Father to Son

In Elizabeth Jennings' poem 'Father to Son', a father speaks about his grown-up son. They have lived together in the same house for years, yet the father says he does not understand his son at all. He tries to rebuild their relationship from his memories of the boy's childhood.

He wonders whether all he gave the boy was wasted: the son now lives in a world of his own, which the father cannot enter. They talk like strangers, there is no sign of understanding in the air, and their conversation is really a kind of silence.

The father says he would rather his son left home and then came back, like the prodigal son in the Bible, who wasted his inheritance but was welcomed home by his father. The father would forgive him, rather than see him build a separate world.

In the last stanza, both father and son are hurt and angry. Each holds out an empty hand, wishing there were something to forgive, some clear wrong that could be put right. But their problem is not a wrong; it is a gap between two generations.

The poem has four stanzas of six lines each. Each stanza rhymes abbaba, sometimes with half-rhymes (words that almost rhyme).