Connections+to+Poems

In this photograph by Nicholas Nixon i saw a mother holding her daughter in her arms, trying to show her that she loves her and that she will always love her, even if she does not show it all the time. It is so easy for children to think that their parents do not love them because they yell a lot or are just very busy. But there is no mother in the world who doesn't love her children and in this photograph that motherly love is captured perfectly. In this photograph, I saw many different things, that all somehow made perfect sense. I can imagine that in the photograph, the mother has just shared some terrible news with her daughter. The girl looks like she has to think about what her mother has just told her and is slowly but surely drifting away in her own little world of loneliness and confusion. The hug and the kiss on the child's cheek represent the mother's deep and never ending love for her daughter. It is almost as if she were saying " I love you no matter what; without you, i don't make sense. You are what i live for."**
 * Whenever i look at photographs i make up stories about how the people in the pictures got to a certain location, why they are there, and most importantly what they feel, based on their facial expressions and posture.

Even though e. e. cummings' poem //I carry your heart with me// was most likely written about a man expressing his feelings for a woman, I see a strong connection between Nixon's photograph and the poem. For me, both of them are expressing the same exact emotions; unconditional love and gratefulness. Cummings describes the feeling of telling someone they influence everything he/she does, telling them that they're with him/her in his/her heart at all times, telling them he/she has found true love in them. Motherly love is supposedly the strongest and deepest love of all and therefore i find it appropriate to link this photograph to e. e. cummings' poem //I carry your heart with me//, for it captures the moment of telling somebody the things cummings talks about in his poem.

I connect //The warning// by Robert Creeley to this image as well because i feel that both, the mother and the daughter feel unloved by each other. It seems like both of them would do anything for a little more appreciation by the other. But in all their sadness, they forget that you can't force love on anyone and that a small thing like a drawing might do the trick of putting a smile on someone's face. Maybe the two have just rediscovered their love to each other when the daughter brings in the drawing, an attempt to reach out to her mother.

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