Raymond Carver Thank Me Analysis

The river and fishing made such a big impact on the Maclean family that it is the root of this book. The Macleans compared the river to life, went fishing to answer questions, and created a river that has a past full of memories. The river and fishing become metaphors for life by having a life of its own.

The organization of the poem is interesting. Each line is either an incomplete sentence or it finishes a sentence. The stanzas are each about three or four lines long which contain some arduous words. An example is the word “weir”. Lowell writes, “...the sea lapped/ the raw little match-stick/ mazes of a weir” (ll. 9-11). After research on it, the word means, a fence or enclosure set in a waterway for taking fish (Merriam Webster). This word is important to know because of the imagery it represents. The raw little match-sticks mean that it’s burnt out and so is their love for eachother. The weir is where the rock would be next to. They’d see the fish being trapped. This shows how the speaker the was fish. They were emotionally trapped in the town and the relationship.

Carver presents symbolism throughout his story to represent a darker side of the human heart when it is wounded. “Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said. I’m not hurting the baby, he said.” The baby represents the relationship of the man and woman. There is not an actual baby that is being hurt, but their relationship together. Once the “issue was decided” towards the end, it represents how the man and woman’s relationship was no more. In addition, snow is brought up in the beginning to start the mood of the relationship. “...The snow was melting into dirty water.” The snow represents the pure white relationship they had in the beginning. Once the snow melted into dirty water, that shows that their relationship is tainted, fading away, and can never be the same. This also leads into the light that is set towards the house. “The kitchen window gave no light.” The window showing both the darkness of the outside and the inside of the house, represents how darkness is taking over the relationship, and how there is no more light to shine on their love for each other. All three of these symbols connect back to how the man and woman have a codependent relationship.

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

In the first stanza the reader is introduced to the two characters in the poem. The reader is also made aware of the time of the year and day. The first stanza reveals a lot of information. It tells the reader who, when, and where. It also appeals to the sense of touch and sight when it describes the father's hands and also when he "puts his clothes on in the blueblack cold." One could almost feel the "cold" and see the "cracked hands."

There are clues throughout the poem that express the man’s past experiences, leading him to have a hostile tone. The speaker represents his past as “parched years” that he has lived through (7-8) and represents his daughter’s potential future as

In the poem the speaker tells us about how his father woke up early on Sundays and warmed the house so his family can wake up comfortably. We are also told that as he would dress up and head down stairs he feared ¨the chronic angers of that house¨, which can be some sort of quarrel between his father and his mother in the house. This can also lead the reader to believe that the father may have had been a hard dad to deal with. However the father would polish his son's shoes with his cracked hands that ached. This shows the love that the father had for his son and now that the son has grown he realizes what his father did for him. The sons morals and feelings have changed him because as he has grown to become a man he has learned the true meaning of love is being there for one's family and not expecting it to be more than what it is. Consequently this teaches him a lesson on how much his father loved him and how much he regrets not telling him thank

This is shown in the lines “Weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him” (p. 155). There is a very different feeling toward how each narrator sees their father. “The whiskey in your breath could make a small boy dizzy”(p. 193). This line in Roethke’s poem shows that he saw his father as an embarrassment to him. Having an alcoholic father who gets reckless at points when he drinks can be hard for a child to handle, but the narrator is able to accept the fact that his father drinks and moves on. Hayden sees his father in a different light. He sees his father as a workingman, who is too busy to have fun and talk to his family. He sees his father as only a tool for earning money for the family, or doing all of the hard work around the house. “Sundays too my father got up early, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No on ever thanked him” (p. 155). This shows he only saw his father as a workingman, didn’t notice the hard work his father did, and didn’t understand that he was doing this out of love for his family. Both the narrators showed different attitudes toward their fathers, because they both saw them in a different way.

With the use of imagery, the poet communicates to the reader the emotional bond between the father and his son. In the first stanza of the poem, the he illustrates a clear picture between the son and the father. "The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy But I hung on like death Such waltzing was not easy." the poet is saying that the father may not be the best father in the world with his breath smelling like whiskey, but despite that, the son hangs on like death. The simile the poet

The poem starts to narrow in on the relationship of apprentice and master with the lines, “This was his son, who sat, an apprentice, night after night, his glass of coals next to the old man’s glass of coals.” (ll 12-14). “This was his son,” is a powerful statement that gives not only a parental relationship but also of a father forging his son into a man. We all learn from our fathers and in the old days a lot of sons stayed home and

In the next stanza, the line "Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay", the poet is now using imagery with the waters, however it can also be a metaphorical representation of life due to

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.

In “The Passage”, Jerry’s father represents compassion and respect for Jerry by letting him use his most prized possession… his fishing rod. In the text it explains, “His father’s rod was a very valuable one. Each spring his father sent the rod away; it came back glistening new each year.” Jerry’s father is able to let his son go off with his fishing rod because he trusts him.

In lines seven and eight Whitman expresses some confusables as he has the man break off a twig and twines some moss around the twig to keep the leaves from getting loose. He puts a lot more words into your head then you think he is putting in. It looks like one sentence but in actuality it is the manís whole life summed up. Throughout the manís life he has picked a group of friends and in one way or another wrapped those people around his world and cared for them as much as it seems he cares for this tree that he picked out of no where. The man brings the twig home with him and places it in his room somewhere visible so that he can enjoy it. Then he says that it is not there to remind him of his friends because that is all that he thinks of lately. The reason that he did this is to remind himself of his life and how he chose these friends and continued to carry them along throughout his lifetime.

This is a good pre-setting for this poem. The reader is told right away that the two had a good relationship and love. At the same time, it gives the reader a feeling of something not very real but of some other world. Though grandparents love their grandchildren, they do not usually prefer their company to the society. Nevertheless, Lowell considered his grandfather his dad. Even his family members, when they said "your Father" (Line 9), meant his grandfather. The reason is that his real dad was a navy officer and was always away from home: "Daddy was still on sea-duty in the Pacific" (Line 5). In the beginning of the second paragraph, he says: "He was my father. I was his son" (Line 10). This shows that the love was mutual between the grandson to the grandfather and vice-versa. By mentioning both relationships, he puts extra focus on that fact. The seventh and the last paragraphs of the poem talk about the author's feelings: "paramour" (Line 58). In those paragraphs, he shows the reader that in some way, he was intimidated by his grandfather. Lowell describes his grandfather's crutch as "...more a weapon than a crutch" (Line 49). There are names and altitudes of all the mountains the grandfather had climbed. The author, of course, respects his grandfather but also feels insignificant compared to him. It also shows when he says that he liked to cuddle with the grandfather: "In the mornings I