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The Boy Essay

Decent Essays

The Boy and His Family Relationships In a sort of short story style, Marie Howe illustrates a depleting family relationship between a father and his children in the poem, “The Boy,” through its many symbols. With no discernible rhyme scheme, the plot develops, climaxes, and concludes alluding to a short story but in poetic form. The speaker, discovered through clues within the poem, is the younger sister of the boy and she is listening and learning from the examples set by her brothers. There is no mention of a mother so the focus is kept on the relationship between the father and children. Opening the poem is a description of the setting and it begins to set up the solemn tone: “My older brother is walking down the sidewalk into the …show more content…

The decoration also embodies a home like atmosphere. The foreshadowing from previous lines is illustrated when the speaker uncovers the reason for the brother venturing here: “He’s running away from home because our father wants to cut his hair” (8). The brother probably has matured out of his current activities. This one line discloses a plethora of information about the father. Obviously, the father desperately wants his son to be a well-groomed young man, not an “overgrown weed” and “underdeveloped” boy as foreshadowed in lines 4-6. The cutting of the hair symbolizes the crossing of the threshold between boyhood and manhood. The father’s desperateness is demonstrated by asking the sister to convince the boy to return: “And in two more days our father will convince me to go to him – you know where he is – and talk to him” (9-10). He understands the younger sister knows where the hideout is and, using parental tools, makes the promise the brother will not receive punishment for his bad deed: “No reprisals. He promised” (10). The sister agrees and is accompanied by an entourage of younger children, symbolically reinforcing the idea of transitioning into manhood by describing their voices to newly hatched baby birds in spring, as if to say they haven’t matured yet: “A small parade of kids in feet pajamas will accompany me, their voices like the first peepers in spring” (10-13). The

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