Memory of My Father
Memory of My Father - meaning Summary
Familiar Fathers in Age
The poem centers on the speaker’s remembrance of his father triggered by encounters with anonymous old men. Small London scenes — a stumbling man on a kerb, a faltering fiddler in Bayswater — prompt recognition and a sense of inherited likeness. The speaker reflects on his father’s decline and on mortality, as aged strangers evoke the past and suggest that any elderly figure could once have been his father.
Read Complete AnalysesEvery old man I see Reminds me of my father When he had fallen in love with death One time when sheaves were gathered. That man I saw in Gardner Street Stumbled on the kerb was one, He stared at me half-eyed, I might have been his son. And I remember the musician Faltering over his fiddle In Bayswater, London, He too set me the riddle. Every old man I see In October-coloured weather Seems to say to me: "I was once your father."
Feel free to be first to leave comment.