The feeling of being burdened and the annoyance that comes with it is brought up in other parts of the poem, in lines such as, "and I was embarrassed/by old men standing up to shake my hand/and tell me they were "sorry for my trouble."" These lines suggest that the narrator is embarrassed by his position of eldest in the family and feels a sense of patronization from the older men rather than condolence. Instead of pursuing his identity and feeling like an independent adult at school, he is forced to come back to his family where he feels like a child again, and the reader can sense a feeling of resentment in further passages. This resentment and lack of emotion is apparent when he makes the comment, "I saw him/for the first time in six weeks/paler now," addressing his brother's corpse. The young man is very matter-of-fact about his brother's death, almost sarcastic one could say, because he despises being called away from his life and opportunities at school. Unfortunately, curveballs are thrown at individuals everyday to complicate their journey towards identity, and when society holds certain expectations for say, the eldest child of a family, it complicates that child's growth as an adult and holds him back from his true personhood. The narrator of this poem feels a sense of being stolen away from his niche, and while he feels a sense of loss, it's for himself and his identity, not for his brother. .
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.
