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Ernest Hemingway was a recognized genius in the field of literary pieces and poetry works. One of the remarkable poems written Hemingway was the poem titled Advice to a Son. This explication paper digs deeper into the elements present in the said poem.
Advice to a Son was written by Hemingway in 1931. The main purpose of the author in writing this poem is to offer his son some truths and insights concerning the callous realities of living. Hemingway reflected on society and the way people seek out opportunities to improve their living. For Hemingway, the world is a dangerous place. The poem is brief yet sweet and straight to the point. In this poem, Hemingway shared his wisdom to his son being that he was more experienced and learned. He expressed his views on how a man should live in a world that experiences massive changes in culture and politics.
The poem’s diction consists of two components namely the vocabulary and syntax. In the poem Advice to a Son, the words used were simple and easy to understand. In terms of syntax, there is an apparent repetition of the word “never” in the poem. The word “never” was mentioned in every line of the poem except the last lines of the stanzas. The word “never” is a form of negation which means not at all or never ever. The use of this word in the poem is so strong that it puts emphasis on what the father wanted his son to do. The father told his son “never to trust”; “never to kill”; “never to sign”; “never to rent”; and a lot more.
Hemingway uses a formal tone in the poem. The delivery of the lines is uttered in a persuasive way trying to capture the attention of the son and convince him to believe that what the father speaks the truth about the harsh realities of living on earth. The lines evoke a feeling of bewilderment as to why the father warned his son not to be too trusting. The tone in the first four lines of every stanza seems to vary with the last lines.
Paradoxically, Hemingway may be right in some aspects of the poem but the words also leave some room for criticisms. For instance, in the line that says “never trust a white man”, it stereotypes the white man and associates them as bad. On the other hand, when the author said “never kill a Jew”, it appears to say that there is nothing wrong to kill other races but not Jews. But perhaps, if these lines may be interpreted in the standpoint of the author, it may well likely that something happened to the poet in the past which made him disliked white men.
Connotations and denotations were also used in the poem. For example, when the author said “don’t enlist in armies”, he was trying to denote that being in the army would endanger the life of his son. When the father told his son never to sign a contract, he was trying to denote that a contract is a form of agreement, a strong weapon that can be used against another if in case the person fails to comply with the conditions agreed on. When the father told his son “not to have many wives”, he was denoting the fact that having many wives is a sin and an adulterous act. When the father told his son never to pay the blackmailer” or “go to a law”, the father was trying to connote the fact that that blackmailers and laws are not consistently trustworthy and will only put the son in hot water.
The poem made use of rhyming words as well such as Jew and pew, wives and hives, seat and neat, law and straw, and dies and sky. The poem has four stanzas and each stanza has five lines.
