PARENTS
AND CHILDREN
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Weakness
~Alden Nowlan
Old mare whose eyes
are like cracked marbles,
drools blood in her mash,
shivers in her jute blanket.
My father hates weakness worse than hail;
in the morning
without haste
he will shoot her in the ear, once,
shovel her under in the north pasture.
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Tonight
leaving the stables
he stands his lantern on an overturned water pail,
turns,
cursing her for a bad bargain,
and spreads his coat
carefully over her sick shoulders.
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Meaning:
1. In groups, discuss how the title of this poem relates to its content.
Make notes describing the various “weaknesses” portrayed in the
poem. Why is the father’s weakness a surprise? Share your ideas with
other groups.
2. What does the speaker mean by “cursing her for a bad bargain”?
Explain your answer in a few sentences.
Form and Style:
3. This poem is in three stanzas. Explain the narrative purpose of each
stanza. In other words, how does each stanza develop the story?
4. How does the form of the third verse differ from the first? What is the
effect of this change on the reader and his or her interpretation of the
meaning?
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Winter Sundays
~Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
(5)
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,
(10)
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?
Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, edited by Frederick
Glaysher. Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden.
Meaning:
1. How would you describe the speaker's father and the relationship
between the poem's speaker and his father?
2. What does the speaker mean by “love’s austere and lonely offices?”
Explain.
Form and Structure:
3. Discuss the author’s use of consonance and alliteration. What effect does
each have on the reader?
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4. What effect does the final version's "turn" (the last two lines) have on the
poem's meaning at large? Why do you think the author repeats “what did
I know” twice?
Digging
~Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
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Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
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By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
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My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
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Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
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Irish poet Seamus Heaney worked as an English teacher and lecturer before being appointed professor
of poetry at Oxford in 1989. Economic in his use of language, Death of a Naturalist (1966) reveals his
preoccupation with environmental themes. “Digging” is from this collection. He won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1995. (Born in Northern Ireland in 1939).
“DIGGING” - SEAMUS HEANEY
Meaning
1.
a. How does the narrator “dig” with a pen? For what do you
think he is digging? Support your interpretation with evidence
from the poem.
b. In the lines, “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen
rests; snug as a gun,” what quality or qualities does the poet
suggest a pen shares with a gun?
c. There are no other references to weapons in the poem. Does the
simile belong in the poem? Why or why not? If you were to
change the simile, to what would you compare the pen? Why?
2.
a.
In what country do you think the poem takes place? Refer to
details and vocabulary from the poem to support your answer.
b. Three generations are presented in Heaney’s poem. How is the
narrator different from his father and grandfather? How is he
similar to them? Support your interpretations.
Form and Style
3. How does Heaney appeal to the reader’s senses throughout the poem?
Cite specific words and phrases that reflect what the narrator sees,
hears, and smells. Why does Heaney use this technique?
4. Quote the line where the first flashback begins. What sparks this
flashback? Where does the second flashback begin? What prompts it?
What purpose does each flashback serve?
Creative Extension
5. Create a visual representation of Heaney’s poem. Include images from
the poem and use the layout, style, and colour in your art to convey
Heaney’s attitudes about similarities and differences across the
generations. Attach a one- or two- page analysis of your visual
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explaining how you used various techniques to reinforce Heaney’s
tone and ideas.
6. Write a personal essay about the influence of families on children.
Consider your own experience, the experiences of the narrator in
“Digging,” and the experiences of individuals that you have
encountered in another text (poem, article, story, or film). How do
families influence their children and what are the limitations of their
influence?
Tangled
by Carl Leggo
(Lines from Edmonton to my father in Newfoundland)
far away
in a city you will never know
I chase words in the cold air
and measure my worth
by the words made mine
and remember you
silent
crouched in the bow of a dory
rising and falling on blue-gray waves
in the air yellow-orange with the sun
untangling the line I twisted in knots
in my frenzy to tear from the ocean
a cod with a lead jigger hooked in its side
and I remember you
sat
and traced the line through its knots
and said nothing
and untangled my line
that could reach to the bottom of the ocean
and lay in swirls at your feet
untangled it
in the morning sun
through the noon sun
into the afternoon sun
and said nothing
and I wouldn’t look at you
because I knew you were mad
and I had to look
and you weren’t mad
you were smiling
and where I live now
there is no ocean
unless you stand on your head
and pretend the sky is ocean
but it’s not
and the line I throw out
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never hooks into the sky
but always falls back
and tangles at my feet
and perhaps that’s why
you could spend hours untangling
my tangled line
you knew
an untangled line could be thrown
into the ocean’s black silence
and
anchor you to the bottom
The Gift
BY LI-YOUNG LEE
To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
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I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
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when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.
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Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. Both
of Lee’s parents came from powerful Chinese families: Lee’s great grandfather was
the first president of the Republic of China, and Lee’s father had been the personal
physician to Mao Tse-tsung. In Indonesia, Dr. Lee helped found Gamaliel University.
Anti-Chinese sentiment began to foment in Indonesia, however, and Lee’s father was
arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After his release, the Lee family fled through Hong
Kong, Macau, and Japan, arriving in the United States in 1964. Lee and his parents moved from
Seattle to Pennsylvania, where Dr. Lee attended seminary and eventually became a Presbyterian
minister in the small community of Vandergrift. Though his father read to him frequently as a child,
Lee did not begin to seriously write poems until a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he
studied with Gerald Stern.
My Father and the Fig Tree
~Naomi Shihab Nye
For other fruits, my father was indifferent.
He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
“See those? I wish they were figs.”
In the evening he sat by my beds
weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.
They always involved a figtree.
Even when it didn’t fit, he’d stick it in.
Once Joha was walking down the road
and he saw a fig tree.
Or, he tied his camel to a fig tree and went to sleep.
Or, later when they caught and arrested him,
his pockets were full of figs.
At age six I ate a dried fig and shrugged.
“That’s not what I’m talking about! he said,
“I’m talking about a fig straight from the earth—
gift of Allah!—on a branch so heavy
it touches the ground.
I’m talking about picking the largest, fattest, sweetest fig
in the world and putting it in my mouth.”
(Here he’d stop and close his eyes.)
Years passed, we lived in many houses,
none had fig trees.
We had lima beans, zucchini, parsley, beets.
“Plant one!” my mother said.
but my father never did.
He tended garden half-heartedly, forgot to water,
let the okra get too big.
“What a dreamer he is. Look how many
things he starts and doesn’t finish.”
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The last time he moved, I got a phone call,
My father, in Arabic, chanting a song
I’d never heard. “What’s that?”
He took me out back to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest,
sweetest fig in the world.
“It’s a fig tree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.
“MY FATHER AND THE FIG TREE” – NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
About the Author
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in the state of Missouri in 1952 to a Palestinian
father and an American mother. She still has family in the Middle East, and
her poetry often concerns Palestinian life. She is the author of and contributor
to many books. Nye sees poetry as a bridge to other cultures in a world that is
increasingly marked by dissension. Currently a resident of Texas, Nye has
traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information
Agency promoting international goodwill through the arts.
Meaning
1. What does the fig tree symbolize for her father? Explain.
2. In what way is it significant that the speaker’s daughter is unimpressed by
the taste of her first fig?
3. Why do you think that her father never planted a fig tree himself?
Form and Structure:
4. What images seem particularly important in this poem? Why? How would
the poem be different if these images were omitted?
Creative Extension:
5. Naomi Shihab Nye has said “Poetry slows us down, suggests we pay
better attention, and honors each moment for what it is.” Consider a
distinct moment (or series of moments) from your childhood that relates
to a specific object much like the fig tree in Nye’s poem. This could be a
toy, a favorite tree, a talisman, a photograph, etc. What does this object
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represent for you? Write a poem in which you use strong imagery and
vivid detail to depict the object and its significance to you.
Slipping
~Joan Aleshire
Age comes to my father as a slow
slipping: the leg that weakens, will
barely support him, the curtain of mist
that falls over one eye. Years, like
pickpockets, lift his concentration,
memory, fine sense of direction. The car,
as he drives, drifts from lane to lane
like a raft on a river, speeds and slows
for no reason, keeps missing turns.
As my mother says, “He’s never liked
to talk about feelings,” but tonight
out walking, slow to match his pace –
his left leg trailing a little like
a child who keeps pulling on your hand – he says,
“I love you so much.” Darkness, and the sense
we always have that each visit may be
the last, have pushed away years of restraint.
A photograph taken of him teaching –
white coat, stethoscope like a pet snake
around his neck, chair tipped back
against the lecture-room wall – shows
a man talking, love of his work lighting
his face – in a way we seldom saw at home.
I answer that I love him, too, but
hardly knowing him, what I love
is the way reserve has slipped from
his feeling, like a screen suddenly
falling, exposing someone dressing or
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washing: how wrinkles ring a bent neck,
how soft and mutable is the usually hidden flesh.
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Mother to Son
Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards all torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now -For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
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Langston Hughes
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Biographical notes on Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes, a native of Joplin, Missouri, became one of the most popular figures of the
Harlem Renaissance. His goal was to write a truly "Negro" poetry without perpetuating racial
stereotypes. Wealthy patrons helped him to publish his first volume of poetry -- The Weary
Blues (1926) -- to go through college, and to support himself while writing. In the 1930s,
Hughes became increasingly involved in radical politics and joined the American Communist
Party because of its claim to represent all races equally in its working-class solidarity. These
connections haunted Hughes during Senator Joseph McCarthy's red scare of the 1950s:
Hughes was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in
1953 and was considered a security risk by the FBI until 1959. During the 1950s he completed
several memorable anthologies, including The First Book of Negros (1952), The First Book of Jazz
(1955), and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958).
“MOTHER TO SON” - LANGSTON HUGHES
Read “Mother To Son.” Think about and then write about what advice the
mother is telling the son in this poem. How might this apply to Langston
Hughes’ life? Who is the mother? Who is the son?
Analytical Questions:
1. What is the theme of the poem?
2. What form does the poem take? Is this effective?
3. Discuss the use of extended metaphor in the poem.
4. Discuss the use of voice in the poem.
5. What is the tone of the poem?
Creative Writing Extension
After rereading “Mother to Son” choose one person in your life who has
given you advice. It could be a parent, teacher, relative or friend. Write about
the advice you were given and how that advice reflected the personality,
background and past experiences of the giver. For example, people who grew
up during the Great Depression often give advice about saving money and
living a very risk free life. What does this advice tell us about the people who
give it? We can learn a lot about a person and his past by the advice they give
us.
Visualize the person you have chosen. Imagine that you are sitting or walking
with that person. What would they be telling you? Start writing lines of this
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conversation. Speak in the person’s voice who is giving the advice and try to
use their individual speaking style. The result will be a poem that tells about
this person through the conversation and advice.
The Portrait
~Stanley Kunitz
My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.
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The Lanyard - Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
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And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
“This poem does what most poets tend to do, which is, if you want to write about a topic that’s rather large you
choose an image as a point of entry rather than taking on the topic in a frontal way.”
Billy Collins, on reading “The Lanyard”
Like Bookends
~ Eve Merriam
Like bookends
my father at one side
my mother at the other
propping me up
but unable to read
what I feel.
Were they born with clothes on?
Born with rules on?
When we sit at the dinner table
we smooth our napkins into polite folds.
How was your day dear
Fine
And how was yours dear
Fine
And how was school
The same
Only once in a while
when we’re not trying so hard
when we’re not trying at all
our napkins suddenly whirl away
and we float up to the ceiling
where we sing and dance until it hurts from laughing
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and then we float down
with our napkin parachutes
and once again spoon our soup
and pass the bread please.
Women
They were women then
My mama’s generation
Husky of voice – stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.
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Alice Walker
Implied metaphor: Does not directly state that one thing is something else. Instead it uses
words to suggest the comparison.
Walker’s famous poem is built around a metaphor that is first suggested in line 12 and then
extended through line 18. The metaphor is based on a comparison that is never openly stated.
After you read the poem, talk about what Walker is comparing her women and their struggle to.
Questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
What do you see happening in this poem?
What unusual comparison is being made in l. 12-16?
What is logical about the order of nouns listed in l. 19-21?
Who might be the people referred to as “we” in the last five lines?
Alice Walker uses a metaphor to compare two kinds of actions or struggles. What does
she compare the women’s struggle to?
What doors did these women really batter down?
What do you think the mined fields and booby-trapped ditches stand for?
What do you think these women knew their children had to know?
Journal Reflection:
What other people in the world could be described as generals leading armies? What do
these people fight against?
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