Analyzing Cat Stevens 'Poems Father And Son'

You said.” Shows that despite both father and son saying the same thing, it has different meaning coming from each. The father doesn’t want to cause any trouble, and feels somewhat embarrassed and ashamed of what he has become. Incapable and weak. The son doesn’t particularly want to physically help him, but he does want to care for his Father, and it is expected of him to do so. These lines of the poem are particularly emotional.

Scott Hightower’s poem “Father” could be very confusing to interpret. Throughout almost the entirety of the poem the speaker tries to define who his father is by comparing him to various things. As the poem begins the reader is provided with the information that the father “was” all of these things this things that he is being compared to. The constant use of the word “was” gets the reader to think ‘how come the speaker’s father is no longer comparable to these things?’ After the speaker reveals that his father is no longer around, he describes how his father impacted him. Details about the father as well as descriptions of the impacts the father has distraught on the speaker are all presented in metaphors. The repetitive pattern

The relationship between a father and their child is tremendously salient, and will influence the life of both the parent and the adolescent in many ways. Often, it can be difficult for someone to share their personal relationships that they had with their father, as it can be a very delicate subject. Despite this, renowned authors Brad Manning and Sandra Cisneros are two people who chose to write about their unique experiences and childhoods that they shared with their fathers. Both Brad and Sandra felt their childhood relationships with their fathers were unorthodox. This was explicitly outlined in Brad's freshman composition paper titled Arm Wrestling With My Father and Sandra's magazine article titled Only Daughter. Through varying rhetorical strategies, the authors purpose and audience is clearly portrayed in both selections.

The relationship between the two fathers and the two sons is a very important theme in this book. Because of their different backgrounds, Reb Saunders and David Malters approached raising a child from two totally different perspectives.

The first stanza, which contains the son’s childish speech, is short, only three lines. However, by the stanza which contains the son’s angry talkback, the stanza is double in length, having four lines. Each line represents a literal level of maturity and growth that the son has gained. As time moves on, he is able to gain more and more experience in life. As his experience accumulates over time, so does his hostility. His terse, childish begging for his father to simply read another story turns to an angry speech about how he no longer beleievs in his father as an authority figure. Despite this, the son’s psyche changes back, as all this maturation is played out in the father’s head, and when he returns, he is back to his childish self, bu this stanza is the longest in the poem. This suggests that when someone is able to mature enough, they are able to comprehend more of the world than they did before, and are able to act

“My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden are the poems that talk about the relation between son and father. Both speakers in the poem are grown men and reflect memories of the day they spend with their father when they were in childhood. About the poem “My Papa’s Waltz,” Baird states that “Theodore Roethke imaginatively re-creates a childhood encounter with his father, but also begins to attempt to understand the meaning of the relationship between them”( Baird). Another poem “Those Winter Sunday”, Peck states that “the poem provides its power, for the poem’s meaning depends upon the differences between what the boy knew then and what the man knows now” (Peck). Both themes, which is the poem written about fathers, are similar to each other; however, there are some significant difference in the structure of the poem, and the feeling toward fathers from sons.

As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love.

In “Jim”, a poem about a son caring for his mother, Jim nurtures his mother while she is ill. He brings her cocoa, food, and he missed his baseball game for her. In “Father William”, a poem about a son being worried about his father’s wellbeing, the adolescent son is concerned about his father’s healthiness.

The specific word choice the author uses to help mold the theme and tone of the poem is the use of “remember” and the use of “miss”. These words persuade the poem to be past events spent with his father, also establishing the passing of his father. This poem describes the love between a son and father, the son is reminiscing on what his father used to be and all the things his father taught him. The tone of the poem is sad and memorable, the relationship between a son and his dad through the reflection, “I miss my father”, with sentimental relations to the memory of the son’s father (Ortiz Line 2). The son continues to reflect upon his father as Ortiz is molding the strong emotion the son is going through. The majority of the time spent with his father was spent in the cornfields working on the corn plantation, “I remember the soft damp sand in my hand” (Ortiz Line 11). Both poems interpret the same tone but rather in different ways, for example, “My Papa’s Waltz” is expressed through an ambivalent tone while on the other hand, “My Father’s Song” is expressed through a reflectional tone.

The Tone of “Daddy” and “My Papa’s Waltz” is what differentiates the two child-father relationships in the poems from one another with “Daddy” having a tone of hate and fear

In the poem, I get a sense that there is no bond, like my father and I have which leads to confusion in the narrator's life. For instance, in line eight when he says, "I would slowly rise and dress,/ fearing the chronic angers of the house"(8-9), this gives me a strong sense of sadness, for him because I feel that he is greatly deprived of what every child should have a good role model as a father, and someone to look up to. “Speaking Indifferently to him, / who had driven out the cold”(10-11) is saying that they really did not know how to communicate with each other. I feel that the boy will regret not having and knowing what it is that makes you who you are, and may never get a chance to have and hold a special bond with his father and having a relationship with a person that can not be held with anyone else. This would bring an enormous amount of sadness to my life had I not had my Dad there to guide and protect me, when I could have used tremendous support and security.

Throughout the poem, the speaker uses specific details that show the conflict between the speaker’s son and his parents. In the first stanza, the speaker recalls exchanges of dialogue between the speaker and his or her son. For example, the speaker’s son exclaims, “I did the problem / and my teacher said I was right!” (Nye 3-4). The child validated his teacher’s opinion but ridiculed his parents’ opinion. This is further explained through more details in a later part of the same stanza. The mother explains how the son believed his parents were “idiots / without worksheets to back us up” (Nye 9-10). The speaker’s son had entrusted his teacher and thought of his teacher as highly intelligent, but believed that way because of foolish reasoning. In addition, the speaker lists examples of minor mistakes the parents made that caused the son to be embarrassed of them. Through distinct details, the speaker describes how the son’s “mother never remembers / what a megabyte means and his dad fainted on an airplane once / and smashed his head on the drinks cart” (Nye 10-12). By choosing to include these particular details, the poet outlines the foundation of the conflict between the son and his parents.

A child’s future is usually determined by how their parent’s raise them. Their characteristics reflect how life at home was like, if it had an impeccable effect or destroyed the child’s entire outlook on life. Usually, authors of any type of literature use their experiences in life to help inspire their writing and develop emotion to their works. Poetry is a type of literary work in which there is an intensity given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinct styles and rhythm. These distinct styles include different types of poems such as sonnets, villanelles, free verse, imagist poems, and many more. And these distinct styles are accentuated with the use of literary devices such as metaphors, similes, imagery, personification, rhyme, meter, and more. As a whole, a poem depicts emotions the author and reader’s can relate to. In the poem’s “Those Winter Sundays,” by Robert Hayden, and “My Papa’s Waltz,” by Theodore Roethke, we read about two different parent and child relationships. These two poems help portray the flaws and strength’s parents exhibit and how their children follow their actions and use it as a take away in their grown up lives.

Children are often too juvenile and ignorant to comprehend all that is done for them. The narrator of this poem is now a grown man and is looking back on his childhood. He says that he would “[speak] indifferently to [his father], who had driven out the cold, and polished my good shoes as well.” (Hayden) After working hard all week to provide for his family, the narrator's father would wake early Sunday mornings to tend to his family. As a grown man, he sees how much effort his father put in to keep him content. Sometimes it was difficult to see this because he was overcome by fear: “...slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic anger of that house.” (Hayden). Though the narrator was intimidated by his father, he still loved and appreciated him. This father- son relationship is unique because the bond grows and develops as a strong connection throughout time, with the help of maturity. The narrator of this poem recognises the unappreciated family sacrifices that are made which only improves the bond between a boy and his

Several things that happen in this book are a result of what the father and son do in their relationships for