The poets Mark Irwin, Robert Hayden, and Theodore Roethke use various techniques to make their pieces more impactful and to cause a specific reaction from their audience. These authors apply these devices in these poems which center around memories of their fathers. The poems “My Papa’s Waltz” by Roethke, “My Father’s Hats” by Irwin, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Hayden use mood, imagery, and metaphors to elicit emotions from the reader that help them relate better to the context of the poem.
The poem “My Papa’s Waltz” has a playful mood, with the scene set with carefreeness with the use of informal terms, like romp and waltz, to allude to a playful and clumsy dance. However, the poem also has a darker undertone expressed through an alternative interpretation of the same words, which may mean a scuffle, alongside the use of other phrases like ‘beat time on my head’ ( Roethke , 2001). The only metaphor used in the poem is eerie and evocative simile ‘I hung on like death’ which creates a more serious tone ( Roethke , 2001). The author uses imagery extensively in the poem. The smell of whiskey that is so strong it could knock out the small boy sets the stage for a clumsy dance that wrought havoc in the kitchen and might have bruised the author ( Roethke , 2001). Similarly, the author uses this imagery alongside others describing his father’s knuckles and hands to provide insight on his father’s character ( Roethke , 2001). The description of the mother’s countenance makes one wonder why she did not stop the dance, which might have been either because she knew it was harmless and loving or she was complacent.
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The poem “My Father’s Hats” has a tranquil mood. The speaker sets the location of the poem in his father’s closet where he reminisces about and imagines pleasant experiences with his father ( Irwin, 2004 ). The author uses imagery to create a memory of his father’s scent by imagining the musk and pines of the forest ( Irwin, 2004 ). He remembers how his father smelt like ‘rain clinging to damp earth’ ( Irwin, 2004 ). Additionally, the author uses the scent of the hats to create scenes of affection and longing, by imagining activities with his father, like being helped to climb trees, and he narrates this with vivid visual descriptions and more scent descriptions ( Irwin, 2004 ). At the end, the poem’s mood is sadder than it is reminiscent, and the author expresses this by comparing his feeling towards his father’s ‘sleep’ (death) to ‘standing on the canyon floor’, which could directly be interpreted as being at one’s lowest point ( Irwin, 2004 ). The author uses this metaphor in direct contrast to the previous one of being up in the trees when his father was alive.
The poem “Those Winter Sundays” has a melancholic mood. The author employs a reflective stance and looks back at a period of time and uses these memories to make some present moment inferences. The author expresses his regret about his mannerisms toward his father, which he admits were indifferent in spite of his father’s efforts ( Hayden, 1962 ). The author uses the imagery in ‘the blue-black cold’ to convey the intense atmosphere of the house and to magnify the effort that would have to be put to drive out the cold ( Hayden, 1962 ). Similarly, the author compares the cold to a tangible object by using a metaphor that describes the cold, as ‘splintering and breking’ ( Hayden, 1962 ). Further imagery is used to cause emotion for acts by the father when the user describes his father’s hands as, ‘cracked hands that ached’ and polished his good shoes ( Hayden, 1962 ). The author uses these descriptions to fondly refer to acts that were previously ignored but that he was presently grateful for.
The authors for these poems have all shown use of imagery and metaphors to stir up imagination in the reader and help them relate better to the gist of the poems. The poems “My Papa Waltz” and “My Father’s Hats” were particularly appealing due to the use of vivid description and the warmth that their authors manage to convey in a way “Those Winter Sundays” does not. All the three poems use mood, imagery, and metaphors to set the emotional stage and they help to create a specific reaction that the authors wished to pass to the reader.
References
Irwin, M. (2004). My Father's Hats by Mark Irwin - Poems | Academy of American Poets. Retrieved 28 July 2019, from https://poets.org/poem/my-fathers-hats
Hayden, R. (1962). Those Winter Sundays. The Heath Anthology of American Literature , 2 .
Roethke, T. (2001). My papa's waltz . Bluestem Press, College of Saint Benedict.
