Parents are innately protective of their children. They know that their children will encounter difficulties in their lives, but at some point the parent must leave the child alone and simply wish him or her a lucky passage. In “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur, the speaker describes his daughter's experience through writing, used as a metaphor for life. Your daughter is facing problems and challenges; it's growing. This is compared to a starling that was trapped in that same room just two years earlier. The starling, after much effort and struggle, managed to free itself. The speaker uses the comparison to illustrate the painful reality that, ultimately, parents must allow their children to face life's challenges on their own. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The structure and syntax of the poem emphasizes the peaks and troughs of life. There are 11 stanzas, each consisting of 3 lines each. It is important to note that the second line of each stanza is always the longest. This visually highlights the ups and downs of life. This clearly emphasizes how the daughter will hit the walls, but in the end it will be "again with a clamor of blows." Furthermore, every stanza except the last is made up of one declarative each. However, there are constant pauses with commas, colons and semicolons to indicate that life is not smooth. The speaker, and father, understands this and realizes that he can do nothing but hope that his daughter will be able to fight this. Therefore, the structure and syntax of the poem itself visually illustrates the bumpy road the daughter must face and conquer. Stanzas 1-5 use nautical imagery to describe writing as a metaphor for sailing through life. Specific terms such as “bow,” “railway,” “load,” and “passage” illustrate the daughter's journey in “writing a story” as a journey through life. The daughter is still young, but already has "a great load, and some of it heavy". Therefore it is significant that the speaker actually chooses to "wish her a lucky passage". The obvious empathetic tone shows that the speaker is aware that the daughter will inevitably face waves of violence during her journey. The daughter “rejects [the] thought and its easy figure,” demonstrating that the daughter refuses to adhere to the desire and is willing to fight the struggles of the life she has chosen. This sets the backdrop for the message of the poem which is essentially summed up in the last stanza. In stanzas 6-10, the episode in which the speaker watches a starling struggling to fly away parallels how the speaker hopes his daughter will fight through her life and not give up. The speaker recounts the bird “trapped in that very room, two years ago.” It was exactly the same room. This could parallel how the speaker is potentially trapping the daughter because the speaker, as a parent, is unable to let her go. Yet the speaker continues to recall “how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door, [he] watched the bright, wild, dark / and iridescent creature.” Although the starling “[fell] like a glove on the hard floor” and was eventually “hunchbacked and bloody,” he finally managed to free himself “[clean] the windowsill of the world.” This idea is concurrent with the speaker's current situation. The speaker watches from the outside, helpless and unable to help his daughter. It is evident that there are parallels between the daughter and the starling that are based on the speaker's release of the daughter into the real world and the message of the poem as a whole. which is summarized in the last three lines. Both the starling and the writer got trapped in the exact same thing.