"Love Song" by Joseph Brodsky, "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke, and Sherman Alexie's "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" are all in the genre of literature known as poetry. Despite this similarity of genres, each of the poems is distinct across other aspects of poetics including theme, symbolism, diction, and cultural influence. This analysis will provide a comparison and contrast of these three poems across these and other elements of poetry.
In "My Papa's Waltz" and "Love Song," Roethke and Brodsky, respectively, employ a formal end rhyme scheme that is the conventional ABAB rhyme. The first stanza of "My Papa's Waltz" rhyme the first and third lines with "breath" and "death," while the second and fourth lines rhyme "dizzy" and "easy" (Roethke 1). Brodsky also employs this rhyme scheme in "Love Song," and like Roethke his diction includes site rhyme in addition to regular rhyme. In the fourth stanza Brodsky (1) rhymes lines one and three with "lava" and "lover," while rhyming the second and fourth lines with "source" and "divorce." In contrast to this rhyme scheme, Sherman Alexie uses free verse that does not include rhyme in his poem. As he tells us in the first stanza's first two lines, "The white women across the aisle from me says 'Look, / look at all the history, that house" (Alexie 1). While Brodsky and Roethke also complete the thoughts and sentences in each stanza, Alexie's poem runs thoughts and sentences together in different stanzas.
Thematically, the poems are all in contrast which might have something to do with the cultural influences on the authors. Alexie's poem focuses on the theme of ignorance and bias in mainstream perceptions of American history. His Native American background is surely the cause of intense emotions in the poem, "I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, / ...If Don Henley's brothers and sisters / and mothers and father h...