The Father of American Psychiatry

[billy]

easy enough to google who it's about. some good sounds via assonance etc. the tercets are in the main well put together. if your aim is for it to be a cold piece you succeeded, that said, i think it lacks a bit of depth. we know father is the patient but the poem doesn't feel as though it's about him given the title, and on reading the dad tercets i think it would be better suited if there was something on a more personal level, possibly via a couple more tercets. halfway down the poem i had some conflict, is the psychiatrist the same person as the father within the poem.t the format does read as two poems which i'm assuming are supposed to be connect; they are but for me not enough. it takes a few reads to get into it and that's not a bad thing,

Madness nestles in vessels of blood 
and you don’t fault a fellow for a fever  and isn't needed as it put both clauses in the 1st and 2nd line as one
or blame a wagon for its broken wheel.
 
Drinking, dicing, his first-born disappoints him,  is dicing gambling?
reading oppressive melancholia
on the Moral and Physical Thermometer.
 
Sanity breeds in regular habits -
bleeding, purging, mercury, emetics;  
the aptitude to judge like other men.
 
Escorted home, cobwebbed, uncombed, i really like this tercet for the imagery it reeks of [i]altshimer, or metal disorder.
[/i]no tongue or eye for kith and kin;
as familiar as The King of Babylon.
 
Heresy, buggery, blasphemy and theft
are bodily diseases oozing out
of each incautious orifice.
 
Father, doctor, shrink and gaoler
confined him in his own asylum
to wear deep gutters in the basement stone. okay, this stanza shows the poem isn't about the father, but the doctor,
 
A hospital bed is not a prison cell.
The Gyrator and the Tranquiliser
are kinder than the stake or the noose.
 
He came home once and returned much worsened;
father’s footsteps too long, too certain.
Madness nestles in vessels of blood.