Free Verse:
A poem that doesn't rhyme or use a type of pattern.
Appropriate Poem Example:
A poem that doesn't rhyme or use a type of pattern.
Appropriate Poem Example:
Little Father
By Li-Young Lee b. 1957 Li-Young Lee
I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.
I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest.
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.
I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won’t drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.
Biographical Information:
Li-Young Lee was born in Djakarta, Indonesia in 1957 to Chinese political exiles. Both of Lee’s parents came from powerful Chinese families: Lee’s great grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China, and Lee’s father had been the personal physician to Mao Tse-tsung. In Indonesia, Dr. Lee helped found Gamaliel University. Anti-Chinese sentiment began to foment in Indonesia, however, and Lee’s father was arrested and held as a political prisoner for a year. After his release, the Lee family fled through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, arriving in the United States in 1964. Lee and his parents moved from Seattle to Pennsylvania, where Dr. Lee attended seminary and eventually became a Presbyterian minister in the small community of Vandergrift. Though his father read to him frequently as a child, Lee did not begin to seriously write poems until a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where he studied with Gerald SternBiographical Information:
Interpretation of poem:
This poem talks about three phases of death: transcendent, the physical, and the emotional. Transcendent talks about the religious beliefs of where a person is going to go when they die. Physical is about the body being buried in the ground. Emotional is about how the death of his father will always remain in his heart. After all these transitions he relates back to his own life and how he learns to cherish it.
Visual Representation:
Explanation of Visual:
This picture explains this poem, because it states that he will never forget his love one. Even though he is dead and gone. This camera represent memories that don't fade away or change , but the people do (ex. in age phases or their personality).
Citations: