One of the poems we have been assigned to read in class is "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver. From what I can tell, the speaker in this poem is looking at a photograph of her father on fishing trip from when he was a young man, 22 years old to be precise. I immediately assumed that the speaker was a female, but I think that was simply because I was trying to identify with the speaker. In reality, it probably makes more sense that the speaker is male because he is talking about fishing with his father. The son begins the poem describing the surroundings in the picture, and it is in this first stanza that I concluded the father was on a fishing trip. The speaker says, "...he holds in one hang a string of spiny yellow perch." In the second stanza the speaker talks about how his father has always wanted to be something he isn't, "He would pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, wear his old hat cocked over his ear. All his life my father wanted to be bold." In this last statement I sensed some resentment from the speaker. It seems as though he was saying that instead of yearning to be a good father to his son, he instead yearned to be revered by his comrades. I could not recall the exact definition of posterity, so I looked it up at dictionary.com and discovered that it meant future generations of. This was consistent with how the second stanza was describing the father's facade. It is in the final statement that the son makes his resentment towards his father especially clear. He says, "Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I who can't hold my liquor either, and don't even know the places to fish." This makes it apparent to the reader that the speaker's father was never there for him as child or even an adult. He holds a grudge against his father for not being there for him like a father should be, for not taking him on fishing trips or spending quality time with him. This is what I gathered from the poem, and I look forward to seeing what my classmates thought in class tomorrow.
The poem "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath was a little more difficult for me to understand than Raymond Carver's poem "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year." From what I gathered, the poem is about a woman whose Nazi father died when she was very young, but the memories of him still haunt her. She ends up searching for a husband who resembles her father, and the speaker describes her husband as a vampire who "drank her blood" for seven years. The speaker also talks about attempting to kill herself while trying to rid herself of these men in her life. I get the impression that by the end of the poem the speaker finally shuts them both out of her life, "staking them in the heart." At the beginning of the poem the speaker compares her father to black shoe that she has had to live in. Not only does this evoke images of being trapped, but the color black also brings about negative connotations from the very beginning of the poem. "...black shoe in which I have lived like a foot for thirty years, poor and white, barely daring to breathe or Achoo." These lines in the first stanza describe the speakers fear of her father really well. She describes her father with terms like God, statue, and big which let us know how helpless she felt around him. Because her father is said to be a Nazi, she assumes the part of the Jew or the victim. "An engine, an engine chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may as well be a Jew." To compare her feelings toward her father to going to a concentration camp is a pretty big deal. It illustrates again how deathly afraid of him she was. Stanza 8 is really confusing to me. I think the speaker is describing some of the landscape of Germany. She also speaks of her "gypsy ancestress." I suppose this means that at least one of her ancestors was a gypsy, but I am not sure of how this is relevant. I vaguely remember learning about the Nazis exterminating gypsies, but I am not 100 percent sure. In the next stanza the speaker admits how she has always been scared of her father with his "neat mustache" and "Aryan eye," which is again speaking of his Nazi qualities. The mustache reference seems to put her father in a category with Hitler. In a following stanza the speaker says, "...a cleft in your chin instead of your foot but no less a devil for that..." This statement confused me at first because honestly who has a cleft in their foot? However I typed cleft foot into google and discovered the often times the devil is portrayed as an animal-like creature with hoof-like feet. This is consistent with the rest of the line when the speaker discusses the devil. Finally the speaker tries to kill herself in the 12th and 13th stanzas to reconnect with her father but fails. She then begins searching for a man who resembles her father. This man is describes as black and evil, but she decides to marry him, "And I said I do, I do." In the final stanzas the speaker overcomes both her father's haunting memory and the man she has married who resembles her father. She says, "If I've killed one man, I've killed two---" and "There's a stake in your fat, black heart..."
VOCAB:
Tyrol: Part of the Alpine mountain region, it borders Germany
Aryan: Hitler's perfect race, blond hair and blue eyes
Panzer-man: German tank drivers
Luftwaffe: German word for air force
(FOUND ALL OF THESE TERMS ON WIKIPEDIA)
Meghan McDonough
MWF 9:05-9:55
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