Farther by Owen Sheers (Analysis)

The OCR anthology Towards a World Unknown has the poem in full at this link:

Click to access 171147-poetry-anthology-towards-a-world-unknown.pdf

---

A rough analysis: (the last line is analysed in the last paragraph)

Against a dramatic setting in the nature in Wales, the speaker explores his love for his father, his sorrow at the distance that has grown between them and his hope that they could become closer.

The Welsh setting plays an integral part in the poem. Apart from having its own character, it sets the tone for the poem and reflects aspects of the changing relationship between father and son.
Lines 3-9 first sets the scene:
(a) ‘choosing the long way round’– both father and son treasure this time that they are spending together, and want to prolong it, so they choose the long way round. Sets a loving and sad tone. They want to spend time together but clearly do not do so often.
(b) ‘simplified by snow’ and ‘its puzzle solved by moss‘- a form of pathetic fallacy? sets the expectation for readers that this poem is a journey to untangle something, some unsolved sentiment. It also portrays nature as an intelligent being – it ‘simplifies’ the forest by laying snow over its complicated forestry, and it ‘solves’ the puzzle laid out by the deteriorated stone wall through growing moss strategically over it.
(c) ‘and out of the trees into that cleft of earth/split they say by a father’s grief/at the loss of his son to man.’ – these are powerfully emotionally lines. the first line builds suspense – what is there outside of the trees? What is so special about that ‘cleft of earth’? The next two lines have almost identical rhythms (do some simple scansion and you’ll see). This (and the enjambement) adds to the gravity of the tone, makes the emotion behind the lines especially intense. There is also obviously a similarity here to God’s sending of Jesus Christ to die for humanity. So, the speaker could be acknowledging that he knows that his father’s love for him is on epic proportions. In what way has his father lost him to ‘man’? Maybe the son (Owen Sheers) has left Wales after he has grown up and that could be interpreted as a betrayal and a ‘loss’.
The religious connotation is continued in Line 9 – an ‘altar’ of rock. What are they worshipping at this ‘altar’? Makes their journey seem like a pilgramage.
(d) ‘A blade of wind from the east/and the broken stone giving under our feet/with the sound of a crowd sighing.’– ‘Blade’ of wind – metaphor of wind as a knife blade, clearly sets a hostile tone. ‘broken stone’ – dysfunctional environment? Or just one steeped in ancient history? ‘the sound of a crowd sighing’- irony – there is no crowd in this rural place. Highlights the father and son’s isolation. Concentrates the spotlight of the poem on them.
(e)‘and shared the shock of a country unrolled before us,/the hedged fields breaking on the edge of Wales.’ – again the environment is animate and dynamic (don’t say it’s personification – humans don’t “unroll” or literally “break”). ‘Unrolled’ is a great verb to describe the vastness of the landscape before them and ‘breaking’ is a effective way of conveying the sudden ending of the fields against the coastline. The speaker and the father are sharing a memorable, dramatic, emotional moment. This is further reflected in the line ‘the sky rubbed raw over the mountains’. The sky’s colour may be ‘raw’, but the adjective also reflects on the emotional vulnerability of the speaker in the last lines of the poem.

In addition, the speaker’s relationship with his father oscillates between being distant and being close throughout the poem.
(a) The underlying tone of loss and sadness is set by the description of the ‘cleft of earth’ as described above.
(b) Then the son and father set out on a journey where they encounter a shared problem: the slope is ‘steeper than expected‘. In a way, this sets the reader up to expect that this is a journey where father and son bond (because as is commonly known, people bond together over shared problems). One of the most significant passages in the poem is:
(c) ‘Half way up and I turned to look at you,
your bent head the colour of the rocks,
your breath reaching me, short and sharp and solitary,
and again I felt the tipping in the scales of us,
the intersection of our ages.’
Here, the speaker comes to a realisation of the vast age gap between him and his father. ‘your bent head the colour of rocks’ – this line is ominous and brings up the shadow of death. Human bodies return to nature in death, but already, the father’s ‘bent head’ reminds the speaker of ‘rocks’ on the ground. The father’s breathlessness (evoked by the caesura and the consecutive conjunctions) is also a reminder of the ailing health (due to age). And so the speaker feels the ‘tipping in the scales of us’ – whereas once upon a time, the speaker was the one who would have been young and fragile and his father was strong and able, the speaker is now the able one and the father is ageing and fragile. The long/short length of the last two sentences evokes the imbalance of the tipped ‘scales’.
(d) ‘Pulling a camera from my pocket I placed it on the trig point
and leant my cheek against the stone to find you in its frame,
before joining you and waiting for the shutter’s blink
that would tell me I had caught this:’
The speaker and the father are out of touch with each other’s thoughts and intentions. Whilst the speaker intends to take a photo of the scenery by perching his camera on his camera stand, his father stands squarely in the frame. However, instead of asking his father to move away, the speaker sets the camera up to take a picture, walks to join his father, and waits for the camera to take a picture of the scene with the two of them in it automatically.
(e)’the sky rubbed raw over the mountains,
us standing on the edge of the world, together against the view
and me reaching for some kind of purchase
or at least a shallow handhold in the thought
that with every step apart, I’m another closer to you.’
As said – ‘raw’ reflects the colour of the sky but also the speaker’s emotional vulnerability in this moment. The next line emphasises the bond between the father and the son – they are a collective unit – ‘us’ and ‘together against’. But even in this powerful moment, the speaker acknowledges that there is still distance between them. This distance is, to some extent, irreparable – there is a hint of hopelessness when the speaker says ‘or at least…’. As if he is grasping at straws at a last resort to close the distance between them.

The last line is enigmatic – on the literal level, it makes no sense – it is an example of the speaker’s refusal to admit that the gap between him and his father is irreparable- he has convinced himself that growing apart from his father also means growing closer to him. On another level, it could be that the speaker is saying that although him and his father are growing apart as his father grows older and the speaker moves further away from Welsh culture, yet by growing apart, the speaker also gains the distance necessary to have a more complete understanding of his father. This is supported by the moments that they have shared on the way to the top of the hill – when the speaker was ahead of his father (and thus further apart), he was able to look back and have the perspective to observe that his father is growing old (bent head the colour of rocks). Also, by putting his camera on his camera stand, the speaker is out of touch with his father’s intentions to just enjoy the scenery – but by leaving the camera in place on the stand, the speaker is able to capture the moment (ie. take a photo of) him and his father sharing this moment of scenery.

To note:
There are alternating patterns in the poem – of:
(1) human interaction VS setting
Human interaction: 1-2, 9-11, 15-21, 24-27, 29-32
Everything between these lines describes the setting.
In other words, the speaker, his father and the Welsh setting are interwoven tightly. The relationship between the son and father and the Welsh setting are inseparable.
(2) The relationship between son and father oscillates between distance and closeness. (Use a highlighter and you can see they alternate:)
Closeness:
‘but it was then we climbed the Skirrid again,’
‘We stopped there at an altar of rock and rested’
‘and you are with me again, so together we climbed to the top’
‘before joining you and waiting for the shutter’s blink’
‘us standing on the edge of the world, together against the view’
‘that with every step apart, I’m another closer to you’
Distance:
‘split they say by a father’s grief…’
‘and again I felt the tipping in the scales of us…’
‘and leant my cheek against the stone to find you in its frame’
‘or at least a shallow handhold in the thought…’

Father Returning Home by Dilip Chitre

The Poem: 

My father travels on the late evening train
Standing among silent commuters in the yellow light
Suburbs slide past his unseeing eyes
His shirt and pants are soggy and his black raincoat
Stained with mud and his bag stuffed with books
Is falling apart. His eyes dimmed by age
fade homeward through the humid monsoon night.
Now I can see him getting off the train
Like a word dropped from a long sentence.
He hurries across the length of the grey platform,
Crosses the railway line, enters the lane,
His chappals are sticky with mud, but he hurries onward.

 

Home again, I see him drinking weak tea,
Eating a stale chapati, reading a book.
He goes into the toilet to contemplate
Man’s estrangement from a man-made world.
Coming out he trembles at the sink,
The cold water running over his brown hands,
A few droplets cling to the greying hairs on his wrists.
His sullen children have often refused to share
Jokes and secrets with him. He will now go to sleep
Listening to the static on the radio, dreaming
Of his ancestors and grandchildren, thinking
Of nomads entering a subcontinent through a narrow pass.

Dilip Chitre (1938-2009)

Summary and Analysis:

Dilip Chitre is an important  post-independence India poet. He was bilingual and wrote in Marathi as well as English. This poem is presumably set in Mumbai, and in keeping with the rest of this list of poems under CIE 0486 syllabus, is about love – in this case, familial love.

In the first stanza, the father is commuting home after work, and he presents a pathetic sight. He is on board a ‘late evening’ train, and the implication of the end of the day sets the tone for the theme of the irrelevancy and maltreatment of elderly people in the rest of the poem. The train ride seems to have an oppressive atmosphere, the commuters are not chatting happily away – instead, they are all estranged from each other and are ‘silent’ on this long commute home. The lighting is depressing, a ‘yellow light’ shines on the commuters, leaving a sense of the lack of maintenance and care of the train that echoes the poem’s theme of the neglect of the elderly. The description of the father’s eyes as ‘unseeing’ draws attention to the poignant fact that he is estranged from life itself. Instead of understanding that the father is simply ‘blind’ to life, the adjective ‘unseeing’ reminds readers that the father once ‘saw’ life, and it is only old age that has undone that ability to ‘see’ or engage with life.

The father is the picture of an uncared for person. His clothes are ‘soggy’, wet from the rain, and his raincoat is not just wet, but ‘stained with mud’, as if his state is always worse for wear. His bag is ‘stuffed with books’ tells us that he is a person who thirsts for knowledge and has an enthusiasm for life at least in respect of books. Yet the bag that holds these books is ‘falling apart’, and we understand from this, that even one of the core interests in his life is not keeping him together. The enjambement of ‘stuffed with books//is falling apart’ neatly conveys the precarious state of the books, that they are nearly about to fall out of the bag.

The key line in the latter half of this stanza is ‘like a word dropped from a long sentence’. This is a line that vividly relates the irrelevancy and insignificance of the elderly father to the world. In the process of trimming down a long sentence, one has to make the value judgment of which words are not essential to the meaning and structure of the sentence, and accordingly, delete those words from the sentence. Likewise, in the hierarchy of social structure, there are only a certain sector of the population, or certain people, who are considered essential the meaning and structure of the community, and in this poem, the elderly, or at least, the father figure, is not one of them. He is annexed from the sector of the population considered essential.

Against these immeasurable, oppressive forces, the contrast of the futility of the father’s determination in ‘hurrying onward’ despite sandals that are ‘sticky with mud’ shows up the poignancy of society’s abandonment of its elderly population.

In the second stanza, the setting changes to the father and speaker’s home. Again, the picture presented is of a neglected person – after a long journey home, the father doesn’t enjoy hot tea or tasty food, but instead drinks ‘weak tea’, and a ‘stale chapati’. Instead of being greeted by welcoming company, his companionship comes in the form of  a ‘book’.

The disorder of his life is also shown up by the choice of his place for contemplation about life – the toilet. The place where humans go to dispose of bodily waste, to put it politely. It’s almost as if he doesn’t even have respect for his own philosophical musings to find a more dignified place to do his thinking. ‘Man’s estrangement from a man-made world’ is a powerful line. It presents to us the paradox that this world and its social hierarchies and structures are created by man, but men do not look out for all of its own kind, and so the world that man created is also the world that neglects much of the population of men. (If you’re being pedantic about technical words in the GCSE exam, you could talk about the repetition of word ‘man’)

His physical fragility is conveyed by the image of him ‘trembling’ at the sink, and the rest of the stanza speaks of the old man’s immeasurable loneliness.

Even his closest kin – his children, reject his presence and his mind. They do not share their life with him or trust him with their personal ‘secrets’. At the arrival of bedtime, he is content with the ‘static’ of the radio, instead of genuine programmes on the radio. This is reflective of his life in general, as portrayed in the poem. He does not get the fulfilling version of life that everyone else who can tune into radio programmes do, but he is still content with the dysfunctional version of life that he receives.

The last two clauses of the poem are very poignant though. They do not point to the discontent or complaints that the old man has about the broken life that he leads. Instead, they point to the escape methods that the old man has – he escapes into his own mental world of ancestry, drama and grandeur. Despite the cruelty he has been shown, and the total collapse of a functional life, the elderly father has the bravery to find solace in creating his own mental drama and world.