Papa's Violent Waltz Poetry is made to express the thoughts and emotions of the poet. One may share the same feelings or they can interpret the poem however they wish. Many are undecided about the theme of Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz." Some people t...

Many of us go day by day living our lives without appreciating the true value of family. We occasionally take for granted the individuals who have brought us into this world, and generally forget to thank them for all they have done. I myself have fallen in this category, as I frequently bypass all ...

The word carbon- tetrachloride means a chemical compound containing four chlorine atoms per molecule. The word tetrachloride is used in the poem "Where I'm From". It is found in the first stanza, second line. The word tetrachloride supports the theme of family, and how unique a ...

The Use of Imagery in "Those Winter Sundays" Parents often have the desire to give to their children no matter how much pain it brings to themselves. In Robert Hayden's poem "Those Winter Sundays," the father does whatever is necessary to make his family comfortable. In ...

ANALYTIC EXERCISE Seven Centuries of Poetry in English Compare and contrast two of the three poems below, commenting in detail on notable features of language-use and on the feeling towards the parents developed in the poems: "Book Ends" "Because" "My Papa's Wa...

A Woman is the Foundation In the poem, "a woman is not a potted plants," Alice Walker is pointing out the contrasts between a woman and natural objects, one of which is a potted plant. The woman may appear to be just a decorative piece in the house, but Walker is trying to emphasize tha...

Relationsips with Fathers The narrator of My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke discusses a very heartbreaking and distressful situation when looking back at his childhood remembering a scene (perhaps one frequently enacted) where he and his drunken father w...

"Cinderella" The notion of rags to riches is a dominant theme in American Literature. However, fairy tales demonstrate a different theme. The idea of a character going from rags to riches show characters rising from the low class to high class in society due to hard work and de...

A little boy is always being violently beaten up by he's drunken dad. He uses he's dog's barking as a warning device to tell him if he's dad is coming home drunk. In this story, injustice can be seen from three different points of views. The boy's, the mother's and the ...

Legacies and Heritage Nikki Giovanni and Linda Hogan both wrote poems in the 1970s about their grandmothers that seem totally different to the unaware reader. In actuality, they are very similar. These two poems, Legacies and Heritage, express the poet's value of knowledge passed down from g...

Poems, although they can be appreciated individually, are better understood if the reader sees them in the context of the poet's other works. One such poem that benefits from being approached in this way is "Mother Who Gave Me Life". "Mother..." is one of several poems Harwo...

"Those Winter Sundays," is a poem about a son remembering his father. The poem seems to be a lament of the fact that the son, at the time could not perceive his father's expressions of love. The father is a hard worker who worked everyday even on Sundays. It is clear that there was distan...