My Father In Law And I - Analysis

A comedy of manners that keeps brushing against grief

Lawson’s poem makes a dry, quietly bleak claim: the speaker and his father-in-law can’t truly meet each other in speech, so they meet in ritual—a handshake, a pint, a shared sigh—gestures that resemble mourning more than friendship. On the surface it’s a sketch of awkward in-laws; underneath, the repeated comparison to a funeral suggests that what’s dead (or dying) between them is not a person but a kind of ease, an emotional vocabulary they never learned how to use with each other.

The tone is wry and restrained. Each stanza begins with a mild character label—careworn, sober, kindly, domestic—as if the speaker is trying to be fair. But the fairness can’t warm the room; every description is followed by an account of how both men strain to perform sociability: he summons a smile, he tries to look cheerful. The effort is the point.

The handshake that speaks of the days gone by

The poem’s first crucial image is that silent shake—a sign that supposedly speaks, even though no one talks. Lawson frames it as a language of old events: the days gone by. That phrase can sound nostalgic, but in this context it reads like a shared history neither man wants to name. The simile Like men who meet at a funeral turns their greeting into a condolence exchange: polite, minimal, and heavy with what can’t be said.

Notice how the father-in-law is described as silent and the speaker participates in that silence without complaint. This is not just one man’s emotional limitation; it’s an agreed-upon atmosphere. Their bond, such as it is, lives in small, sanctioned actions—smile, handshake—rather than in any genuine conversation.

The pub as a second funeral: Ah, well! and the world-old sigh

The second stanza shifts from greeting to drinking, but the emotional temperature barely changes. Both men spare a shilling and drop in for a drink, suggesting thrift and routine, the kind of small habit you can justify to yourself. When Our pints they fill, their response is not pleasure but resignation: Ah, well!—followed by the world-old sigh. Lawson makes that sigh feel ancient and collective, as if the two men are plugging into a timeless male script: endure, don’t explain, have a drink.

The simile sharpens: it’s Like the drink that comes after a funeral. The pub becomes wake-like, not celebratory. The drink isn’t the beginning of joy but the continuation of a duty: something you do when there’s nothing else you can do, when consolation has to be swallowed instead of spoken.

Trying to be cheerful, waiting for the second drink

In the final stanza, Lawson tightens the screws. The father-in-law is now kindly and domestic, a man of home virtues, and yet the meeting still can’t become homely. They stand and think till the second drink, and that detail matters: it implies that one drink is not enough to loosen what’s locked, that their minds keep working in the silence instead of their mouths.

That silence might imply something the poem won’t quite state outright: That we’d both get over a funeral. The phrasing is almost comic in its understatement—of course you get over a funeral, in time—but it also hints at a deeper wish: that they could get over whatever loss, grievance, or awkwardness has turned their relationship into an ongoing condolence call.

The poem’s central tension: virtue and sadness in the same room

The quiet contradiction is that the father-in-law is presented as respectable—sober, possibly virtuous, certainly kindly—and the speaker seems willing to grant him that. Yet their meetings are haunted. Even the drink is framed conservatively: they save coins, they drink pints, they sigh; there’s no wildness here, only management. Lawson suggests that goodness and emotional barrenness can coexist: a man can be domestic and still unable to meet another man warmly, especially when the relationship is loaded with family history.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If their gestures already resemble a funeral—handshake, sigh, after-funeral drink—what exactly are they mourning each time they meet? The poem keeps answering with silence: the only thing it allows them to share openly is the weather of feeling, not the cause.