...Realistic & Complicated ''Daddy Dozens'' by Jamila Woods is about a father who's a doctor and doesn't spend time with his family because he's always working. "Step Father" by Emanuel Xavier is about a father and son who don't have a good relationship. Their relationship has a lot of pain and sadness. The father was mentally and physically abusive towards his son. The son is gay and wants his father to love and accept him for who he is. The father gets old and starts forgetting his memory. The son in the end forgives for his father for everything him put him through and provides love and care for his father. Even though these poems seem very different they very much a like....
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...Feelings For Our Fathers When asked about one’s feelings, people will often give a myriad of different answers. More times than not, those answers will range anywhere from: happy, sad, angry, or somewhere in between. At any one moment, people can have numerous conflicting feelings about the same subject. Li-Young Lee’s poem, “My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud,” perfectly demonstrates how the feelings we have for our fathers are complex, not simple. Lee’s complex feelings for his own father are first shown when he explains how “[his] shoulders ached from his [father’s] gaze” (320-21). This statement is one that most people can probably identify with. As children, we have a deep-rooted desire to make our parents proud of us. However, sometimes the pressure on us gets to be too much. This pressure leads to feelings of resentment, as a result of not being good enough. Lee describes his own experience with resentment, which stemmed from him feeling like “a remarkable disappointment to [his father]” (321). Resentment is just one of the many complex feelings we...
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...Nikki Vanessa V. Novales July 20, 2012 # 2012-42443 PI 10 E2-6R Rizal: Hidden Beneath The Surface A Reaction Paper On “Bayaning 3rd World” “Who is Rizal?” If you ask this question to any Filipino, they will most likely say, “He is our national hero” Or “He’s the person stamped on our 1-peso coin”. But is that all he really is? The movie “Bayaning 3rd World” is about two film makers trying to make a movie about Rizal. They found out, however, that this would not be an easy task, for their subject is a very complicated man. Rather than focusing on a single issue about Rizal, they decided to make a detective story about Rizal being the country’s national hero. They tackled several issues but focused mainly on Rizal’s retraction and Josephine Bracken. The movie was meant to be educational, but unlike most documentaries, “Bayaning 3rd World” is definitely not boring. The documentary was presented in a comical way, so that viewers of all ages would be able to understand it and grasp its meaning. I was confused at first because I didn’t know what the “Retraction Controversy” was and the two film makers started having these long conversations about it without explaining it to the viewers. But when I found out what it was all about, following the flow of the story became easy. Another controversy that arose was about Josephine Bracken, on whether she and Rizal were married or not. It was implied that if they were indeed married, then Rizal retracted...
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...Literature Through Time Literature depicts the morals of time it shift and morphs into less power in the divine and more faith in man. Stories began being written by monks and the clergy which in time turned into regular men with stores that focused on more secular matters. English literature fills up the gap between wars, between societal change, you can see time progressing, you can see our values and morals changing, you can see history passing by. In the beginning there was Bede, a philosopher, speaker of many languages, a man who looked around him and saw a world in peril that only God could save, a man full of faith. Time passes and we see Shakespeare, a genius, a man with a queen, a man who rallied against the common, Shakespeare was a man with deep loves and a strong voice. “The Story of Caedmon”, was written during a time when Christian religious dogma was primarily hagiography, “the telling of the life of virtuous men and women that represents what it means to be a good Christian.” These stories are used as a form of reflections on one’s life as to make it better in the future. Religious dogma needed to be made more accessible to the congregation which was widely illiterate, so the stories were written with easy points and then acted out so that the congregation would not only be awake and attentive, but so that these stories of morality and faith would really sink in. “Caedmon” is probably the earliest extant of Old English poetry, Bede tells about Caedmon, an...
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...1590’s, to the fashion for sonnets, he moved closer to the cultural and literary dominance of the court’s taste—to the fashionable modes of Ovid, Petrarch, and Neoplatonism—and to the need for patronage. Although the power of the sonnets goes far beyond their sociocultural roots, Shakespeare nevertheless adopts the culturally inferior role of the petitioner for favor, and there is an undercurrent of social and economic powerlessness in the sonnets, especially when a rival poet seems likely to supplant the poet. In short, Shakespeare’s nondramatic poems grow out of and articulate the strains of the 1590’s, when, like many ambitious writers and intellectuals on the fringe of the court, Shakespeare clearly needed to find a language in which to speak—and that was, necessarily, given to him by the court. What he achieved within this shared framework, however, goes far beyond any other collection of poems in the age. Shakespeare’s occasional poems are unquestionably minor, interesting primarily because he wrote them; his sonnets, on the other hand, constitute perhaps the language’s greatest collection of lyrics. They are love lyrics, and...
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...Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, MA and died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, MD. He led a life of deep heartache. He was orphaned as a child only a year after he was born, adopted by his stoic non-supportive father figure John Allan, a scottish tobacco exporter and dry-goods merchant. He gave Edgar constant grief over debt and educational pricing, but Poe took the morbid dark and secret reaches of the human psyche and turned it into beautifully renowned pieces of literature. During his early years Edgar observed John Allan in his work which gave him “an understanding of the value of information and that literature was a commodity produced by sale in the capitalist marketplace.” (Felicia Burdescu, Michaela Prioteasa, Shaping...
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...Life In Poverty “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” said Edgar Allan Poe, an American author of the 1800s. Poe is best known for two common themes-death and loss. This may have resulted from the many years of his life he spent in poverty. After taking a closer look at the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe, it is apparent that he deserves recognition as a profound American author. Poe had a very difficult early life. He entered the world on Jan 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts (Bio.com.). At the age of three, his mother had passed away and his father had abandoned his family (“Edgar Allan Poe.”). He never really knew his parents, because he was orphaned at such a young age. Later in life, Poe went into debt because his foster father, John Allan, didn’t pay his college fees (Bio.com.). Poe’s life was a constant struggle before his writing career started....
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...The dark and dreary writing style of Edgar Allan Poe did not come from a man with a wonderful, glorious life. It did not come from a man that had no worries, no problems (either economically, spiritually, or relationally); it did not come from a man who had thoughts of rainbows and unicorns nor even cute and cuddly bunnies. No, this writing style, which made Edgar Allan Poe so famous, had come from a man that had struggled throughout his life to find happiness, who struggled to barely make ends meet, who wanted most to be loved by those who were the closest to him. As a young child Poe’s mother died of tuberculosis and his father had abandoned him. Later he struggled with the death of his young wife and foster mother. These events had presented...
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...The poems “My Papas Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden are similar and yet drastically different poems. The poems are similar because they share a main theme. The main theme is the two speakers of the poems are remembering their fathers. Both of the fathers in the poem seem to some many similarities, but for the most part are very different Individuals. Firstly, in the poem “My Papas Waltz”, the speaker describes his father and himself dancing. The speaker alludes that the poem is a memory from his child hood. Implied in the lines "The whiskey on your breath/ Could make a small boy dizzy” (Roethke lines 1-2). More importantly he depicts his father as an alcoholic. Unlike the father in the poem “Those Winter Sundays” where there is no mention of alcohol. Furthermore the speaker’s perspective is son or daughter reminiscing the things the father did for him or her as a child....
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...felt poems that are somewhat similar about respected fathers. In these two poems, both authors take an admiring look back at some of the most memorable actions of their fathers. It is clearly implied that their fathers were not perfect by any means, but deeply loved. The authors wanted us to see how much their fathers loved them, but by reading these poems, the love was expressed differently. Although there was unconditional love shown, I feel as if both Roethke and Hayden are expressing painful wounds and unmet needs by their fathers. In Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz”, he wants the readers to understand a very heart breaking and traumatic situation that he encountered with his father in his earlier stages. From reading the poem, it is obvious that his father was a habitual drunkard. The “Waltz” that is mentioned in the story, is a sentimental dance that is shared between Roethke and his father. It is stated, “The Whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy; but I hung on like death.” From personal experience, the harsh smell of...
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...between a father and son is one of the most important things a child can have. A good relationship with one’s father results in a more stable life and mindset. Both My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke and Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden display father and son relationships. These poems have complications in the relationship between the two, but My Papa’s Waltz is a more negative complication. Those Winter Sundays shows more of a misunderstanding from the son’s point of view. Negative complications help emphasise how important a healthy relationship between a father and son is. My Papa’s Waltz shows a conflicting relationship between father and son. The boy seems to love his father. This is evidenced by the boy...
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...Approaches to Literature Assignment 2. Situation and Setting I. Read the following poems carefully several times. A. Situations i. “To a Daughter Leaving Home” (p. 736) ii. “On My First Son” (p. 1096) II. Examine one group of poems that interests you the most and answer the following questions. B. Group A iii. Who is speaking? To whom is the speaker speaking? Is there an auditor in the poem, or simply an audience outside of it? What is happening? The title of the first poem, “To a Daughter Leaving Home,” reveals some information of the setting and the situation. We can see that it might be a parent saying something or even writing a letter to his or hers daughter who is about to leave their family. In addition, according to the poet’s gender, it isn’t hard for us to assume that “a parent” is actually a mother. In this poem, it seems like the mother is speaking to her daughter, but to me, I think it’s more like a mother’s monologue, trying to express her love and blessing to her daughter, since her daughter has been “pumping, pumping / for your[her] life.”(line 18-19) As for the other poem “On My First Son,” apparently the speaker is a grieving father and in some ways, we can even tell that the speaker is not any other father who also lose their kids. The poem is autobiographical and the speaker is actually Ben Jonson himself. In the poem, lines like “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; / My sin was too much...
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...Such Waltzing Was Not Easy The poem “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke portrays a father/son relationship between the narrator and his father who died of cancer when Roethke was in high school. Most readers would presume that the little boy admired his father, despite his faulty qualities, alcohol being the most prominent one, and wrote this as a tribute to him. The first stanza provides the readers with an image of the boy being content while waltzing with his father, no matter the circumstances: The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. The first stanza shows us that the little boy craves his father’s attention, and enjoys the time he has with him. However, as...
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...A Fathers Love My Papas Waltz is about a young boy who is astonished by the way his father Unknowingly shows him affection the father is a day laborer who clearly likes to have a couple of drinks after work and afterwards he returns home to find his son waiting for them to do their nightly Dance the Mother seemingly watches adoring the fact that the father and son has this little interaction every night but she does frowned upon the father in Disgust because instead of Waltzing they are Stomping and making dishes fall off the shelf The boy makes himself lifeless while Dancing with his father because this waltz wasn’t Easy I believe that the poem is about a young boy who adores his father’s manly ways and in the 1920’s or when the poem was written it was hard for men to show affection to their sons so this is the way for a father and son to bond at night when he is off of work The Mother is clearly a homemaker and her duties are to be in the home she admires the way the Father tries to bond with the child however she is worried that the boy might be subjected to doing this because men can sometimes become very carefree while drinking unknowingly and is probably swinging the boy like a rag doll and the boy is holding on for dear life The poem always goes back to the reference of how the father is a hard worker with the lines With a Palm Caked Hard By Dirt and Was Battered on One Knuckle states that the father always was away at Work so the boy and his father hardly had any...
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...English 101 1DB Essay 3 November 4, 2013 Struggles of a Single Mother The struggles of a single mother are insurmountable. In the poem “ Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes writes prolifically about his mothers struggle. Tupac in his music video Dear Mama presents another strong argument on the struggles of a single mother. Both of these works deal with the struggles their mothers went through. However they present a different argument when it comes to the source of the struggle. Hughes poem doesn’t identify what exactly caused the struggle but it is reasonable to assume it was external circumstance. Tupac on the other hand repeatedly identifies himself as the cause of the struggle. Thus the arguments diverge. One argument deals with the struggle caused by external circumstances while another deals with the struggle of single motherhood caused by the children. I feel that the argument Tupac presents in his video is a more realistic and persuasive argument for singe motherhood. In the video “Dear Mama” Tupac uses his lyrics to tell the story behind the video. He uses realism in the lyrics as well as in the video. When the video opens up Tupac’s mother speaks about being seventeen, pregnant, and in jail. After she speaks, Tupac opens up the song by saying that his mother had nowhere to stay at seventeen once she was released from jail. The combination of the words of Tupac’s mother and Tupac himself creates a strong emotional appeal to the audience. This combination of...
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