preview

Charles Wedd's Poem 'The Death Of Santa Claus'

Decent Essays

In Charles Wedd’s poem “The Death of Santa Claus” the speaker compares Santa’s death to how children react to finding out that Santa isn’t real to show how much of an impact Santa and all of the other holiday heroes have on children. In the first half of the poem, Wedd is describing how Santa died through the third person showing how Santa isn’t able to get to a hospital because of how far it was from him, but also how even when our kids believe in our holiday heroes, one day they will find out that there is no Santa, Easter Bunny or even the Tooth Fairy. In the second half, Wedd moves to an eight-year old's perspective from where the child still believes in Santa only to have the kids at his school tell him the Santa is not real. Wedd starts …show more content…

Claus but all the elves and reindeer run outside to try and help Santa off the ground from the fall. While they all try to help him, Webb says "Rudolph's nose blinks like a sad ambulance light," which compares the light of Rudolph's nose to the light from an ambulance. While transitioning from Santa's side of the poem, Webb moves to an 8 years old's perspective, who still believes in Santa but in lines 24-26, the young boy talks to his mother he tells her "stupid kids at school say Santa is a big fake." The mother is caring and loving and sits with him on their purple-flowered couch and takes his hand into her own; the boy's mother knows then that she would have to tell her son that what the other kids told him was true. In Line 29-30 Webb says that the mother has "tears in her throat, the terrible news rising in her eyes." While some may think the lines are flipped around, Webb flips the words around to show that the mother was getting choked up from the tears that would soon be flowing down her face, while also letting the reader know that the young boy could see that his mother was going to tell her the terrible news that she had been dreading of telling

Get Access