American Primitive
... Jay Smith¡¯s poem "American Primitive," it portrays the speaker through the eyes of a child. The child is too young to understand the relationship that his father has with money. Ultimately, the relationship between the father and money leads to the father¡¯s suicide. In this poem, the speaker explains how family members are affected buy the every day perils of financial adversity. The speaker¡¯s expresses his love for his Daddy, ¡°And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar¡±, which explains the relationship between the child and the Daddy. The child¡¯s love for his Daddy is in comparison to the Daddy¡¯s love for his Dollar. In "American Primitive," the speaker is very young and does not comprehend the relationship that his Daddy has with his Dollar. The child expresses, "I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar", shows no indication of the Daddy¡¯s love for his child. "Daddy" and ¡°Dollar¡± is capitalized in the poem probably suggest the father's struggle between prioritizing the two. The father hung himself because of some sort of financial adversity, this suggest he loved the Dollar more than his love for his child. He is abandoning his child and his family because he cannot bear the lost his Dollar. He does not care of the psychological affect the sight of finding his Daddy¡¯s dead body demise will leave in his child as in shown in the line ¡°His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.¡± There is no concern for protecting the child from the trauma. As the child witnessed his father¡¯s death, the child could only express his father¡¯s love in two ways: his lov...