Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter
This poem is about the death of a little girl who was very energetic in life.
Child Burial
This poem is about the death of a young boy from his mother’s perspective.
Those Winter Sundays
This poem is about how much the speaker regrets not appreciating what his father did for him.
The Magician Suspends the Children
This poem is about a mother who tells the two children how fast aging is.
This Is a Photograph of Me
This poem is woman’s first person description of her own dead body in a pond.
Love Poem
This poem expresses a man’s love for his wife, especially her clumsiness and her flaws.
I Saw In Louisiana a Live Oak Growing
This poem is about loneliness and homosexuality and employs the image of an oak tree.
Traveling through the Dark
This poem is about a man finding a dead deer on a highway and the conflict between nature and technology.
Birches
This poem is a speaker’s first hand account of his wish to become young again by swinging birches, which are a symbol of renewal in the poem.
Fifteen
This poem is about growing up as it describes a teenager’s discovery of an abandoned motorcycle, which he soon realizes has been lost by its owner, who crashed. It is also about the romanticism of childhood vs. the realism of adulthood.
Lost
This poem is about getting lost in nature and how people should not blame the nature for being lost but rather themselves for not recognizing and respecting its uniqueness.
The Snow Man
This poem is about winter, in particular how no human person can regard its beauty, and only something which is inanimate, like a snowman, can love it.
A Mirror
This poem personifies a mirror and then goes on to describe a woman who regrets losing her childhood as she perceives her old self in a lake, which is the mirror.
Waiting
This poem describes the path which should be taken in order to arrive at a place where a woman who loves the reader will meet the reader.
No Map
This poem describes the speaker’s feeling of dread and fear as he considers the possibility of his father and friend dying during their surgery, and then juxtaposes this fear with the promising yet uncertain and also fearful future of the speaker’s son on his 8th birthday.
Age Sixty-Nine
This poem is basically an allegory for the speaker’s insight into life; the speaker describes how he has decided to stop waiting and looking for meaning and answers in his life and instead trust a higher divine power while living freely.
