Research Paper on:
'William at the Beach, Age 7' by William Stafford

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
title of the poem has already created a certain degree of sympathetic awareness and will cause one to immediately think of his or her own time spent at the  beach as a child or having been to the beach with a seven-year-old. In the process of poetic explication, it is always a valuable part of the exercise to consider  personal awarenesses and understandings and how that ties into an overall interpretation of the poem. At its core, the poem addresses the ways in which a father influences the perceptions  and the vision of a child. In that process, the child learns what he or she needs to know about the alien world they may be encountering and, more importantly,  they learn that their can do whatever it takes to assure that they will survive and that he will endure for his child. William the Poet and William the Child  The fact that the poet is writing about a child with the same name as he carries immediately establishes a nice parallel framework for examining the external and internal meanings  and processes of the poem. For example, it is likely that the student studying the poem or any other work will already know that William Stafford is a poet from  Americas heartland. In fact, he may be, according to Heldrich (2002), "Kansass most famous writer" (pp. 143). Therefore, the vision of a man and presumably his child at the beach  creates a certain degree of uniqueness that would not exist in a poet from Seattle, Washington or Portland, Maine. For the William Stafford, the sea is as unfamiliar, as alien  as it is for his small child. If, as Heldrich suggests, Stafford is a poet who creates a mythic land from what he sees and embroiders with imagination (pp. 143),