"My Father's Garden" analysis

Hello again,
   The poem I chose from section II was "My Father's Garden" written by David Wagoner. Don't let the title mislead you like it did to me. When I first read the title I thought the poem would be about a young child writing about her father's garden. About how it was made up of all these different color flowers and how he even grew some fruit and veggies in the garden. My guess was very wrong; this poem had more to do with metal working than anything else it seemed. This poem was made of four stanzas and had no rhyming scheme. I felt the poem that I read was quite difficult and that made me reread it at least 6 times. It also contained much imagery within the paragraphs. Not much caesura and enjambment was used but there was some. I also had to look up a few words that were not in my vocabulary to help me grasp the reading better.
   One of the techniques I came across quite often was personification. I found four examples of personification within my whole, entire poem. I made a connection that I thought was very clever and that not a lot of people would notice right off the bat. The start of stanza 3 reads, "He was called a melter. He tried to keep his brain", and the start of stanza 4 read, "But it melted. His classical learning ran". When I went back and reread the poem for the 3rd or 4th time, I realized that both of these lines had enjambments in them. Not only that but the word before the period was 'melt' with an ending on it (-er, -ed). Another thing about hose lines were the word after the period was 'He or Him' bringing all of our focus back to the father. I found 2 similes in the poem and even found it odd to see a Latin phrase in the text. "magna sine laude" means 'without big praise', and how that fits into that stanza, I'm not quite sure.
   There were places in this poem that confused me also. For example, stanza 3, line 2, "From melting in those tyger-mputhed mills". At first I read 'tyger' as the word tiger, then going back I started to doubt myself what it meant. I wanted to be sure it was tiger and not some other odd word I've never heard of. Therefore, I looked it up and there was no definition for the word. I asked myself the question, and even wrote it down, why did Wagoner choose to spell 'tiger' like that? Was it to confuse the reader, because it surely confused me. My best guess to what the theme was was garden's aren't always pretty "flowers" that bloom and smell nice. I came up with this as my theme because in stanza 2 it says, "He would pick flowers for us:...to knock them down". That was the best imagery example I read in the whole poem. Those four lines in stanza 2 were very clear in my head, and those lines actually made me think about what the father's real job was because that descriptive part was not describing real flowers. When I thought about the tone of the poem, I started getting confused because I don't remember learning about tone too much. So, based off my readings and my memory, I wrote down the tone of the poem as being from someone's point of view who knew/knows "him", referring to the father, well; maybe a child of his because this was under the Poems of Childhood section.
   I advise anyone who likes imagery or finds it interesting to read this poem because it contains a lot of that, and it is very descriptive.


Geaux poetry,
ksparkles77