In The Park Gwen Hardwood

In the Park Being a parent is a very stressful and difficult job, the reason is because when it comes to being a parent a child’s needs comes before anything else. In the poem “In the Park,” Gwen Hardwood discusses the feelings involved with raising children. The speaker in the poem has feelings of regret and sadness as she thinks of what her life could’ve been if she never had children. The poem speaks to people because it makes people who had mothers wonder whether their mothers thought like this and it makes parents in the same situation feel exactly how the speaker is feeling. In this poem the speaker is a mother and she is with her three children at the park. She then has a conversation with someone that she once loved and in this conversation

Something else that makes it different than the other stanzas is that the rhyme scheme is in a different format, the rhyme scheme is in an ABCABC format. The first three lines of the stanza is “They stand a while in flickering light, rehearsing the children’s names and birthdays. ‘It’s so sweet to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive,’” in these lines of the poem the mother and the man are talking and the subjects that the mother is having about her children sounds insincere. It also sounds like she has to say it so often for people she runs into that it sounds rehearsed, especially the part when she talks about how sweet it is to see the children watch and grow. In the last three lines of the poem it says “she says with a departing smile. Then, nursing the youngest child, sits staring at her feet. To the wind she says, ‘They have eaten me alive.’” As the man leaves her smile goes away because she no longer has to pretend to be happy. While she is nursing one of her children she looks down at her feet like someone who seems defeated and reveals her true feelings. She says that they have eaten me alive and this phrase shows her regret and