Tuesday, January 19, 2010

"My Son, My Executioner" , Donald Hall

"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.

4 comments:

  1. Left out the last verse:

    I take into my arms the death
    Maturity exacts,
    And name with my imperfect breath
    The mortal paradox.

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  2. I think you've almost go it, but I would add that the father realizes that as he watches his son grow he must also watch as his own life makes its way towards its end. The father lives on in the son but the father's time is limited and each day the son grows the father is closer to the day of his own end.....He reflects upon the fact that at 22 and 25 he and the mother seemed to live forever. But now, he recognizes that nothing is forever and while they watch the child grow and live, they also see the "arch" of their own lives bending towards an end.....

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