My Son My Executioner Summary

Examining “My Son, My Executioner” Poets.org states Donald Hall, the author of “My Son, My Executioner”, was born in 1928 in Hamden, Connecticut. As an adolescent he began writing. At sixteen he attended the Bread-Loaf Writer’s Conference, and in the same year had his first work published. Hall graduated in 1951 from Harvard University in Boston with a BA. In 1953 he graduated from the University of Oxford in England. Hall has published many books of poetry, edited textbooks and anthologies, written autobiographies, and has won many awards. In 1972 he married the poet Jane Kenyon. In 1995 Kenyon died from leukemia. Hall’s “My Son, My Executioner” was written in 1955.
“My Son, My Executioner” by Donald Hall out of Literature and the Writing Process, contains a lot of
They begin a new life. In the second stanza the speaker says, “Your cries and hungers document our bodily decay”. This is symbolic of new parents sacrificing their life for their child. Parents, especially parents of a new baby, sacrifice a lot of sleep for example. When one does not sleep they feel ill in many ways. They may feel like zombies without sleep. They give up time they had once spent caring for themselves. They now spend much of that time caring for a demanding newborn. The physical and emotional demands of caring for a newborn exhausting for parents. Also in the second stanza the speaker writes, “Sweet death, small son, our instrument of immortality” there are two origins of irony here. “Sweet death” to most people does not seem like fitting words for a newborn. Death is not sweet. Death is sad and cold. However, when thinking about the amount of energy parents spend on their infants, and how at times, they feel like the life has been sucked out of them “sweet death” begins to sound accurate. Parents love their children. They will do anything for their child even if the child has demanding needs (Longman