Uncle Tony's Poetry Corner and Butcher Shop

     Ah, it's been a tough week for fathers up here in Canada.  From the hostess of 100 Huntley Street, the northland's ultra-nice answer to The 700 Club:

      "It's such a shame that fathers on television are portrayed as abusive and incompetent.  Many are not."

     Transpose that into a black key, madam -- or Jewish, or female, or Indian.  Then this wisdom, gracing the back of the bulletin for our parish (actually, our "pastoral unit," headed by two sacerdotal units, a consecrated female unit, a secretarial unit, and various ministerial units):

Fathers are wonderful people
too little understood,
And we do not sing their praises
as often as we should...

For, somehow, Father seems to be
the man who pays the bills,
While Mother binds up little hurts
and nurses all our ills...

And Father struggles daily
to live up to "his image"
As protector and provider
and "hero of the scrimmage"...

And perhaps that is the reason
we sometimes get the notion
That Fathers are not subject
to the thing we call emotion,

But if you look inside Dad's heart,
where no one else can see,
you'll find he's sentimental
and as "soft" as he can be...

But he's too busy every day
in the gruelling race of life,
He leaves the sentimental stuff
to his partner and his wife...

But Fathers are just wonderful
in a million different ways,
and they merit loving compliments
and accolades of praise,

For the only reason Dad aspires
to fortune and success
is to make the family proud of him
and to bring them happiness...

And like Our Heavenly Father,
he's a guardian and a guide,
Someone that we can count on
to be always on our side.      -- Helen Steiner Rice

Yes, the Father is a "guardian and a guide," "always on our side."  We are supposed to be on the Lord's side, but I suppose it could be worse.  I can't at the moment imagine how, but human ingenuity does often stagger the imagination.  We were also treated to such cute stuff on the front of the bulletin, clearly translated from bad English idiom to bad French: "un papa" is someone who can "etre present pour toi quand tu as besoin de lui," who listens, who supports, who gives you his best, and who can be one of your "meilleurs amis".  Clearly written by someone who is not a father, will never be a father, and has never given any deep thought to what it means to be a father. 

     I'm writing this on the quick, from a computer in a public library -- I don't have much time.  I'll be posting a blog on the difference between feeling and sentimentality, especially as regards church music and liturgy, sometime later this week -- I promise.  Meanwhile, after all that saccharine, and all that mendacity, here from the poet Robert Hayden are a few lines that touch upon some deep truths about fathers, imperfect as they are, and even about the Father whom they dimly reflect.  I'll quote them without comment:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then from cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Comments

[Beth]

I teach this poem in Intro to Lit. It never fails to move my students -- some of them even to express appreciation to their fathers.

[Firinnteine]

I forget where I first ran across Hayden's poem, but reading it again, I like it still better the second time.

God grant us grace to be such men as those who fathered us, such patriarchs as those who went before us, and in our own brokenness and imperfection nevertheless to show our own children (God willing) an image of the one perfect Father.

[V-Dawg]

Firinnteine: you probably saw it the same place I did--in The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. I actually memorized that poem for a class recitation, though unfortunately I don't have it completely memorized anymore.

[James Kabala]

I read the Robert Hayden poem in AP English (yes, in public high school) almost a decade ago. It is a great poem.
Helen Steiner Rice, whom I never heard of before but Googled after reading this post, is apparently the late (1900-1981) queen of bad greeting card verse. However, according to the online biography at her offical website, her father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, forcing her both to put aside her plans to attend college and to become the family breadwinner for a time, and her husband (not, as far as I can tell from the bio, the father of any children, but surely that must have been their long-term plan) killed himself in 1932 after losing all his savings in the 1929 crash and his job as a banker in the subsquent Depression. So surely at some point Mrs. Rice must have "given deep thought to what it means to be a father," but, lacking true poetic talent, she covered the pain with treacly twaddle rather an excellent poem such as Hayden was able to write.

[maria horvath]

Tony,

Your parish unit North of the Border Up Nanada Way obviously needs a new editor unit for its bulletin. There are many thoughtful poems about fathers, as clear as Robert Hayden's, just waiting to be printed.

MEN AT FORTY

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

~ Donald Justice (1925-2004)

[Nick]

I think you might be just a touch to hard on Mrs. Rice. I don't find anything offensive in the whole thing. It may not be a perfect work of art, but few are. I think it might have to do more with the source of the newsletter than the poem itself.