This poem depicts the sudden truth that Jonas realises about release during one of his sessions with the Giver. Before this, Jonas thinks that like the word, release meant someone leaving the community and joining another outside. However, he did not realise that this community that the Released joined was the one of the dead and this shocked Jonas very much. To him, these people were not spared from not being given a choice or chance to redeem their life. Instead, they were killed when they were at their weakest, which was at a very early or late stage of their life. Jonas found this very unfair and I also think that this sort of method to ensure a balanced community is not very fair as the people were euthanised due to several of their physical aspects.

However, some things must be sacrificed in order to maintain the perfect Utopic society. In this context, this idea still holds true.

In this poem, the protagonist (Jonas) starts out as an innocent four-year-old, who loves his father and does not understand much about the job that his father has to do, which also includes euthanising the young and the old. As he grows older and progresses into maturity, he realises with growing horror that his ‘father was a killer’. Repetition enhances this effect when he was watching the record of his father euthanising a child when he felt a ‘burning fire in [his] heart /that was strong, too strong’. This is the expression of the sudden realisation of what Jonas feels when he realises that his father has been doing this all the while and the sickened feeling that comes with this realisation. I think that Jonas is somewhat pitiful as his father’s ‘identity’ as a ‘killer’ has been masked from him until he found out years later, whereby it comes as a great shock, and Jonas cannot believe that his father is like this.

The use of ages in the poem also shows a short segment of Jonas’ life as a cycle that has been disrupted. When old people die, young children replace them, and yet the child, being a twin, was euthanised and this shows a disruption in the cycle.

The rhythm of the poem starts out as regular, with a rhyming scheme of a,b,c,b, d,e,d, f,g,h,g for the first three paragraphs. The somewhat regular rhythm and rhyme scheme implies that Jonas is not aware of what his father does at his job, and is only wrapped up in his own world of childhood. However, as the poem reaches its climax, the rhyming suddenly becomes very clockwork and regular, as if Jonas feels dulled by the awful truth about his father and can only think in circles. The large font at the end of the poem also signifies his great disbelief and shock about the truth and the straightforward way that the writer uses to show his shock also shows how big and terrible this discovery for Jonas is as he cannot cope with it, and needs to express it simply and loudly. The utopic society that Jonas has taken his Community for does not seem so perfect to him any more.

thanks for reading

LISA