The diction helps accompany the idea that the speaker has a change of heart. The comparison of word choices displays that the speaker has contradicting thoughts towards the situation.
The irony of the poem is within in the language and creates contradicting ideas that the speaker can make any noise in the house, but only sexual noises wake the child. There are not any big words to try and confuse the reader, but with this the important words are hidden in this plan language. The senses are defiantly appealed to in this poem, “touch” is ironically an important word. When the spouses are done making love they are touching one another as “he appears” ready to snuggle. Touch comes up several times in the poem and always is used in a sensual and vivid way. “touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body”, “Touching along the length of our bodies”, “Familiar touch of the

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