There are lots of poems and songs from sons to fathers
I am teaching a course where students are reading poems, and as I was going through them, I noticed that the particular anthology I’m using has quite a few from male writers about their fathers. I’ve found this so interesting, that I’m going to have my class take two, or three, such poems and offer comparisons and contrasts to them.
Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” is a piece where the speaker remembers his father waking up early on “Sundays too” (not just the working days, but the day of rest), to put the logs on for the fire to get the house warm before the rest of the family awoke. The speaker, in reflecting on this act, also recalls the “angers” of the house: he never mentions them, but the reader can imagine what kind of family this was, one where the father worked very hard a job that demanded so much of his bodily effort, that made him hard and tough, and angry. “No one ever thanked him,” the speaker simply says. In this reflecting the speaker asks rhetorically, how could I have known of “love’s austere and lonely offices?”
Then there’s David Bottoms’s “Sign for My Father, Who Stressed The Bunt,” a poem that takes the literal terms of the practice of bunting baseballs and breathes a different kind of meaning, as he concludes with this line, “I’m getting a grip on the sacrifice.” One realizes the teaching of the basics as metaphor for something beyond the diamond.
A short piece by Rilke, “The Cadet Picture of My Father,” speaks about the distance between the son and father. There are others here. All these sons trying very hard to find a way to communicate to men who probably did not learn how to do it. I too have written poems to my father, some finger-pointing, some apologetic.
I suppose it’s not surprising that male poets would seem to have a kind of obligation, as men, to write to their fathers. My sense of the world of poetry is that most men who become poets have fathers who were not men of letters, and in that sense they present no role model for the path they have chosen. Most fathers worked long hours in factories, or mines, or farms, or perhaps offices in large cities for anonymous corporations. They were men who understood the world that way, and didn’t see the kind of visions their sons had. They may have wanted their sons – and daughters – to go to college, but if they never went they would not fully appreciate the transformations higher education brings. They spent their lives toiling so that their sons would not have to, yet often would argue with those sons about laziness and lack of appreciation for hard work. And of course, they only understood a few ways of showing love: working to put keep the roof over the family’s heads, teaching the bunt, buying ice cream cones on Friday nights. Too often these gestures were never understood, and so many of these poems seem to reflect a speaker who learns to appreciate his father a little too late.
I’ve learned a few interesting things about my old man lately, and I hope he likes the next poem I write him. It’s a start.