Perspectives On Family Essay Examples

The topic of family has been important in literature just about as long as people have been writing. The major works of the Greek tragedians Sophocles and Aeschylus revolve around the drama that takes place within families, and the topic remains just as much a source of interest in modern times, as the exploits of such groups as the Kardashians occupying much of the public’s attention. Perhaps it is the universality of the family experience or the formative work that family provides for our personalities, for better and for worse, that makes this such a topic of universal relevance. In Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” Mistuye Yamada’s “The Night Before Goodbye,” Raymond Carver’s “Photograph of my Fahter in His Twenty-second Year,” and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Courage That My Mother Had,” the authors use figurative language devices such as simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole to take a look at their subject, which is the family.
The complexity of the waltz that the speaker presents in Roethke’s poem represents the complexity of family relationships. The waltz itself is a simple dance to learn, and the footwork is not difficult, as couples simply move back and forth while circling. When the speaker recalls that “The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy” (1-2), the hyperbole present opens the poem with a dash of fear. Using such metaphors as the “romp” that takes place as father and son dance around the kitchen in a way undermines the grave tone in the background. Cooking pans tumble down from the shelves, and the speaker’s mother looks at the two of them with a grim look on her mouth. The waltz keeps spinning, though, creating more a kaleidoscope effect of unsettling emotions rather than a pleasant portrait.
Additionally, there are several metaphors that suggest that the relationship between father and son (and possibly between father and mother) was more violent than loving. There is the battered knuckle (10) and the father’s belt buckle that scrapes against the boy’s ear (12). The knuckle represents a possible sign of physical violence, although the reader does not know what the knuckle has been hitting. Young boys growing up during the era in with Roethke grew up might have been accustomed to spankings happening with a belt in their father’s hands. The father “beat[s] time on [the son’s] head” (14). Normally, the verb “kept” would appear in that situation, at least with the normal language of rhythm. The substitution of “beat” could, again, suggest a malevolent violence bubbling beneath the surface. Just as the waltz keeps spinning around, never finding resolution, the emotions in this poem act in much the same way.
Raymond Carver’s “Photograph of my Father” explores a similar area, the impressions that a son has of his father. The viewpoint of the speaker in Carver’s poem comes later, in adulthood, as he looks back at an old photograph of his dad. The picture shows him an “embarrassed young face” (2) on a man holding “a string of spiny yellow perch” and “a bottle of Carlsbad beer” (3-5). The spiny nature of the perch serves as a metaphor of the spindly nature of the father’s self-assuredness. Note that the father “leans against the front fender of a 1934 Ford” (7), attempting to pose as something perhaps a bit more glamorous than he actually is. However, the son has grown up with this father, and he knows about the father’s real personality. The son observes that the father “would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity, wear his old hat cocked over his ear” (8-9). The young man feels, in a way, sorry for his father, because he realizes that the father was so intent on communicating a self-concept that was vastly different from his real self. He knows that the photograph is an image of his father, but it does not really feel like his father is looking back out at him.
As the poem comes to an end, the spiny perch are now even less vibrant, as the speaker observes “the hands that limply offer the string of dead perch and the bottle of beer” (12-13). What were, at the beginning of the poem, symbols of accomplishment and enjoyment, are now empty sacrifices at the altar of some misplaced idea of what it means to be a man, to be a success, to be worthy of the adoration of one’s son. The conflicts in the speaker’s mind echo those conflicts that most people feel when it comes to the battle between the expectations parents have for children and the progress parents have made in their own lives.
In Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “The Courage That My Mother Had,” the speaker has a much less ambiguous sense of her mother’s courage than either of the speakers in the first two poems under discussion have. The first stanza involves a search for a metaphor that is adequate to describe the bravery that her mother showed in life. She compares it to “rock from New England quarried; Now granite on a granite hill” (3-4). While water does wear away rock over time, in general, the granite of New England is enduring and solid. The process of quarrying involves taking the rock out of the earth to use it for one’s own purposes. The fact that the rock is back in the hill is expressive of the fact that the mother has passed away, in a reversal of the typical process. While the speaker’s mother’s courage has become one with the hill, the quarrying process pulls rock out of the earth, never to return. However, the metaphorical use of the granite indicates, for the speaker, just how durable her mother’s courage was.
The golden brooch in the second stanza is another metaphor, standing for the mother’s attempt to leave something tangible in her daughter’s hand to remember her by. Indicating, though, that the brooch is “something [she] could spare” (8) is instructive, as it shows that the brooch is not the most valuable gift that the mother left behind for her daughter. Instead, that gift is the courage that the speaker wishes that she could have gotten from her mother. She feels that her mother took the courage “into the grave” with her (10). However, one suspects that the healthy fear that the speaker feels is an actual sign that she has more of the courage she thinks she is missing than she knows.
Mitsuye Yamada’s “The Night Before Goodbye” expresses a family that is about to be scattered, and the tensions in such a situation. At the start of the poem, the mother is mending, a practice that is a well-known part of the domestic sphere. However, she is not doing so on the front porch, or in her living room, but in “room C barrack 4 block 4” (15). The setting is an internment camp in which Japanese Americans were placed during World War II, as the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese pushed the American government into a xenophobic frenzy that assumed that each Japanese on American soil could actually be a spy for the Japanese Empire. The mending that the mother is doing is her own attempt to take care of her family as best she can in a situation that threatens to ruin the family. The FBI has taken her husband in for questioning; one son is in the Army; two other children want to leave for the “free world outside” (7). She still has a small boy who will go with her into the internment camp with her husband, but that is scant comfort. All she can do, though, is to urge her daughter to “Remember keep your underwear in good repair in case of accident don’t bring shame on us” (17-22). If she can’t keep her child close, in that mixture of independence and heartbreak that greets each child’s leaving home, she can at least make sure that her child has appropriate underwear for the journey forward. In a way it is a pathetic sort of offering, but it is what she now has to give.
All four of these poems show, in their own way, the complex ways in which family works its way into our deepest emotional recesses, only to rear its head at what are sometimes the least convenient times, but also to provide support when we need it most. The uses of figurative language in these four poems all powerfully portray different elements of the role of family in our formation.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. “Photograph of My Father in his Twenty-second Year.” Course reading.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “The Courage That My Mother Had.” Course reading.
Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Course reading.
Yamada, Mitsuye. “The Night Before Goodbye.” Course reading.