Reflection In Kamala Das's My Mother At Sixty Six

The theme in this poem shows this mother in many ways, is mourning the loss of children aborted for whatever the reasoning. This is known by the statement made in line 22 “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”. She also mourns the loss of things that will not reach their potential, such as the sound of a babies’ cry, and voice or even the loss of tears. Another conflict that emerges in the poem is the desire of the mother to do what is best for her children and the finality of her decisions.

As Wendy Martin says “the poem leaves the reader with painful impression of a woman in her mid-fifties, who having lost her domestic comforts is left to struggle with despair. Although her loss is mitigated by the promise of the greater rewards of heaven, the experience is deeply tragic.” (75)

The atmospheric conditions may represent the hardships that the couple had to go through in their relationship, and may also be used contrast the unpredictability of the outside world compared to the steady relationship that the couple have. ‘A Youth Mowing’ is also a poem about relationships, this time it is between a younger couple. The river ‘Isar’ is a symbol of freedom, it represents the way that the men’s lives are. However, this sense of liberty is broken by the ‘swish of the scythe-strokes’ as the girl takes ‘four sharp breaths.’ Sibilance is used to show that there is a sinister undertone to the freedom that the boy has which will be broken by the news that his girlfriend is bringing. She feels guilty for ‘what’s in store,’ as now the boy will have to be committed to spending the rest of his life with her, and paying the price for the fun that they had.

Losing a parent is presumably an unthinkable concept for those lucky to have them alive, but sometimes the title of “parent” dies long before a body is placed in the ground. Toi Derricotte author of “Beginning Dialogues” unfortunately had to experience both the death of her mother’s title of “parent”, as well as her literal death. Derricotte’s parents had divorced when she was eighteen, and her father did not seem to play much of a role in her life; she was left to be raised by her mentally abusive mother. Her mother also had a tough road to walk growing up, having to face and deal with brutal issues like racism and bulling. Persevering through those tough times may be the underlining reason behind Derricotte’s mother’s negativity and abuse towards her daughter. Perhaps she just grew a thick skin at a very young age and had never learned how to feel, accept, or administer love. Derricotte’s had said: “She told me all my life she loved me, as if she completely forgot the hundred slights, humiliations, threats, and insinuations. Of course she loved me;

The children are unnoticed by others and the mother is the only one that is protecting them. This poem shows the hard times that the mother must face because her children have died. However the mother is coping with them while still protecting her children after they have died, This is the mother's way of coping because she is not yet ready to let go of her children and still wants to care for them. This poem shows this through nature by portraying the mother as a bird who is protecting her nest. Also the poem uses nature by describing the harsh times as a winter wind that has caused harm to the mother and her children.

The mood of the speaker changes to guilt as the speaker and her mother realize they would "crawl" with "shame" and leave an "emptiness" in their father's heart and yard. The author negatively connotes "crawl," "shame," and "emptiness" to invoke a more serious and shameful tone. The beginning of the conveyed a more matter-of-fact and pragmatic tone, but changes into a more sentimental one by the end to convey family is more important than the money. The symbol of the tree represents the family, and connects it to their father's hard work and dedication to the family. If they were to cut it down, it would be symbolic of their betrayal. Imagery of the tree is used to describe the freedom and beauty of the tree as it "swings through another year of sun and leaping winds, of leaves and bounding fruit." The tree represents their family bond and how strong it is even through the "whip-crack of the mortgage."

In Father and Child, as the persona moves on from childhood, her father becomes elderly and is entertained by simple things in nature, “birds, flowers, shivery-grass.” These symbols of nature remind the persona of the inconsistency of life and the certainty of death, “sunset exalts its known symbols of transience,” where sunset represents time. Both poems are indicative of the impermanence of life and that the persona has managed to mature and grow beyond the initial fearlessness of childhood moving onto a sophisticated understanding of death.

In addition to this, belonging to a family is a key concept in this novel. The novel opens with an alluring introduction to the family; a blissful atmosphere is created through the picturesque icons of their family life. The composer uses small photograph like icons to allude towards the widely acknowledged contentment that is readily associated with the memories in a picture album. Tan introduces the motif of the paper crane which he carries through the length of his novel as a symbol of affection and belonging between the family members. The next pages signify the break in contentment as the man begins his journey and a salient image of the couple with their hands grasping the other’s parallels the anxiety and despair in their downcast facial expressions. Although the gloomy atmosphere, the light sepia tones in the picture allow an insight into the tender and loving relationship that the family members share. Upon the man’s departure the paper crane motif returns and he hands it to his daughter as a token of his undying love for her. His migratory experience is studded by the comfort and ease that he obtains from a picture of his family. In paralleled scenes on the boat and the new apartment, the

"The Mother," by Gwendolyn Brooks, is a sorrowful, distressing poem about a mother who has experienced numerous abortions. While reading the poem, you can feel the pain, heartache, distress and grief she is feeling. She is both remorseful and regretful; nevertheless, she explains that she had no other alternative. It is a sentimental and heart wrenching poem where she talks about not being able to experience or do things with the children that she aborted -- things that people who have children often take for granted. Perhaps this poem is a reflection of what many women in society are feeling.

First, the speaker represents the bright side of the mothers and daughters’ relationship where they have strong bond and they love each other presence. She says mothers and daughter walk happily “arm-in-arm” in the “villages and shopping malls” (line 1-2). Here, mother is drawing a pleasant image of mothers and daughters bond. They are holding each other hand, talking, and

She is upset by the loss of the day even though her mother attempts to distract her with a garden of flowering violets, her father also attempts to comfort her. Finally, she returns to sleep after dinner. Her memory is a positive memory and the motif if the violets are used to link the past and present as it will help her get through her dark times. In the visual her memory is included, and he mother confronting her is one of the main images that she remembers from this. The image of her mother comforting her is a very important one, as it establishes the role and persona of a mother at the time and how women in that era were seen as to stay home look after children and the men went out and worked to support the

When the mother sends her child off to church, she brushes her hair, bathes her, and puts white shoes and gloves on her. This effort put into creating an image of beauty and peace in her child shows that the mother is trying to forget about the suffering of the people who are fighting for freedom that she is doing nothing to aid. When she sees her child this way, she feels that she has

"You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. Over and over, we are told of the limitations on choice--"it was the only way"; "They persuaded me" and verbs of necessity recur for descriptions of both the mother's and Emily's behavior. " In such statements as "my wisdom ! came too late," the story verges on becoming an analysis of parental guilt. With the narrator, we construct an image of the mother's own development: her difficulties as a young mother alone with her daughter and barely surviving during the early years of the depression; her painful months of enforced separation from her daughter; her gradual and partial relaxation in response to a new husband and a new family as more children follow; her increasingly complex anxieties about her first child; and finally her sense of family balance which surrounds but does not quite include the early memories of herself and Emily in the grips of survival needs. In doing so she has neither trivialized nor romanticized the experience of motherhood; she has indicated the wealth of experience yet to be explored in the story’s possibilities of experiences, like motherhood, which have rarely been granted serious literary consideration. Rather she is searching for

As she is developing, she is tantalized by the societal norms he represents. She is ready to give up the backwoods (a symbol of herself) for all he (a symbol of society) has to offer. Convinced of that, she sets off to find the secret of the elusive white heron and in order to find the heron, she had to climb to what was literally the top of the world for her, the top of the pine tree. The world from the top was different than the city and it was different from the woods at ground level. From the top her perspective about the world changed, it was vast and awesome, and she understood her place in it more than before. She understood it to mean more than to sacrifice her own self for the gifts this man had to offer that were tantalizing but incapitable with her personality and true self.

In a world in which abortion is considered either a woman's right or a sin against God, the poem "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks gives a voice to a mother lamenting her aborted children through three stanzas in which a warning is given to mothers, an admission of guilt is made, and an apology to the dead is given. The poet-speaker, the mother, as part of her memory addresses the children that she "got that [she] did not get" (2). The shift in voice from stanza to stanza allows Brooks to capture the grief associated with an abortion by not condemning her actions, nor excusing them; she merely grieves for what might have been. The narrator's longing and regret over the children she will never have is highlighted by the change in tone