In Chelsea Dingman’s Clan of Fatherless Children, the poet uses the title to address the son of the speaker. It provides the reader an idea of what type of subject is to be explored. As the title suggests, a boy who does not have a father is mentioned in the poem, yet is not its core. The poem does not center around the boy, it instead describes how the boy ended up as a part of the Clan mentioned in the title. His mother relives the accident in which the father was lost. The poem’s purpose is to provide an outline, a story, for how the touched upon Clan gathers its members. Dingman equips words choices that provides the poem with a an empty, almost heartbroken tone. The narrator looks back on her relationship with her love who has passed …show more content…
In several lines, she places the use of alliteration. An example of this is the line “we used to sling songs”, in which the s sound is repeated. Dingman also uses imagery in the poem, such as with “ gauzy haze/ through the windows”. Using this imagery helps to create a vivid picture in the reader's head of a snow storm. Another device present in the piece is the simile. One example of a simile in Dingman’s poem is “stay/ quiet like the stars amidst the sky’s betrayal”, in which she is comparing herself to the silence of the stars. There are also metaphors in the poem, as shown by the last line: “You are the snow”. Here, the speaker compares her late lover, the father of her son, to the snow storm that rages outside her …show more content…
When her son hears this, he asks her for peanut butter waffles, and she agrees. However, once the forecaster mentions the snow, she is reminded of her late lover’s truck in a gully, from a car accident that occurred during a snowstorm. The mother remembers how that night her and the father were singing songs during the storm while driving, stating they didn’t realize how “they were close to death”. The “death” being not only the father’s life ending, but on the speaker’s side, the death of their family. A chapter in her life ends when he dies. She recalls they also caught snowflakes in their hands that fatal night. The speaker misses this figure so badly, and wants him to know everything. She states there is nothing she is more afraid of than leaving her child behind, showing that she was never ready to raise the son herself, making the father’s death extra devastating. The speaker states after the accident, she ran from the world. She tried to avoid everything after her lover dies, instead of finding a healthy way to deal with her heartbreak. She then touches on how people think snow is just fun, nothing to be afraid of. However, she knows otherwise, the father of her child having died because of it. Once again, she mentions how much she wants to tell the father everything, but then states how she chooses to live, perhaps hinting she might have considered ending her life to be with