Strategy Essay, Week 14

In the poem "To" by Franz Wright, one finds upon a first reading that the poem appears to be playing by the conventional rules of poetry. For example, the poem is written on a subject that is stereotypical in that it "should have a poem written about it" and uses some intesnsely emotional language throughout. However, because Wright does not identify the person to whom his persona is speaking, we cannot know precisely what kind of relationship is expressed or how the emotionality signifies. Likewise, the turn near the end of the poem to implied violence takes the poem from what could have been a saccharine account of a persona's child to an interesting display of the mixed emotions regarding a parent to his child, comparing the parent to God and the child to his "children."

The poem begins with the line "Before you were born I loved you," signifying that the poem will be very emotional in its execution, and indeed through the language of this particular piece, one may read that the persona is a parent (perhaps a father) writing for his child (who seems to be, though is not necessarily, female). He goes on to write in similar terms, allowing the persona to speak about his feelings regarding his child's first steps, again a very emotional time and one that may be expected in poetry, just as the later lines on the child's teenage years and being a "weedy thing" come in the next stanza.

However, directly after these lines, the turn occurs in which the persona states, "I loved and I was there / while they were raping you / I loved although / like God / that's all that I could do--" and the poem ends. After three stanzas of intensely felt language regarding the childhood of the persona's offspring, we find an immediate and very unexpected turn of events that is difficult to decipher. In fact, though violent, this stanza relates the same type of love as the ones previous in that it recalls the pain (both emotional and physical) that the child has had to go through in his/her life, for which the parent could do nothing but continue to love. Indeed, such sentiment expresses well the mixed power of a parent to both love and protect a child in that this persona realizes that there was only so much he could do to shield his child from the world, leaving him/her to be "raped" while he could only stand there and continue to love.

These methods are very interesting for Wright and are very unusual techniques for a postmodern, contemporary writer. Such language and expressions of love (especially the use of the word "love") for a child from the parent's perspective are expected realms of poetry and generally frowned upon, at least when a poet is starting out. However, because Wright is such a developed poet, he knows how to manipulate the "expected-ness" of the subject and both pander to how a parent would really feel toward a child while simultaneously adding fresh imagery and interesting turns.