I remember when my eldest step-daughter told me that she was going to study psychology at 'A' level rather than English, tartly replying to her that studying literature would teach her far more about the human condition than studying Freud ever could. Through every shade of my grief for my dad, literature has been there to support, console, empathise. C.S.Lewis said, 'We read to know that we are not alone', and each transition is echoed in my books. So, I am Heathcliff, longing to be haunted:"Come in! Come in! Cathy do come." Or on the good days, I am taking the baton from John McCrae: "To you from failing hands we throw/The torch; be yours to hold it high."
But today, I am the snivelling Nina in 'Truly Madly Deeply': sobbing "I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I know I shouldn't do this but I miss him."
But today, I am the snivelling Nina in 'Truly Madly Deeply': sobbing "I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I know I shouldn't do this but I miss him."
"It doesn't matter who my father was," Anne Sexton once wrote, "it matters who I remember he was." Many poets have used poetry as a way to pay tribute to their fathers, to mourn them, or to plead with them through time. In Li-Young Lee's "The Gift," the speaker, whilst helping his wife remove a splinter, recalls the time his father did the same for him:
ReplyDeleteAnd I did not lift up my wound and cry...
I did what a child does
when he's given something to keep.
I kissed my father.