Sample Poetry Responce

1. Ancestors, parents, children. The connections and oppositions among these groups often provide interesting material for poets. In the work of at least two poets you have studied, examine the means by which such relationships have been explored.

In Naomi Shihab Nye’s “My Father and The Fig Tree”, a clear relationship is shown between the speaker, and their father. As the poem begins, the reader becomes immediately aware that our speaker, now older, is looking back on his/her childhood and the relationship they had with their father. In addition, the reader can understand how well the speaker knows their father, as they observe his obsession and fascination with figs, a fruit he adores. From the very beginning of the story, the speaker addresses this, by showing his love for the fruit in everything he would do- whether it was including the fruit in his stories or even being overjoyed when he finds a fig tree in Dallas, Texas- his love for them is clearly shown.

In the first stanza, it is evident that the speaker and the father shared a close relationship, as they say: “In the evening he sat by my bed weaving folktales like vivid little scarves.” Because storytelling is an intimate craft/art form, the speaker is portraying the time they spent one on one with their father. The speaker even goes as far to portray their father as an artist, as they romanticize his actions by using metaphors and similes.

However, in the second stanza, there is a clear shift in their relationship. When the speaker addresses the first time they ate “a dried fig and shrugged”, there was a divide between them and their father. The speaker goes on to say that their father wanted them to eat a fresh fig rather than a dried one, as a way to fully experience the fruit/.; However it is not just the taste of the fruit the father is trying to make his child understand, rather, he uses the fig as a symbol of his home country, and by eating a fig (a fruit that grew there and not where he is currently living) it reminds him of his homeland.

This is not to say that eating the dried fig divided the relationship between the father and his child completely; it didn’t.  In the last stanza, we can see they still have a connection with each other when the father calls the daughter after moving to let her know he found a fig tree growing in his new backyard. When he shows her the new fig tree, it symbolizes that this new home is their home. In addition, we can assume that he was able to give his child a ripe fig to try, symbolizing the child is able to understand and have a deeper connection to him and to his past home.