Cat’s in the Cradle—Harry Chapin
My child arrived just the other day,
He came to the world in the usual way.
But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay,
He learned to walk while I was away.
And he was talkin fore I knew it, and as he grew,
He'd say I'm gonna be like you, yeah,
I know I'm gonna be like you.
(Chorus)
And the cats in the cradle and the silver spoon,
Little Boy Blue and The Man In The Moon.
When ya comin’ home Dad?
I don't know when, we’ll get together then, son,
ya know well have a good time then.
Characterization—we can
see that Chapin characterizes
the father as a good man
who cares for his family; he
simply doesn’t recognize
that he not spending the time
with the son that the son
needs, which doesn’t make
him a bad person; it simply
makes him a neglectful one.
(Verse 2)
Well my son turned 10 just the other day,
He said Thanks for the ball Dad, come let’s play.
Can ya teach me to throw? I said
Not today, I got a lot to do. He said That's ok.
And then, he walked away but a smile never came,
He said I'm gonna be like him, yeah,
Ya know I’m gonna be like him.
(Chorus)
(Verse 3)
Well he came from college just the other day,
So much like a man I just had to say
Son I'm proud of you, can ya sit for a while?
He shook his head, and he said with a smile
What Id really like Dad, is to borrow the car keys.
See ya later, can I have them please?
(Chorus)
(Verse 4)
Well I’ve long since retired, my sons moved away,
I called him up just the other day.
I said Id like to see you, if you don't mind.
He said Id love to Dad, if I can find the time.
You see my new jobs a hassle and the kids have the flu,
But its sure nice talking to you Dad,
Its been sure nice talking to you.
And as he hung up the phone it occurred to me,
He’d grown up just like, my boy, was just like me.
(Chorus)
Irony is seen when the
father realizes that the son
has become what he didn’t
like in his own father—that
he never had time for him,
the exact same thing the
son unintentionally does to
the father
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Personification
—a house
cannot be
chronically
angry, but the
people in it can
be, which is
what this
personification
suggests about
the setting
Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blue-black cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Syntax—the first stanza consists of 2
sentences: one long, the second one
very short. The declarative second
sentence suggests the narrator’s
realization, as does the concluding
question.
Diction—the last three bold-type
words suggest the realization about the
nature of father’s love.
This line features repetition, emphasizing
that the narrator understands that his father
did love him.
John McCrae—In Flanders Field
IN Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Imagery—notice the visual
(poppies and crosses) and aural
(larks and guns) imagery.
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Persona—dead men cannot talk. This device
helps the author convey the poem's message not
to let the soldiers’ effort be in vain.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The torch is a metaphor for the
struggle that the living must assume
on the part of the dead.
Our quarrel is an understatement
since the poem is about war.
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Metaphors— Sylvia Plath
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off .
The above poem consists of only
metaphors, likely suggesting what??
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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner--Randall Jarrall
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Again…persona.
The Panther—Rainer Maria Rilke
Simile—
this simile
suggests
the
repetition
of his
restricted
life.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
The setting is a cage that prevents the
anything else. It seems to him there are
panther from being what it is by nature.
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. That he can only pace back and forth
suggests the crushing effect of the setting
on the panther.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
The poem consists of many images, all
is like a ritual dance around a center
of which suggest that the panther is not
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
what it would otherwise be if it were
allowed to be in the wild.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
______________________________________________________________
Snowdrops—Louise Gluck
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring--
The you that the narrator is
addressing is unclear. Therefore we
can conclude that this is not likely
another person being directly
addressed, making it an apostrophe.
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
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Ex-Basketball Player BY JOHN UPDIKE
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you'll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
The poem is full of imagery.
The first stanza shows the town.
Stanza two shows Flick. Stz. 3
shows what Flick once was. Stz
4 shows what Flick became. Stz
5 shows what flick is now—
someone who failed to become
something after his childhood
successes ended.
Here we have several examples
of personification. This
technique establishes a playful
tone for the poem.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
But most of us remember anyway.
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
In the last stanza the tone turns
dour and glum, which
characterizes Flick as pathetic
for not having been able to make
anything of his life once he no
longer had school and coaches
to provide structure for him.
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Frank’s Wild Years—Tom Waits
Well Frank settled down in the Valley
and hung his wild years
on a nail that he drove through
his wife's forehead.
He sold used office furniture
out there on San Fernando Road
and assumed a $30,000 loan
at 15 1/4 % and put down payment
on a little two-bedroom place.
His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash,
made good bloody marys,
kept her mouth shut most of the time,
had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
that had some kind of skin disease
and was totally blind. They had a
thoroughly modern kitchen,
self-cleaning oven (the whole bit).
Frank drove a little sedan.
They were so happy.
One night Frank was on his way home
from work, stopped at the liquor store,
picked up a couple Mickey's Big Mouths,
drank 'em in the car on his way
to the Shell station. He got a gallon of
gas in a can, drove home, doused
everything in the house, torched it,
parked across the street, laughing,
watching it burn, all Halloween
orange and chimney red. Then
Frank put on a top forty station,
got on the Hollywood Freeway,
headed north
In these marked lines, we see
imagery of an ideal life that a man
establishes within the setting of
common suburbia. Frank is
characterized as a former partier
and drunk who settles down when
he gets married. The nail in the
wife’s forehead is a metaphor for
the confining institution of
marriage.
This line is ironic. We can conclude
this once we have read the second
stanza. Because Frank burns his house
and life down, we can clued he was
not happy and that the social setting
that he attempted in the first stanza,
did not fit who he is as a character.
The second stanza is full of vivid
imagery of Frank preparing and
executing the deed.
We can conclude that the life he
attempted in stanza 1 did not fit him
because the tone turns serene when
Waits describes Frank heading north.
Never could stand that dog.
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The Unknown Citizen by W.H. Auden
07/M/378/ This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every
way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it
cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war,
he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Entire poem describes the
character of a man who lived
his life according to the status
quo of the moment, suggesting
he was not a man who was able
or willing to think
independently of other people,
perhaps for fear of not being
accepted or fitting into his
society. He is thus
characterized either as
mindless. One can also
consider that he is
characterized as shrewd, one
he realized that he is powerless
over the monolith that is our
society, so the best option is to
choose to get along so as not to
cause himself problems.
Last two lines are ironic,
since if anything had been
wrong, no one would have
heard since every act in his
life had been one of
compliance to fit into
society’s status quo.
52
The Blue Bowl—Jane Kenyon
Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.
The bowl symbolizes the
family’s primitive experience
of mourning the death of their
pet, a process of behaviors that
people don’t often understand
on a rational level.
We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.
Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.
Hay for the Horses
Gary Snyder
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunch pails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
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