Cathy Songs Poem The Youngest Daughter - Essay Example

? The aging process is something that everyone must eventually contend with, and it can be hard on one’s self and one’s family. It is inherently ripefor conflict, which is one of the reasons it is so frequently used in the artistic sphere; it involves conflict between people, dependency, changing relationships and even conflict between the mind, the soul and the body itself. One of the most frequent motifs in art about aging is the cyclical nature of it – how the adult parents care for young children, only to themselves be cared for once their children mature. Cathy Song’s poem “The Youngest Daughter” comments on this understanding of aging, and, going against traditional ideas on the subject, argues that that adults caring for children is a negative rather than a positive thing, causing a great deal of harm to the adult child, and that it would perhaps be better if long term medical intervention did not exist to extend the life of the elderly. One of the most important ways Song’s poem comments on the negative impact that the reversal of child-parent dynamic that occurs with the elderly is her focus on the idea that it is physically harmful to the child who now has to care for their elderly parent. The third line of the poem describes the speaker’s physical state – one that could at first be mistaken for that of a sickly elderly person. Despite the fact that the speaker is the youngest of six children, and thus could not be very old to have a living mother (24), her skin is “damp / and pale as rice paper” (Song 3-4), and later the speaker describes her skin as “aspirin-colored” (12). This description of sickly appearance, combined with the medical language “aspiring-colored” immediately gives the reader an image of someone who is under great strain, and someone whose life-style is suffering greatly for some reason. Song goes on to emphasize that these physical ailments are directly related to the fact that the speaker, the youngest daughter, must care for her mother. She does so by forming an implicit connection between the mother and the daughter, by describing her skin as having the same color and texture that her mother’s did when she was a caregiver (6), and by providing images of the mother continuing her care-taker role by “massaging the left side” of the speaker’s face when she has headaches. These images directly conflate the mother and daughter into the same care-taking role, showing it to be a source of conflict – the child must care for the mother even as the mother continues to try to care for the child. Song then demonstrates explicitly how the youngest daughter has had to take on a care-taking role, through a long narration of the process of bathing her mother daily. Song puts a great deal of emphasis on the reversal of the care-taking relationship that exists between child and parent to show how this has been the source of the physical ailments in the daughter’s life. The physical ailments, however, are not the most damaging – having to take care of her elderly mother has, more importantly, given the speaker a sense of hopelessness that seems impossible to shake. Hopeless images come in two major forms throughout this work: images of darkness and images of eternity. Light is an almost universal image for hope in poetry (Gray), and the absence of light, is thus obviously the absence of hope. Obviously an eternity in darkness, and thus without hope, is something that would be depressing to everyone. By connecting these images Song shows that her speaker has truly fallen into despair through caring for her elderly mother: she is in darkness, and thus without hope, and as there is no light imagery anywhere in the poem, there is not even a hope for hope. The poem opens with a sense of darkness which sets the mood of despair for the entire work: “the sky has been dark,” the poem says, “for many years,” connecting ideas of darkness and eternity (1-2). This construction is paralleled by the close of the bathing scene, where the speaker laments the fact that “It seems it has always / been like this: the two of us / in this sunless room,” again, connecting a sense of darkness to a sense of eternity, giving the reader a sense of eternal despair. This dynamic seems that it may be broken in the closing scene, where the speaker says she is “plotting [her] escape,” but the following imagery, “a thousand cranes” seems to shut the door on this hope, because cranes are the symbol for long life and immortality in many Asian cultures (Walsh), implying that the mother’s life, and thus daughter’s entrapment, will be eternal. The final way that Song argues the inversion of the child-parent relationship is harmful is by demonstrating that it harms the relationships of everyone involved. The speaker complains that she has a “sour taste” about having to care for her mother (26), and whether the bitterness is directed at her five brothers and sisters for not taking care of her mother, the father for the same reason, or even for the mother for needing to be taken care and still being alive after thirty years of diabetes (34), of is not clear. Furthermore, the speaker’s mother does not trust her, knowing that she would do anything to leave (47). While the inversion of the parent-child dynamic as parents age is often hailed as one of the more perfect elements of a the circle of life, Cathy Song strongly disagrees. Her portrait of the frustration, hopelessness, physical, mental and inter-family harm that goes along with caring for an elderly parent argues strongly that we should not live into dotage, and that perhaps should, in some cases, eschew long term medical care. Works Cited Gray, John. "Poetry Analysis: Hope Is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson." Helium - Where Knowledge Rules. Helium, 01 Dec. 2010. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. . Walsh, Mary. "Bird Symbolism and Spirituality." Squidoo.com. Squidoo, 09 Apr. 2009. Web. 24 Nov. 2011. . Song, Cathy. “The Youngest Daughter” Picture Bride. Yale: Yale UP. 1983. Read More