Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift,” Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” and Eric Chock’s “Poem for My Father” all center on the poets’ fathers and contain a belated recognition and thanks for all their fathers have done for them. Each of these poems focuses on a theme: love, in the first, devotion in the second and obligation in the third, but all acknowledge the continuity between generations as the poets prepare to take on their responsibilities as parents and spouses.
In “The Gift” Li-Young Lee distracts his wife with a story while he removes a splinter from her hand, just as his father long ago told him a story to keep his attention off the pain. The boy looks into his father’s face as the reader assumes the wife does during the operation. The poet addresses the reader, saying that if the reader had witnessed his father’s removal of the splinter he would have thought he was planting something in the boy’s hand, something that led to his performing the same operation on his wife for which she will reward him, as he did his father, with a kiss.
The continuity of the action stretches further than from the boy to the man. Lee describes how each generation performs the same unselfish acts of love and care for those who depend on them. That is the theme of the poem and it is strengthened by each descriptive word and phrase. His father’s “lovely face,” meaning the beloved face, is the face of the man who nurtures and protects him; a well of dark water describes the voice, deep, strange in that it speaks out of a life unknown to the boy and yet that voice is familiar and, like a well, life-sustaining. These are the images that cancel out the sharp, life-threatening splinter and the even sharper blade used to remove it, wielded by hands that are the source of tenderness, skill and discipline. The splinter is likened to a silver tear, a tiny fire, antithetical yet connected by his pain. It is this experience that has taught him to empathize with his wife’s pain and so prepared him to help her by extracting the splinter as painlessly as his father would have. In that way he, too, is able to remove the threat and to save her from having to face her death, no matter how minor the threat of that may be, so that she may remain mindful of her life with him.
As the anonymous commentator from Art and Culture says, in this poem “we see the concentric circles that ripple outward from unconditional, familial love,” a love that only reveals itself in time and through deep reflection. It seems as though the poet is saying that love is what binds us together and creates the continuity between generations, and surfaces only in those small but clearly remembered gifts such as taking a splinter out of a small boy’s palm.
Linda Sue Grimes, in her analysis of Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” makes the same point when she says that “none of us understands the sacrifices our parents make for us while they are making them.” They only become clear much later in life when we ourselves are parents or spouses. The narrator in this poem recalls a routine event from his childhood and endows it with almost religious significance, a ritual, an “office” to be performed every Sunday morning for no reason other than for love and duty. Just as no one thanks the priest who offers communion so his father’s efforts went unnoticed, or at least did not register consciously. Yet as he thinks back to those “blue black cold” mornings he recognizes the sacrifice made by the man who got up in the cold, put on cold clothes and endured the cold in order to make the house warm for his family. That coldness is echoed by the boy’s indifference toward his father and by the “austere and lonely” duties performed by his father. In the end, though, those “banked fires” are warmed by the blaze of that good man’s love who uncomplainingly shouldered his responsibilities and, more than that, polished his son’s good shoes so that he would enter the Lord’s day suitably dressed.
Grimes regards this poem as near-perfect. Her only concern is with the line “Fearing the chronic angers of that house” which has been taken to mean that the father was abusive. To her the line signifies not parental abuse but that these are “angers that belong to the house; perhaps the house has leaky, noisy pipes, broken windows, dilapidated furniture, rodent infestation, an abusive landlord.” The chronic angers may also tie in with the religious undertones of the poem, referring to the tribulations of the world outside filtering into the cold house, only to be dispelled by the father performing his offices.
At the end, like Lee, Hayden asks himself why it took him so long to appreciate all that his father had done for him. “What did I know,” he asks himself twice in succession, which suggests that he now knows that he himself has to accept new duties that must be performed unselfishly, lovingly and without fail.
Eric Chock’s “Poem for My Father” likens a father’s work to that of a poet. His father’s stone wall is built with the same reflective care as he devotes to his poems, fitting stones the way Chock fits words to create “a wall of dreams” around the house. The stone wall, furthermore, is not just a wall but it is constructed of the father’s distant memories that are associated with the black rocks, their shape and heft, yet those memories are governed by something far more immediate and important: his son. When he thinks of his son he “takes a thick slice of stone / and pounds it into the ground to make the corner of the wall.” His son, as symbolized by the rock, does not slip into place like other, perfect rocks. There are misunderstandings caused by the fact that these two men are separated by years, experience and generations. To the poet his father’s thoughts are prehistoric, lava chips, flint, like the tools used by long-ago people. His father works in and through stone while the poet uses words. His father’s memories are most vivid when he recalls a time “thirty years / before he thought of me.” What connects them is their craftsmanship, or their esthetic, which overcomes all other differences just as love does in Lee’s poem and devotion in Hayden’s.
Rhoda J. Yen reads the poem as an analogy to the poet’s father’s “efforts to build a wall around the house with his careful endeavors to make the son fulfill his dreams” (85) and in a sense that is true but only in the most indirect sense. It is the son who must fulfill the dream. At the start of the poem he lies dreaming and in that dream his father expresses his hope that the son will one day write a book. He knows his father thinks writing is a waste of time, and that he thinks so because he has worked hard all his life so that his son can lie in the house, dreaming. Yet the father, too, has dreams although they are of the past, not the future. Long ago he loved fishing and beautiful women and, as Yen points out, fishing holds a special place in Chock’s poetry (84). It may be an activity which father and son feel equally passionately about, and women may be another. It is the poet’s task to connect with his father and all his ancestors, so important in Chinese and Chinese-American cultures. The father has done his duty and continues to work toward giving his son a good start in life but he can only influence the poet indirectly because he does not understand his son’s dreams. It is the relative simplicity , or perhaps the concreteness, of his father’s goals that spurs the poet on not only to dream but to put those dreams into writing, eventually to write that book that will allow him to marry, which is why he says “I cannot wake until I bring the fish and the girl home,” because when he achieves that he will be ready to take his place in the unbroken chain of generations.
In all three poems hands occupy a prominent place among the images. A father’s hands heal, punish, toil, create fire, catch fish, caress a woman’s hair, fit stones into a solid wall around a house built by his own hands. Above all, a father’s hands protect his children and take on a great symbolic significance since poets, generally, are less “handy.” More importantly, fathers teach their sons; but sons who grow up to be poets must teach all. This is why these three poems have more than just a literary value; they, too, are a measure of tenderness which instill a sense of responsibility in their readers.
Works Cited
Anonymous. Art and Culture. Web.
Grimes, Linda Sue. “Hayden’s ‘Those Winter Sundays’: A Nearly Perfect Poem.” Suite 101.com. Web.
Yen, Rhonda J. “Eric Chock (1950 – ).” Asian-American Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Guiyou Huang, ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.