The Youngest Daughter by Cathy Song Response 4/16

The Youngest Daughter depicts a daughter taking care of her ailing mother and wishing to leave. Throughout this poem the tone that has revealed itself: irritation. The poem opens up with, "the sky has been dark for many years," indicating that the speaker's tone of voice is not a happy one. Right after, the speaker then begins to show her irritation, literally, as they talk about their skin, head, and eyes burning and reddening with irritation, "lately, when I touch my eyelids, my hands react as if I had just touched something hot enough to burn. My skin, aspirin colored, tingles with migraine." The speaker shares how she takes care of her mother, giving her a bath. As the speaker is cleaning her mother she has a 'sour taste' and goes on to take the light hearted aurora of her mother's jokes in comparing her breasts to walruses, out of the atmosphere. While her mother is joking, the speaker relates her breasts to a literal function, "I scrubbed them with a sour taste in my mouth, thinking: six children and an old man have sucked from these brown nipples," indicating once again the speaker is not in a jovial mood and is irritated.

The irritated tone can express how the speaker feels about the theme of this poem: eternal youth of the aging. The theme of this poem is reveal through how the mother and daughter has switched positions, as the mother is now the baby taking a bath and the role of an irritated mother is played by the daughter; also at the end there are cranes taking flight as the mother and daughter are sharing a meal, the cranes specifically put there to mirror the eternal youth of the mother. The irritation of the poem can express how the speaker feels about when people age they basically regress back into infancy, and how they need to be taken care of. This poem is a good poem to look at when analyzing tone.