Topic and Thesis

The topic i chose is the complexity of parent-child relationships.
My thesis statement is as follows: In the poems "Photograph of my Father in his Twenty Second Year" and "Do Not Go Gentle into that Goodnight", parent-child relationships are shown through harsh love, unconditional love, and death.

Poetry essay

I am not exactly sure as to what I am going to write about quite yet. I really want to do something with "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Thomas and "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Carver. I think the parent relationships are similar in that they both have a great respect for their fathers. I'm still working it out though. I find that the tones of both poems are quite different. Maybe I can focus in on that.

Thesis Ideas

In the poems, "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver and "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas, the speakers of each poem reveal their relationship to their fathers. In "Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year," the speaker talks about the old age of his father and of his opinion on his father's death. In "Do not go gentle into that good night," the speaker reveals how he feels about his father and how he wishes to be like him, althought he will never be. These two poems are closely related in the topics of parent-child relationships because they both show two mens attitutes and ideas of their fathers. In both poems, the author uses tone, theme, and word choice to make these poems more interesting and easily read and understood.

I will support my thesis by using quotes from the poems and other ideas and concepts I have learned from previous chapters in this class.

Thesis and Prewriting

I decided to compare "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas and "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden. I liked how different the poems were in the way the relationships with their fathers were represented. It seems like Thomas was older when this poem was written, based on the word usage and overall description, while Hayden seems to be remembering his childhood, or else this poem was written when he was younger. The feelings each has towards their father are very different, and I find the contrast very interesting. The differences may have to do with the age the authors are writing about or wrote it at, I'm not sure. I want to compare the differences the authors had in their feelings/relationships with their fathers. When I answered the questions on page 877, I answered a question about positive and negative word, phrase (etc.) associations in each poem. For Hayden's poem there are not many positive and many negatives, while the opposite was true with Thomas' poem, I found many positives and only a few negatives. Answering those questions really helped me because they are not ones I would have thought to ask myself.

What I have thought up as a thesis so far is: Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" both explain feelings toward their fathers; Hayden's shows a negative relationship, while Thomas' shows a positive one.

I am not sure if that is too long for a thesis, or if it is too broad? It also might be difficult to have people understand the differences in how the authors felt because it seems as though the poems were written in much different circumstances, as Hayden's was about daily childhood, and Thomas' was about his father dying.

My Thesis & Prewriting Thoughts

My introduction and thesis go as follows: The poems “Dulce et Decorum est,” by Wilfred Owen, and “The Man He Killed,” by Thomas Hardy, use a soldier’s viewpoint to show how gruesome and violent war is. The horrific images and confusion seen and felt by each soldier during military service show that the once common notion, fighting and dying in a war is a righteous and heroic act, is no longer applicable to modern day wars. By using a soldier’s point-of-view, these poems show that war doesn’t bring about feelings of bravery and courageousness to soldiers on the battlefield, but brings about the realization that war is a destructive, dark pursuit that causes agony.

I chose this topic because these two poems, especially “Dulce et Decorum est,” intrigued me from the first time I read them. I am able to find new, interesting points in each poem every time I read them. Since I enjoy these poems, I won’t have any difficulty re-reading them many times for my essay.

The ideas I am considering using to compare my two poems are: the speaker’s attitude towards war, the figures of speech used to express the ideas about war, the poems’ tones, what the poems reveal about the speaker, and the central theme of each poem. I came up with these points by doing the prewriting activity on page 893 in our literature book.

My poetry essay will be a comparison between “Dulce et Decorum est” and “The Man He Killed.” I will use the figures of speech and graphic imagery used in “Dulce et Decorum est” to prove that the speaker is against war. For “The Man He Killed,” I will use the hesitation and confusion shown within the poem to prove that the speaker is unsure about war and can’t justify war. Although these two poems use different techniques to show their attitude towards war, they share a central theme, which will be what I am comparing in my essay.

The difference in tone between the two poems may cause difficulty when I am writing my essay. Although both poems have central themes that denounce war, the speaker’s use different tones to show how they feel about war. The lack of strong, graphic imagery in “The Man He Killed” may also cause problems when I am writing my paper, because in “Dulce et Decorum est,” the speaker uses very vivid imagery, while in “The Man He Killed,” the speaker uses his pauses and hesitation more so than graphic imagery.

The topic I have chosen excites me, because war is a subject that has been blazing in the news for the past few years. By writing this essay, I will be able to gain more personal perspective on how I feel about war, while comparing how these two speakers, who are soldiers, felt while they were serving in wars.

Thesis for Poetry Essay

It took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to write. I still struggle with poetry. I am going to try and understand the two poems "Do Not go gentle into that Good Night" and "Those Winter Sundays". I feel that they have alot in common and I will try to prove that to the readers. To me the speaker in both poems is a child that talks very proudly and positive about there father but when their father is speaking to them they show some negativity towards their father. I might have difficulty trying to come up with enough thoughts as to why I feel this way, but hopefully in the end it will all be smooth.

Thesis Statement(s)

I am examining two thesis statements:
In the poems Mending Wall by Robert Frost and The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy it seems both authors want us to ask ourselves “why as humans do we carry out a deed and as a result ponder the oddity of that deed?”
1. In Mending Wall the neighbors meet only to mend the wall, though the speakers wonders why is the wall even necessary?
2. In The Man He Killed the speaker sees that if it were not for war the man he killed would have been just another man to him.
I like this topic because it represents an important awareness to me: that humanity often act and think with opposing views. (maybe that should be my thesis????)
Not sure if I will be able to write a lot on this, but am willing to look into it.
In both poems To his Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell and Delight in Disorder by Robert Herrick both speakers attempt to justify their desire with the use of figurative language.
1. To his Coy Mistress the speaker uses hyperbole when he exaggerates time to convince his love that the time to love is now!
Delight in Disorder the speaker uses personification to make the object of his desire seem in control of his desire.
Although, I think the first thesis statement is more interesting to me personally, I may have more to write about with these two poems.
I like this topic because I think I could gather a lot of supporting evidence and both poems struck me as having speakers whom I would not want to hang around to much and surely would not want ogling me or trying to lure me into their paws. I figured this may give my writing a bit of bite.

Thesis

My thesis statement: The complexity of parent-child relationship is like no other relationship you will ever have. The two poems "Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas and "Photograph of my Father in His Twenty-Second Year" by Raymond Carver give us an insight of how different each individual person's relationship with their father may be. I chose the topic because one of the poems remind me of the relationship I had with my father. I will prove my thesis by analyzing the hidden meanings in both poems. I may run into problems with deciphering the poems. I have a hard time understanding poetry.