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Women are supposed to be able to achieve anything, but this is impossible to accomplish. The speaker wishes to join the three Emilys, but due to her children and her husband, "only [a] brief span" of time can be devoted to her poetry.
Born in 1943, Michael Ondaatje also participated in the 1960s transformation. The poem, "To a Sad Daughter," appears in his 11th collection of poetry, Secular Love, published in 1984. Similar to many fathers, this poem illustrates Ondaatje's love for his daughter and desire to lead her in the right direction for the future. He refers to the poem as his "first lecture" to a 16-year-old, but understands the difficulty: "This is the first lecture I've given you. / You're 'sweet sixteen' you said. / I'd rather be your closest friend than your father. I'm not good at advice / you know that, but ride / the ceremonies until they grow dark."
According to Meyer, Ondaatje's "To a Sad Daughter" is a poem about the way that surfaces mask much deeper emotions. Ondaatje is trying to bridge the two very different worlds of his daughter and himself, showing how close yet how distant they are. This distance exists in most intense relationships. His daughter is a representative of the new generation of females, who has the opportunity to seize her freedom and does so with confidence. She is not struggling with being free, since she was raised in a household where she is respected as an equal individual. She is growing up at a time when many young girls do not even think about entering the "man's world," by playing hockey, reading the sports page and watching horror movies. Ondaatje does not try to make his daughter more feminine, but encourages her to continue on this path...
"I don't care if you risk / your life to angry goalies/creatures with webbed feet/You can enter their caves and castles their glass laboratories./Just don't be fooled by anyone but yourself." Yet, even this daughter, who has everything she wants, will be entering into a difficult world of war, drugs and diseases, such as HIV / AIDS, and still male-dominated in many respects. Thus, it is not the daughter who is sad, but the father who knows that his daughter will face many challenges in the future.
From the time of Herrick to that of Ondaatje, women have made considerable progress in their role from an object of beauty and virginity to a free and independent young adult entering the world without gender constraints. These three poems depict the way that women are viewed by the society and the struggles they face being a part of it.
Works Cited
Dunn, Catherine M. "The Changing Image of Women in Renaissance Society and Literature." What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature. Ed. Marlene Springer. New York: New York UP, 1977. 15-38.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963
Herrick, Robert. A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick. Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2007.
Landrum, David, "Robert Herrick and the Ambiguities of Gender." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.2 (2007): 181-207
Meyer, Bruce. Arrivals: Canadian Poetry in the Eighties. New York: Greenfield Review Press, 1985.
New, W.H. A History of Canadian Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003.
Ondaatje,…
Works Cited
Dunn, Catherine M. "The Changing Image of Women in Renaissance Society and Literature." What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature. Ed. Marlene Springer. New York: New York UP, 1977. 15-38.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1963
Herrick, Robert. A Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick. Charleston: Bibliobazaar, 2007.
Landrum, David, "Robert Herrick and the Ambiguities of Gender." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.2 (2007): 181-207
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