Student Question
How does Jimmy Carter's poem "I Wanted to Share My Father’s World" reflect on lifespans, regeneration and legacy?
Quick answer:
Jimmy Carter's poem "I Wanted to Share My Father’s World" reflects on lifespans, regeneration, and legacy by exploring the complex relationship between a father and son. The speaker initially resents his father's strict discipline but later appreciates it as he becomes a father himself. The poem highlights how the father's influence continues through the son's character, creating a lasting legacy that transcends his lifetime, emphasizing the cyclical nature of generational influence and personal growth.
Beginning your paper with a strong thesis will help shape the direction of your paper. The poem is a poignant examination of this lifelong and sometimes tense relationship between father and son. Yet in the end, the speaker misses his father and longs for his praise.
I might begin with a thesis like this:
Through a poignant tone, the speaker conveys both the difficulties of fatherhood and the ultimate reward in creating a legacy that will shape the next generation of fathers.
In the first body paragraph, you could examine the struggles between the speaker and his own father. He notes that as a child, he "despised the discipline" that his father used to shape his son into the man he wanted him to become. As a result, the times were "rare" when father and son crossed the emotional bridge to meet each other on neutral ground. Theirs was not...
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a particularly warm relationship.
In the second body paragraph, you could examine the payoff. After his father dies, the speaker longs to hear his father's approval of his work. He realizes that his father was pained to use the discipline which directed his son's path. And it took years for him to "put aside / the past resentments" of his boyhood days.
In the third body paragraph, you could examine the efforts toward legacy. As a father, the speaker appreciates the work his own father did toward shaping his character. And he realizes that through the hard work his father did in his boyhood, his father will always live within him. Because his father shaped his character, his father's legacy lives in his son (who would become President of the United States).
Thus, the speaker's father has ended his time on earth, but the lessons he taught his son have shaped his son's character in ways that will never be forgotten. We can assume these lessons are now embraced as he raises his own children, and the speaker's father has created a legacy of shaping honorable men of character which transcends his own life span.