Reading Mark Strand’s “Elegy for My Father” it quickly becomes clear that the speaker of the poem is a child of a dying parent. The speaker is describing in great detail the different stages of grief metaphorically. The speaker even goes so far as to break the poem down into different sections or stanzas.
In the first portion of the poem the speaker writes about how the father in the poem is becoming a shell of himself. For example, the poet writes “the body was yours, nut you were not there” (20). The poet uses hyperbole to give contexts what has happened to the father.
Furthermore, the speaker moves onto another stage of grief, anger. In the second stanzas, Answers, the poet states: “why did you lie to me? / Because the truth lies like nothing else and I…show more content… The poet starts the third stanza with “nothing could stop you” (48). This illustrates a good amount of acceptance by the writer. The writer even uses the metaphor “not the ocean rocking” (49), to further establish, that they the poet has learned to accept the coming events.
In the next stanza of the poem we do not see a lot pertaining to the stages of lose or grief, but goes on to describe the affect their father has had on the world. The poet uses apostrophe to do this. The poet writes about his father shadow and how it followed his father everywhere and participated in his father life. This is a very beautiful and striking stanza because the poet manages to use their fathers shadow as an instrument to make the reader feel more empathy.
The next stanza has a clear theme: mourning because the writers father has died and they are feeling depressed. At this point in the poem it appears that the writer is actually putting their father in the ground. “When the poet writes “old man, rise and keep rising, it does no good” (111) this has a lot of weight, because it is showing that the father in the poem is dead and not coming