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Poem Analysis: For My Daughter By Weldon Kees

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While “For My Daughter”, a poem written by Weldon Kees during the 1940s, resonates the bitterness of a mother’s feeling toward her daughter’s illness, it also shows her hopelessness and pain as a mother. What I find interesting about this poem is the strong statement in the last line “I have no daughter” for “I have none”. I find this line to be contradicting, because the mother obviously show hopelessness as she could only watch her daughter slowly dying away. However, she might not bare any love for her daughter or she did love her daughter, but she tries to detach herself from loving her daughter to reduce the pain of losing her. So, I chose this poem to find out if bitterness is the only attitude the poet reveals in this poem.
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