Father’s Bedroom
In my Father’s bedroom:
blue threads as thin
as pen-writing on the bedspread,
blue dots on the curtains,
a blue kimono,
Chinese sandals with blue plush straps.
The broad-planked floor
had a sandpapered neatness.
The clear glass bed-lamp
with a white doily shade
was still raised a few
inches by resting on volume two
of Lafcadio Hearn’s
Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan.
Its warped olive cover
was punished like a rhinoceros hide.
In the flyleaf:
‘Robbie from Mother.’
Years later in the same hand:
‘This book has had hard usage
On the Yangtze River, China.
It was left under an open
porthole in a storm.’
A few questions seem immediately generated for me by this poem. The questions would form the basis of my exploration of the poem and its link to other extracts about fathers in the ELAT paper. Questions are helpful as they take away any anxiety as to meaning! Remember the ELAT paper question does use the word ‘interesting’ in the rubric and this underlines the role of the student to debate any text in an open minded and thoughtful way. In other words, I don’t have to understand a text ‘fully’ in order to find it interesting and thereby to find ‘things’ to talk about!
And even the most simple question needs exploring as it may lead to lots of possibilities, as well as giving your answer direction, thoughtful control and poise.
Here are a few ‘intuitive’ questions:
1) Why is the poet/narrator visiting his father’s bedroom? (IS THIS A SPECIAL SPACE-NOT A STUDY OR OFFICE?)Is he an interloper? ( TENSION) Is this an intimate, painful visit? Is his father dead ?(TIME GAP) Is this visit nostalgic and tinged by grief or bitterness?
2) How intimate is the description of the room? The details seem exotic, and described with a certain awe.The awe could be ironic as it seems his father collected artefacts and signs of the East, (WAS HE A GREEDY TRAVELLER?)yet this may have kept him away, physically and psychologically from his son.
3) Is the poem a form of entrapment? (Memory therefore a form of ‘netting’ in which particles of places and people are kept animated through the act of recollection.) By this I mean that the act of writing ensnares and ‘captures’ the father through art in a way unavailable to the poet when the father was alive. ( HE IS TRYING TO KNOW HIM LONG AFTER DEATH?)
4) The book used as a support to a lamp. it supports a light and reading. It is also very near to a human being throughout their sleeping- a sign surely of intimacy and vulnerablity? We keep things close to us that mean something. We can just reach out and touch these signs should we awaken. The inscription is ambiguous. Is it affectionate or distant-or both? And if somewhat formal perhaps due to class upbringing, then is the second inscription more humorous and acceptant of the adventures of the son? The book it seems has a character and has travelled with the father ‘Robert’ throughout challenging weather and enocunters. Is the humour jealous, redemptive or even precluding? Perhaps the father had better relationship with his mother, than the poet.
5) Who seems most vivid and alive in the poem and why? The translucent, slightly ethereal and feminine aspect of certain details are offset against the toughness of the book and what it testifies to and signifies.
The father was a complex, perhaps distant figure, steadily re-composed through the exotic details, yet still remaing elusive. How emotionally ambivalent is the writer to his father and his past? The last words evoke an ‘open porthole in a storm’..bravery, and fabulous unsettling sights?
Rather like memory?
Dr Janet Lewison