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While the narrator in Thomas' poem urges his father to resist death, the narrator in Pastan's poem wishes to advise her father to give up his struggle against it by saying, "father let go, and death will hold you up." Both poems show that the younger individuals, in being distant observers of death, cannot easily relate to those actually experiencing it.
The poem "Sestina" by Elizabeth Bishop also depicts two individuals of different generations; the older individual is the grandmother while the younger one is a child. The allusion to death becomes apparent when it is understood that the loss of a loved one has taken place. This loss is revealed after the child holds up a drawing of a "man with buttons like tears," which causes the grandmother to secretly shed tears of sorrow. This poem makes it most apparent how younger individuals often cannot relate to the experience of death and its consequences like older ones can.
As the poem makes clear, children are often shielded from learning about death at an early age because of their tendency to be easily frightened by such a reality. Thus, all three poems attempt to make it understood that younger generations are less aware than older ones about the reality of death due to not having experienced it often.
