Seamus Heaney’s poem, Mid-Term Break, is a great example of how society’s expectations can impact identity because the poem is about a young man who is away at school to obtain an education and establish his identity when he is called back home to deal with the death of his younger bro

Another poem that touches on identity and social expectations is the poem, My Father’s Song, by Simon Ortiz. This poem, which the reader gathers is about a father’s quest to set new path for his son, is great example of how social expectations can complicate a person’s search for identity in adulthood. While reading this poem, it’s easy to see that this family is and has been in the farming business for generations, which is stressed in the line, “we planted corn one Spring at Acu/we planted several times/ but this time was different.” This line stresses the idea that the family, and more the father and son, plant corn every Spring together as a business and tradition. After reading into this line, one assumes that the father was forced into his role because his father was a farmer before him, and his grandfather was a farmer before his father. Likewise, one would assume that the man’s son would be expected to become a farmer in his own adulthood. Instead, the tone of the piece suggests something different, and the reader gathers a sense of breaking away from the family’s pre-determined path. The father seems to intend to open his son up to a new horizon and the possibility of other occupations. At one point in the poem, the father finds a nest of tiny mice and shows them to his son, “my father stopped at one point/to show me an overturned furrow/the plowshare had unearthed/the burrow nest of a mouse.” This image of the mice represents a sense of new life and hope for his son. The father in this piece appears to want a different path for his son, one in which he has the ability to choose his own identity, one that isn’t necessarily farming. In a further stanza, the line, “very gently, he scooped tiny pink animals/into the palm of his hand/and told me to touch them,” suggests that the father is presenting new life and new opportunities to his son, opening his future and identity up to greater things. Then, just as gently as the father scoops up “new life” for his son, he places it in a safe spot for his son to choose in his own time. “We took them to the edge/of the field and put them in the shade/of a sand moist clod,” suggests the possibility that the boy can choose a different path for himself in the future, a path other than the one laid before him by family expectations and traditions.

Further supporting the idea that society’s expectations and social stigmas complicate a person’s search for identity, the poem by Mary Oliver, Morning, talks about a woman who falls victim to the social standards of women her age and the sense of loneliness and longing she feels because of it. Reading this piece, the poem seems to suggest that the woman feels shut out/cast out from the world, very much trapped in the role of a typical older woman. Whether the woman in the poem is truly in her old age is unknown, but from the text, the reader gets a sense that she is locked away in her house with nothing more to keep her busy than envying the luxurious and simple life of her cat, since popular to social beliefs, older women have cats as companions. This is a huge social stigma in itself, and the reader sees that the woman feels this herself, that she is no more than an old woman with a cat, no career or hobbies besides cleaning her quaint little house and taking care of her cat. This notion holds her back from being who she wants to be, which comes through in lines such as, “then wants to go

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