A Study Guide for Marie Howe's "The Marie Howe's Boy"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Marie Howe's "The Marie Howe's Boy," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535828154

Book preview

14

The Boy

Marie Howe

1997

Introduction

Marie Howe's poem The Boy was published in 1997 in her acclaimed second volume of poetry, What the Living Do. The poem describes an episode involving the poet's father and her brother, as witnessed by the poet herself. Her older brother runs away from home because their father insists on cutting his hair. After two days away from home the father sends the poet to talk to her brother and convince him to come home. The consequences are not necessarily expected.

The poet reflects on how incidents like this affected both her and her brothers. The action of the poem is indicative of the generation gap that was present in this family's household between the father and his children. It also hints at the abuse that went on in Howe's household while she was growing up. This autobiographical poem is written in simple, accessible language, as almost all of Howe's poems are. It explores a number of themes, including gender roles, identity, and dysfunctional families.

Author Biography

Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She was the second child and oldest girl of nine children. Howe's parents were both devotedly Catholic and politically progressive, and they enrolled her in a school that taught those values, the Sacred Heart Convent School. She then went on to the University of Windsor, in Ontario, where she completed her undergraduate degree. After graduating she worked as a reporter for a newspaper in Rochester and then taught high-school English in Boston, Massachusetts, for several