during her visit; she quits eating, and the father
leaves her untouched plate in her room until she
will eat it. When she leaves to return home, it is
November, and there is snow on the ground
again. The father has a terrible appetite for
candy when she has gone, even though he is
very aware of how harmful it is to his teeth.
Section 9
In this section, it has been three months since the
daughter’s last visit. The speaker, who has not
been in communication with his child in that
time, wanders through a natural history
museum, where the carcasses of birds and ani-
mals have been preserved and are displayed in
glass cases. He recalls being there a year earlier
with his daughter and her stepsister, his daughter
in his new marriage, and how the girls ran
around and had fun with one another before
having their first argument. Some of the animals
are big and ferocious, but they are frozen still
now, unable to attack—just as the father’s rela-
tionship with his daughter is in a state of sus-
pended animation.
In the second half of this section, the speaker
goes from listing the museum’s stuffed animals
to listing the odd medical specimens preserved in
liquids in jars, including a kitten, a two-headed
goat, and a tiny horse with no limbs. The sights
of these animals, which died before they were
born, makes him even more aware of the fact
that he has a living, healthy daughter that he has
not talked to for three months.
Section 10
It is springtime again. The poem brings up
images of renewal, of plants growing and new-
born animals, such as colts and piglets. The
daughter has come to visit her father once
again, just as the seasons come around regularly.
Any bitterness that has built up is melted like the
winter snow, and they are at the park again,
feeding the animals as they did in years gone by.
Themes
Separation and Its Effects on the Parent-
Child Relationship
The most obvious and powerful theme cov-
ered in this poem is the relationship between
the poem’s speaker and his daughter. From
the first line to the last, Snodgrass explores
the unique relationship that occurs when a
father and his daughter are separated from
one another by divorce when the girl is very
young. The separation itself causes its share of
problems, introducing a sense of strangeness
and unfamiliarity thatputs a strain on the nat-
urally occurring bond between parent and
child. Added to that is the hostility that often
occurs when two parents decide to go their
separate ways—not only the hostility between
the parents that caused the breakup in the first
place but the lingering resentment that the child
can feel at being in a certain sense abandoned.
In this case, the tension of the situation is made
even more pronounced by the fact that the
daughter has to deal with the father’s new fam-
ily when she comes to visit.TOPICS FOR
FURTHER
STUDY Snodgrass varies the rhyme scheme over the
different sections of this poem. Choose two
sections of ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’ and consider
their differing rhymes and rhythms. Write
an essay on the topic.
Research the cognitive abilities of three-
year-old children. Choose some of the
daughter’s actions described in the poem
and write a report that explains them in
terms of standard developmental phases
and abilities.
In section 3, the speaker describes dislocat-
ing the child’s wrist when he pulled it while
playing. Contact a social worker and find
out about the frequency of unintended inju-
ries caused by well-meaning parents, and
write a report on your findings. In your
report, be sure to propose steps that could
help curtail the problem.
Make a list of all of the species of birds
mentioned in this poem. Research the
behaviors of each, and then write a brief
interpretation of what those behaviors
might symbolize in ‘‘Heart’s Needle.’’Heart’s Needle