Poetry Analysis 1

Poets often include in their poems places that evoke strong emotion. In the work of ONE poet you have studied, show how settings in poems have been connected to the presentation of feelings.

An attractive poem always involves strong emotional expressions. The emotions can be presented in words, lines, and the setting of the poet. Normally, a poem includes various psychological expressions, but still, there will always be a main emotional theme throughout the whole poem. Poets usually use different techniques to portray the environment of the poem and therefore establish the tone. In Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem My Father and the Fig Tree, there is a strong presentation of feeling: the connection to the homeland.

In the first stanza, the speaker gives a clear clue in the first line “For other fruits, my father was indifferent” to establish the basic tone of the poem. This illustrates that the father only prefers one certain type of fruit. In the next lines of this stanza, the speaker says “In the evening he sat by my bed/ weaving folktales like vivid little scarves” to show that those stories about fig trees give the speaker a sense of comfort and warmth. So according to the title of the poem and the first stanza, it’s obvious that “the fig tree” is a psychological belief to the father. The speaker describes the scene that the father comes and tells different stories every night in order to portray how much the father loves the fig trees and how those folktales impress the speaker so that this foreshadows a following scene.

In the second stanza, the father expresses his emotions more when saying the fig tree he refers to is “a fig straight from the earth--gift of Allah!--on a branch so heavy it touches the ground” and is “the largest, fattest, sweetest fig in the world”. Here the father conveys his strongest desire for the fig tree he has dreamt of. However, the readers are still confused about why the father cares a lot about the fig trees since the speaker has not discussed it yet.

When the mother shows up in the third stanza, the speaker shows a contrast between the mother and the father: the mother encourages her husband to plant a fig tree in the house, whereas the father just refuses this idea. From the mother’s perspective, the father is a “dreamer” who starts many things but never finish them. As the speaker has mentioned, however, the father is indifferent to other fruits, so it’s reasonable to understand why the other plants are just left there, being “gardened half-heartedly”. On the other hand, we can say that the father is also a persistent man because all he wants to plant and take care of is just the fig tree.

In the last stanza, the story is pushed into a climax as the father is so excited and happy to tell the speaker that he finds his “largest, fattest, sweetest fig in the world”. He expresses his happiness by “chanting a song” and later takes the speaker to the new yard to see the fig. The father finally finds his dreamt fig, “plucking his fruits like ripe tokens, emblems, assurance of a world that was always his own”. From here, we eventually realize that the fig tree is a symbol of the father’s culture, which connects him and his homeland strongly, and the whole poem is about the emotion of missing a homeland and pursuing a place where one can belong to.