Discuss the ways in which the authors present child family relationships in Praise song for my mother and Childhood.

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“Discuss the ways in which the author’s present child family relationships”

Alan Scandrett

The connection between family members is bond as strong as Titanium and flexible as elastic, in fact many different poets represent their thoughts and emotions through their poems. Here, we are bestowed with two poems that are an accolade to the parents of two poets, by Grace Nichols, and Stephen Spender, with their poems “Praise song for my mother” and “Childhood”.

The two poems contain a heavily nostalgic tone throughout the poems, through the use of this I have established that the poet’s are attempting to communicate their memories through the poem’s. Spender, though he titled the Poem ‘My Parents’ has little obvious relation to the poem at face value other than the starting sentence of the first stanza “ My parents kept me from children who were rough” where he almost has connotations of blaming them for separation from what they thought were ‘lesser’ citizens, he tends to refer to the childhood he lived as a young boy who was bullied on his way to and from school.  However when one delves deeper into the poem and attempts to read between the lines the reader can pick up a tone of blame, a tone of resentment and a tinge of sorrow! It would seem as though Spender, through his writing, is revealing his resentment towards his parents for isolating him from his peers, sheltering him from the real world and being overprotective! Maybe even snobbish as the poem also hints at the child being of a higher ‘class’ than the “rough children”.

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However in the poem Childhood  the poet is not referring to his parents, but an Aunt of his own; it seems that Cornford is trying to portray the ignorance of his youth when he says in the opening line of the first stanza “I used to think that grown-up people” as “grown-up” is not a term used by one who is of middle age or in their teenage years.  The poet doesn't seem to have that close a relationship with his “great-aunt Etty” by the way he described the elderly throughout the poem prior “veins like small fat snakes” ...

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