summary of the poem letter from a parent
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Letter from A Parent :
I feel I ought to write
About Tom’s essay-work last night.
Of all the subjects you have set
This seemed the most unwise yet.
“Describe your family…" Tom wrote it.
So well, I just had to stop it.
Being handed in…so did my wife…
The details of our family life
Are not such a kind, alas,
That I should want them read in the class.
We did not wish the High School Staff
To read them for a lunch-hour-laugh.
We tore it out. I realise.
You may think what we did unwise –
But give it your consideration.
And please accept my explanation.
I trust you will not blame my son.
For, after all, the work was done.
Yours Truly,
BY Harold Honeybun
The six sections of the title poem of Letters from a Father record the slow growth into health and peace of an elderly couple, presumably the speaker’s parents, as they find increasing pleasure in a bird feeder the speaker has given them. The voice throughout most of the poem is that of the father. Throughout, the stanzas are composed of rhymed quatrains.
In the first section, the speaker offers a long list of his pains—an ulcerated tooth, pressure sores from a leg brace, a bad prostate gland, and a bad heart. He feels ready to die. His old wife is in even worse shape: She falls down and forgets her medicines; her ankles are swollen, and her bowels are bad. This letter concludes with the old man chastising his daughter for wasting good money on a bird feeder; better to poison the birds and be rid of their diseases and mess, he says.
The next section notes that the daughter has brought her parents a bird feeder of their own—a waste of money, the old man says, as they will surely live no more than a few weeks. Still, he confesses that they are enjoying it. In this section, the old man’s physical complaints are still vivid—deafness, a bad heart, and belching—and he has added complaints about the birds. They are not even good for food, like the ones the father used to hunt years ago.
The third section creates a sort of transition; its tone is far more positive than that of the first two. The old man is evidently pleased at the large numbers of birds coming to the feeder, and he asks the daughter for a bird book so that he and “Mother” can identify them. They have even sent “the girl” (evidently a household helper) to buy more feed, although the old man tempers the hopefulness of this remark by noting that she had to go to town anyway (the reader suspects that the father is rationalizing).
In the fourth section, the reader learns that, in their feeding frenzy, some of the birds are flying into the old couple’s window and knocking themselves out. The old man recounts how a visitor rescued one unconscious bird and brought it in to be restored by the old man’s stroking. His joy in the little bird’s recovery is evident. He adds that the bird book has arrived.
The fifth section records the old man’s delight in the great variety of birds that frequent the feeder. He has names for all the species and describes their habits with...