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    My Parents

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    This poem explores Stephen Spender's childhood experiences with social class differences. His parents tried to protect him from poorer neighborhood children due to their rough behavior, but this made him a target of their bullying. The children physically restrained him, verbally attacked him, and threw mud at him. Though longing for their acceptance, he refused to show how their actions hurt him by smiling and looking away.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    My Parents

    Uploaded by

    A person
    137 views2 pages
    This poem explores Stephen Spender's childhood experiences with social class differences. His parents tried to protect him from poorer neighborhood children due to their rough behavior, but this made him a target of their bullying. The children physically restrained him, verbally attacked him, and threw mud at him. Though longing for their acceptance, he refused to show how their actions hurt him by smiling and looking away.

    Original Description:

    Poetry analysis

    Original Title

    MY PARENTS

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    This poem explores Stephen Spender's childhood experiences with social class differences. His parents tried to protect him from poorer neighborhood children due to their rough behavior, but this made him a target of their bullying. The children physically restrained him, verbally attacked him, and threw mud at him. Though longing for their acceptance, he refused to show how their actions hurt him by smiling and looking away.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    137 views2 pages

    My Parents

    Uploaded by

    A person
    This poem explores Stephen Spender's childhood experiences with social class differences. His parents tried to protect him from poorer neighborhood children due to their rough behavior, but this made him a target of their bullying. The children physically restrained him, verbally attacked him, and threw mud at him. Though longing for their acceptance, he refused to show how their actions hurt him by smiling and looking away.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    MY PARENTS: Stephen Spender

    The Poet:

    Stephen Spender was a British poet, who was born in 1909 and died in 1995. He was a poet, novelist
    and wrote many academic essays. His work was preoccupied with themes such as social injustice and
    class struggles.

    Themes:

    • Childhood experience
    • Parental love
    • Social class differences
    • Domination
    • Bullying
    • Longing (for freedom)

    Paraphrase:

    His parents attempt to protect the speaker by keeping him from children who are described as
    “rough”. The children are poor, abusive in their language use, always running through the streets,
    climbing and swimming naked. The speaker seems physically weaker, even mentioning his lisp. He is
    targeted by these boys because of the differences between him and them. They physically restrain
    him, they verbally attack him and throw mud at him. The speaker longs for their acceptance,
    refusing to show how their actions hurt him by smiling and looking away.

    Poetic elements:

    Mood: the poem evokes within the reader a sense of empathy for the speaker. Clearly, he longs to
    be accepted by the boys, but class division and parental restrictions lead to his exclusion from the
    group. Instead, he becomes a target due to his fragility and differences from the boys.

    Tone: the last stanza of the poem conveys a tone of longing as the speaker wishes he could be
    accepted by the boys, but this does not happen.

    Point of view: the first person point of view effectively conveys the events described through the
    eyes of the speaker. The readers are therefore drawn into his experience and this evokes empathy
    for the young man in the face of the verbal and physical acts of bullying he experiences at the hands
    of the physically dominant boys.

    Form: this three quatrain poem has no particular rhyme scheme and therefore can be considered
    free or blank verse. The lack of formal structure is quite effective as it aids the conveying of the
    narrative style of the speaker as he relates why his parents kept him from the boys, the acts they
    perpetrated against him and his feelings of being ostracised by them.
    Poetic techniques:

    Simile:

    “threw words like stones”- the painful impact of their harsh language/ they used language designed
    to hurt.

    “muscles like iron”- physical strength of the boys emphasised

    “sprang out behind hedges like dogs to bark”- cunning, fierceness of their unexpected attacks

    Metaphor:

    “salt coarse pointing”- comparison to salt emphasises the painful actions of the boys, like salt on a
    wound, their hostility was designed to inflict psychological and physical pain.

    Hyperbole:

    “I feared worse than tigers their muscles like iron”- intense apprehension and terror on the part of
    the speaker towards his tormentors.

    Enjambment:

    “They ran in the streets and climbed cliffs…” endorses the conversational style of the poem and the
    continuity and consistency of the rough actions of the boys is emphasised via run-on line usage.

    Alliteration:

    “climbed cliffs”- emphasises their movement, thus aids in visualisation.

    Allusion: I looked the other way” biblical allusion to Jesus’ turning the other cheek demonstrates the
    contrast in the gentility of the speaker against his rough tormentors. It highlights his forgiving nature
    but like Jesus was by so many, is ultimately not accepted by the group.

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