Topic > Theme of Punishment in Poetry - 983

Seamus Heany, Rita Dove, and Sherman Alexie have written three poems that favor punishments from different corners of life. The authors wrote in third person and different styles in each of the stories to help the reader get a better insight. The author's purpose was to show a feeling towards punishment. Everyone deserves punishment at least once in their life for something they did unintentionally or by nature. Although the poems are all about punishment, each author gives the reader the meaning of the word in their own situations. Seamus Heany's beginnings as a poet began with meeting the woman he would marry and who would be the mother of his three children. Marie Heaney was a central part of Heany's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his poetry. Heany wrote a poem called Punishment in which he describes to the reader how a woman is tortured because she has committed adultery. The narrator also shows a certain kind of affection towards the woman in a couple of lines by saying, “I almost love you but I would have cast, I know, the stones of silence (1167).” That sentence shows that he loves the girl but knows that everyone, even him, has already sinned in the past. Heany's point of view shows sympathy and bitter love towards this act of punishment and shows me that Heany was hurt or subliminally received the other end of the punishment by describing the pain. Rita Dove was the youngest and first African American person ever named Poet Laureate of the United States. Much of Dove's work focuses on revealing the beauty and meaning of everyday events in ordinary life. In “The Yellow House on the Corner (1980)” and “Museum (1983),” he shows how such moments constitute the history of individuals and add to the experiences shared by human beings. This explains why he wrote a poem called The Cane Fields. The Cane Fields was about a group of Haitian soldiers who were attacked by the dictator of the Dominican Republic because they couldn't pronounce the r in the word Perijil on October 2, 1957. In the story there was a frequently used phrase which was "a the parrot imitates the spring", the parrot was a symbol of something beautiful and represented peace. That phrase was used repeatedly in every line after the narrator describes his horror at the hands of the Dominican army to symbolize the gift and curse of war.