Praise Song for My Mother is a poem about the love between mother and daughter, using multiple metaphors to distinguish the relationship.
Both poems use metaphors to describe the speaker’s feelings towards the other person in the relationship, for example in Quickdraw “And this is love, high noon, calamity, hard liquor in the old Last Chance saloon.” Then in Praise Song for My Mother “You were water to me deep and bold and fathoming.”
Although both poems use metaphors in similar ways they are for very different reasons.
In Quickdraw the metaphor is used to make the verbal argument between …show more content…
a couple more exciting and to explain how even verbal arguments can cause physical pain.
However in Praise Song for My Mother the metaphors are used to describe the perfection of the relationship between the speaker and her mother however in this case it appears the metaphors have been used because the relationship was simply to unfathomable to put into words.
Another similarity between the two poems is the use of the structure to represent the feelings of the speaker.
In Quickdraw the structure is very irregular until the very last stanza, where it becomes much more structured. This is to show how at the beginning of the poem their relationship is all over the place and unpredictable. However near the end of the poem the argument calms down and things apparently return to normal, and this is where the structure becomes more regular.
There is a similar effect in Praise Song for My Mother. To begin with the structure is regular with large similarities between the stanzas however in the last stanza it suddenly becomes very irregular. This is to represent the time where the speaker left her mother “Go to your wide futures, you said” and the special bond was somewhat lost.
A difference between the two poems is the use of punctuation. In Quickdraw a lot of punctuation is used and the commas almost represent the metaphorical bullets being used in the argument between the couple and also to represent the gradual fragmentation of their
relationship.
In Praise Song for My Mother very little punctuation is used at the beginning of the poem to make you read the poem almost like a blur suggesting how everything during this time of the speakers relationship with her mother went by like a flash.
This contrasts the use of punctuation in Quickdraw, which uses a lot of punctuation throughout the poem.
To conclude both poems use similar features throughout for similar or opposite effects.
Both poems are describing some sort of relationship between two people and use metaphors to make the relationships more understandable to everyday people.