"My Son, My Executioner", Donald Hall, page 367 of Sound and Sense
My son, my executioner
I take you in my arms
Quiet and small and just astir
and whom my body warms
Sweet death, small son,
our instrument of immortality,
your cries and hunger document
our bodily decay.
We twenty two and twenty five,
who seemed to live forever,
observe enduring life in you
and start to die together.
Analysis:
"My Son, My Executioner" is loaded with examples of literary devices. In the second stanza the child is compared to "sweet death" showing how the child is the metaphorical representation of death to the parents. This is also ironic because children are usually symbolic of life,not death. Yet at the same time through the usage of paradox, the boy is also personified as being "enduring life" showing a contradiction in the descriptions of the child. This reveals the duality of the child, because the child is the result of the parents lives and the through their child they will live on after they are gone,through their "instrument of immortality". At the same time though through diction it is likely that the parents are being slowly "killed" by the child because they most likely were not ready for a child yet, one of them being only "twenty two" and the other" twenty five", they had a lot of time together, and maybe they weren't ready for a child just yet, because the birth of a child would signal the end of their relationship/their lives together as they knew them, and instead of focusing on each other they would focus only on the child. It is in this way that the child would "leach" the life out of its parents so it could live, thus revealing the 'paradox' of the relationship between the newborn and its parents.
Aside from the irony, metaphor, and paradoxical relationships described before, the poem also uses a pseudo-rhyme scheme, in that some lines rhyme but others do not, examples being "forever","together" "executioner","astir" . Backtracking a bit to the "leach"-like relationship "your cries and hunger document our bodily decay" shows how through the diction of "document" that it is not an immediate thing, but gradual, and that the child is slowly through its cries and hunger is the cause of the parents bodily decay.
All in all, I personally believe that the poem was pretty successful in delivering its message, and although the poem is short it is riddled with literary devices contributing to the overall meaning of the poem as a whole. I believe the poem is simply referring to how when a parent has a child it is the end of their life as they knew it previously, because instead of doing what they want, their responsibilities and commitment to their child prevent them from continuing whatever life style they had before. It is in this way that it is a 'death' of one part of your life, and the beginning of a new phase, one with the focus of life on the child instead of oneself, this is why the child is both an "executioner" and an "instrument of immortality" , because it may be "executing" the parents past life, but through their child they will live on. Evidence to support this is clearly demonstrated throughout the last stanza.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
"Guns" ,W.D. Ehrhart
"Guns",W.D. Ehrhart, Sound and Sense page 360
Again we pass that field
green artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue,
its ugly little pointed snout
ranged against my daughter's school.
"Did you ever use a gun
like that?" my daughter asks,
and I say, "No, but others did.
I used a smaller gun. A rifle."
She knows I've been to war.
"That's dumb," she says,
and I say, "Yes," and nod
because it was, and nod again
because she doesn't know.
How do you tell a four-year-old
what steel can do to flesh?
How vivid do you dare to get?
How explain a world where men
kill other men deliberately
and call it love of country?
Just eighteen, I killed
a ten-year-old. I didn't know.
He spins across the marketplace
all shattered chest, all eyes and arms.
Do I tell her that? Not yet,
though one day I will have
no choice except to tell her
or to send her into the world
wide-eyed and ignorant.
The boy spins across the years
till he lands in a heap
in another war in another place
where yet another generation
is rudely about to discover
what their fathers never told them.
Analysis:
One of the most interesting lines in the poem in my opinion is "artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue, its ugly little pointed snout, ranged against my daughter's school." I say this because the personification of the artillery gun as being a (presumably) pig, for having a snout really reveals how the author feels about the gun, in that it, like the pig, is filthy and the manifestation of sin.Just as the pig is usually represented as being a glutton, the gun is now being likened to the pig in that by extension it could be an allusion to the gun being an object of sin, because it is used to kill. Furthermore, this quotation also foreshadows that many of the small innocent children of the school the gun is pointing to, are going to grow up and experience the hardships of war, just as the narrator has. As for the gun pointing out to the children it somewhat builds to the satirical theme of the poem in that it is like it has chosen the children by pointing at them, beckoning them forward to war, and the destruction of their innocence.
Stanzas 3-7 also are more examples of literary elements. In that they feature a dramatic monologue/train of thought style explanation on what the narrator is thinking in response to his daughter asking about the gun. In this he explains how he was just 18 when he killed a 10 year old boy , the image still sticking in his head to this day. The passage then highlights the emotional struggle the simple innocent question of "Did you ever use a gun like that?" brings to the narrator and makes him struggle with the realization that he will have to either tell her the struggles he faced one day, or leave her ignorant to find out for herself the hardships of the world.
In essence I thought this poem was pretty well put together. I believe that it is trying to be satirical to war, and that it is attempting to highlight the personal struggles war will bring about to peoples lives, and that the consequences of our actions during war will echo on after we are gone, if we do not teach our children about war eventually they will be ignorant to its 'touch' should they ever have to face it. This is demonstrated by the last stanza in which the narrator proclaims "Yet another generation is rudely about to discover, what their parents never told them." All in all, I think the poem is pretty successful in getting its message across.
Again we pass that field
green artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue,
its ugly little pointed snout
ranged against my daughter's school.
"Did you ever use a gun
like that?" my daughter asks,
and I say, "No, but others did.
I used a smaller gun. A rifle."
She knows I've been to war.
"That's dumb," she says,
and I say, "Yes," and nod
because it was, and nod again
because she doesn't know.
How do you tell a four-year-old
what steel can do to flesh?
How vivid do you dare to get?
How explain a world where men
kill other men deliberately
and call it love of country?
Just eighteen, I killed
a ten-year-old. I didn't know.
He spins across the marketplace
all shattered chest, all eyes and arms.
Do I tell her that? Not yet,
though one day I will have
no choice except to tell her
or to send her into the world
wide-eyed and ignorant.
The boy spins across the years
till he lands in a heap
in another war in another place
where yet another generation
is rudely about to discover
what their fathers never told them.
Analysis:
One of the most interesting lines in the poem in my opinion is "artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue, its ugly little pointed snout, ranged against my daughter's school." I say this because the personification of the artillery gun as being a (presumably) pig, for having a snout really reveals how the author feels about the gun, in that it, like the pig, is filthy and the manifestation of sin.Just as the pig is usually represented as being a glutton, the gun is now being likened to the pig in that by extension it could be an allusion to the gun being an object of sin, because it is used to kill. Furthermore, this quotation also foreshadows that many of the small innocent children of the school the gun is pointing to, are going to grow up and experience the hardships of war, just as the narrator has. As for the gun pointing out to the children it somewhat builds to the satirical theme of the poem in that it is like it has chosen the children by pointing at them, beckoning them forward to war, and the destruction of their innocence.
Stanzas 3-7 also are more examples of literary elements. In that they feature a dramatic monologue/train of thought style explanation on what the narrator is thinking in response to his daughter asking about the gun. In this he explains how he was just 18 when he killed a 10 year old boy , the image still sticking in his head to this day. The passage then highlights the emotional struggle the simple innocent question of "Did you ever use a gun like that?" brings to the narrator and makes him struggle with the realization that he will have to either tell her the struggles he faced one day, or leave her ignorant to find out for herself the hardships of the world.
In essence I thought this poem was pretty well put together. I believe that it is trying to be satirical to war, and that it is attempting to highlight the personal struggles war will bring about to peoples lives, and that the consequences of our actions during war will echo on after we are gone, if we do not teach our children about war eventually they will be ignorant to its 'touch' should they ever have to face it. This is demonstrated by the last stanza in which the narrator proclaims "Yet another generation is rudely about to discover, what their parents never told them." All in all, I think the poem is pretty successful in getting its message across.
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