Caitlyn’s poem, Blessed Be the Tie That Binds, is the melancholy story of a Grandma who died of cancer, and the ideas that she embodied for the narrator. The poem has a religious undertone from the very start, as the title is also the name of a hymn; and the repetition of “Heaven” and “flying” and the mention of the soul strengthen this. This poem has a bittersweet feel to it, because on one hand there is the sadness that comes with the death of a loved one, but on the other there’s the relief of Heaven and a better place after that death. Some of the stanzas, such as the first and fourth, are full of happy thoughts, “my guardian angel was always flying”, while other stanzas, such as the second, seem to only have sad thoughts in them.
The repetition of end-words is well done in this poem, but I wish there was more variety to it. For example the phrase “so blue” is used twice, and I would have liked to see one of them changed.
I also like how the poem’s focus progresses from the Grandma and her ideals, to the narrator and how those ideals have been passed down. In the third stanza there is a direct quotation from the Grandma, and in the sixth there is one from the narrator. Form and content work well with this transition because the words are being repeated over and over, but the idea is being transferred from Grandma to narrator, the way ideas are actually passed down.