My Father's Lunch Poem Summary

Margarita Engle’s poem, “The Life of a Digger,” and Erica Funkhouser’s poem, “My Father’s Lunch,” reveal how life as manual laborers are filled with hard and strenuous work. Additionally, both poems concern specific people to show the differences in the repercussions of their work. In Engle’s poem, Henry the digger, finds his job leaves him feeling undignified, whereas in Funkhouser’s poem, the speakers father is rewarded with a good meal and his children’s appreciation. In both poems, the authors’ themes are representational of the lives of manual laborers. By comparing these two poems, we gain a glimpse of the reality between the differences of immigrant and non-immigrant laborers, and how those differences affect them.

Author Erica Funkhouser’s speaker, the child of the farmer in her poem, sets the tone in “My Father’s Lunch.” The tone is set in place through their narrative recount of the lunch traditions they share with their father. These lunch traditions set by their father are a reward of sorts, for their father’s hard days’ worth of work. The lunch hour tradition is conveyed in the poem as a highly anticipated event by the children. As they lay and wait for his arrival, anticipating their time to come …show more content…
The speaker emphasizes the rewards of their father’s hard work through conversational expression to convey their narrative of events. Unlike Engle’s speaker, however, Funkhouser’s speaker avoids using any slang. Funkhouser’s diction is therefore a medium diction, that is not either categorized as a high, formal diction or a low, informal diction. The speaker uses a wider vocabulary, such as “translucent slices” (33), rather than an informal vocabulary such as see-through slices also consistent with a medium diction. This suggests the speaker is likely educated, likely another reward of their father’s hard work as a