Yesterday I finished reading Coventry Patmore’s ‘Magna est Veritas’, and realised that I’d been unconsciously thinking of ‘The Toys’ while reading. So here is that poem:
The Toys
My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darken’d eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein’d stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I pray’d
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou’lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
“I will be sorry for their childishness.”
Here’s a poem that confounds conventional stereotypes about Victorian fathers.
The first sentence tells us what’s happened:
My little Son, who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
I’d want to go very slowly through these opening lines and get my group to think about the order of the various bits of information here. First, we are set down right in front of the child, ‘my little Son’, where the adjective ‘little’ seems almost an endearment as well as a descriptor.
Then we see him in a wider, more extended context:
…who look’d from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
This child, is normally well-behaved, ‘thoughtful’ and easy to parent, he ‘moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise.’ Does the father treat him as an adult? and could that be part of the problem – was he expecting too much? No childishness?
I realise as I am reading that this feels like overhearing a confession or a counselling session. The father is remembering and thinking about this painful incident, but he’s not just telling the story of the incident. He is telling us his feelings about what happened. There’s much love, tenderness, in the first two lines as he recounts how much he loves the child and how good the child is normally. Which makes the next part so much the more painful:
Having my law the seventh time disobey’d,
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
The father has a law – rules, we might call them, or, these days, boundaries. But there is huge authority in that word law, and it does make me think (I know we are not there yet but I know it is coming, having read the poem through a couple of times) God The Father.
The child has tried his father’s patience and seven times. That’s quite a lot of times that your child has stepped over the boundary. I imagine some small child-crime – pushing the sibling off the slide – once, three times – I’m getting pretty angry. Seven times? Getting very cross indeed…But is that ‘seven’ an echo of something? It must be a reference to the Bible:
21Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? 22Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.
We no longer think it right to strike children, but in Patmore’s day that would have been not simply socially acceptable but considered the right way to enforce disciple – it was in my childhood and in my own children’s childhoods. But as bad as the blow, possibly worse, is the emotional pain of rejection – it’s the father who did the rejecting – in the name of parental authority – but he suffers it now :
I struck him, and dismiss’d
With hard words and unkiss’d,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
We get to a key pain here for the father – the word ‘unkiss’d ‘ seems to raise the memory, ghostly presence, of the mother. That mother, ‘who was patient’, would not have done this or let it happen, and is dead. ‘Being dead’ – that’s an odd way to put it. It feels raw.
Thre’s a kind of paraphrase I want to make: ‘his motherbeing dead, I hit the child and sent him away unkindly, unkissed. She’d never have let that happen.’
We are likely to think of the poem at first as showing us a classic stern Victorian father stereotype but what we’re getting here is actually a different kind of classic: difficulty of the single parent, having to be both father and mother, having to set a boundary, stick to it and pull back when a line is crossed. It’s hard that the little clause, ‘who was patient’, is set in the middle of that line about death, that patience is unavailable. The father has not been patient; certainly not to seventy times seven.
It’s so recognisable – every parent must have had this experience or something like it at some point.
But I want to think for a moment about that ‘recognisable’. ‘Relevance’ is another of those troubling matters which are not easy to resolve with a rule of thumb or principle. Does what you take to a group of people who are – or are about to become – a Shared Reading group have to be ‘relevant’ ? Do you only take ‘The Toys’ to a group of parents? For a group of men who like fishing, do you only take a fishing magazine? And for those who follow the Kardashians or Love Island what should you be taking?
But most groups aren’t made up of single issue members: fathers or fishing fans or Kardashian followers, people with a fear of horses, single parents or those who only live in odd-numbered houses. All those people might well attend the same group. So catering for a specific interest group, or what one assumes is a specific interest or single issue group (people who live round here, people with no qualifications, people engaged with mental health services) is rarely the best way to go. ‘People who live round here’ are all different individuals and yet also share some underlying human experience which is not necessarily ‘living round here’. The ‘underlying human’ is more powerful, in my experience, than the ‘connected by our living round here’. Good poems will work well with most people.
There are exceptions. I wouldn’t in the first instance think of reading ‘The Toys’ with a parent in prison for abusing a child. As a man at Reader event once said to me, poems are like poems, they can go off, they can hurt people. But that is not to say that I wouldn’t think of reading the poem later, when we had been reading together long enough, when we trusted one another, if it seemed as if it might help. Read in The Reader magazine about my colleague Megg, reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, ‘Bluebird’ in Send prison -sorry can’t remember which issue.
And of course, you do not know, you never know, the individual private experience of members of your group, who might have been abused by parents or others, or have been perpetrators or sufferers of domestic violence.
Most people know quite a lot about most human experiences, wherever they live, whatever their educational experience, whether or not they work, live with a chronic illness or are in recovery from addiction. Poems will touch a spot in someone in your group. That isn’t a thing to be too afraid of – though be a bit afraid, because it helps keep your mind on the likely responses – that is what poems do. That is what they are for, to find, activate and connect the underlying human experience.
Almost everyone can relate to ‘The Toys’ because it is about feeling guilty after a bad mistake. That’s a human thing, not just a Victorian dad thing.
Finish reading ‘The Toys’ tomorrow
readerjanedavis 