7/23/2023 0 Comments Sad poems about growing up![]() I’m not being pessimistic to suggest that it’s sadness, weaving through life like a shared strand on all of our genes. ![]() So what is it, truly, that brings our diverse tribe together? It includes people, myself not included, who aren’t amused by someone picking their nose (Silverstein has that great poem about a sharp-toothed snail that lives up the speaker’s nose and bites his finger off when he picks it). It includes our elders, youngers, those who have a different culture, geography, wealth, taste, and even language. But the truth is that our tribe - the human tribe - is bigger. Shel Silverstein can bring that tribe together like no other voice. If the poet is historically the shaman figure, as Michael Ryan argues in his essay “Poetry and the Audience,” the one who keeps the tribe together through songs and stories “because he is close to the gods through his ‘divine madness’,” then Shel Silverstein is the quintessential shaman for the tribe of English-speaking children. Not all my poems were sad I did bring Naomi Shihab Nye, a couple of poems from Variations of Ghazal, which is classified as a children’s book, but her poetry does lack the rhyme and humor of Shel Silverstein. I thought many things about the other poems I brought that didn’t materialize, because as it turned out, the young ones in attendance included children as young as 9, and many of the younger children complained that all the poems I brought were too sad.Īh, Shel Silverstein. I thought the poem would lead to a discussion about the things our parents do that we don’t appreciate. I thought that maybe the generation gap between the speaker and his father would resonate in these young ones. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.įearing the chronic angers of that house, I had hoped that many teenagers would attend, and accordingly the poems I brought for discussion centered on themes I thought teens could relate to, among them “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden:Īnd put his clothes on in the blueblack coldīanked fires blaze. This past summer I taught a poetry workshop at the Burlington Public Library. Even though the poem was sad and I was only 6 years old at the time, I liked it. For all I knew, maybe the little horse was cold, and at the time, growing up in southern Arizona, I thought that cold was the cruelest form of punishment. His voice told me that the poem was sad, but I wasn’t sure why. “The only other sound’s the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake,” my tone was somber then, like my dad’s. ![]() ![]() “The only other sound’s the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake.” My dad recited these lines together and asked me to repeat, confident that my hunger for the end rhyme would enable me to perfectly repeat them. “To ask if there is some mistake,” I repeated, following the iambic rhythm and end rhyme without flaw. “He gives his harness bells a shake,” I repeated, parodying even the jiggle of my dad’s neck. “He gives his harness bells a shake,” my dad said. The only thing I understood was that there was a little horse, and I liked him. I knew how to repeat every inflection of his somber tone, but I didn’t know what the poem was about. He started out by reading one of Frost’s lines and then having me repeat it. Or actually, I don’t remember thinking very much when I was small, so maybe my dad thought I should get practice, and one day he taught me to recite Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I was good with language from an early age, and the poem’s rhyme scheme aids memorization, so my dad thought this was an appropriate exercise. Poetry Academy, I thought I should get some practice. Once when I was small, after my dad had told me that I’d be going to the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |