Anthony mahfood

Dr. Ellis

February 27, 2011

Understanding Literature

Parents

The three stories all are very different but connected through the theme “parenting”. “The Video”, Fleur Adcock show the way parents forget about their children when a new child is born. While in “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, the abusive side of a drunken father is shown. In “untitled” by Peter Meinke it is almost like the poet wrote this in a reply to those poems saying that there are good fathers and things can change.

The “The Video”, Fleur Adcock portrays many children’s worst fear a new baby coming into the family. As a child I was the second child so I never really got the attention to myself because my sister and I were 1 year and a half apart, but I remember when my little brother was born a lot of attention switched from us to him even my sister and I was obsessed with him. In the poem The “The Video”, Fleur Adcock the same thing happen but Ceri could not accept the fact that she was not receiving all the attention any more so as show in stanza two and line five and six, “She watched Laura come out, and then,
in reverse, she made her go back in”. Ceri wanted to get rid of her sister because she wanted back all the attention from her parents.

Abuse by drunken parents is not an uncommon thing, but some time can create strength in the child. In “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke I believe that the father is beating his son because if it was his daughter I think the mother would of reacted differently. The mother wasn’t happy, but couldn’t really do anything to stop it. The line 'You beat time on my head' made me think that by his dad beating him it cause him to grow up faster and learn thing he would of never learnt.

This last poem Peter Meinke “(Untitled)” is almost like the future of “My Papa’s Waltz” because it is a father apologizing for all the years he beat his child. The father is begging his son to understand and forgive him because he realizes the effects that it can have on his son’s life. He realized how much he has hurt his son and now he doesn’t want it to affect his son for the rest of his life. The father know how import a parent’s influence is on their child and this is why he feel so bad and is begging for his son to forget about it so that they can both live a normal life in the future.

The three poems come together well because they all show the way that the parents feel about the situation as well as how the children are dealing with it. These poems remind me of when I use to visit a children’s home in Jamaica and there were a few children who stayed in a different room because they only trust a few people because they were abused by their parents. This is really sad because they did nothing to deserve it, but they have to live with that fear.