Part one of term paper
Here's a poem by a Michigan lad, Theodore Roethke, whose father ran a nursery and greenhouse business in Saginaw. This poem avoids all psycho-babble about love-hate relationships, childhood idealization of the father, family tensions and conflicts, the borderline between play and violence, whatever. It avoids those cliches and trite formulati ...

Part two of term paper
... particulars. Every image here deserves to be pondered and tasted to the full, for its emotional richness. The overall tone and feeling contains love and pain and humor and nostalgia all blended. This is a poem worth memorizing. The structure of the poem rhymes at the end of each line, while the sentences end at each quatrain. The rhyme scheme is consistent throughout the piece and each line rhymes with every other line. For example, in the first line ‘whiskey on your breath’ rhymes with ‘bu ...