Zoned out on Poetry #5
Mood
A poet evokes a mood in his readers by using a number of elements such as setting, theme as well as his own attitude or beliefs towards the subject he is writing about. The mood of the poem may be described as idealistic, romantic, realistic, optimistic, gloomy, imaginary, mournful and so on.
Let’s compare these two poems that have to do with parent-child relationship that evoke different moods - Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis and Eden Rock by Charles Causley
Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
Eden Rock by Charles Causley
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
In Walking Away, the parent reminisces about his son and reflects on the separation that has to take place. In Eden Rock, the son reflects on past experiences with his parents and looks forward to reunification. The mood in the first poem is one of parental anxiety. The image of the satellite wrenched from its orbit initiates this mood of the agonising father. It ends with the father’s reluctant acceptance of the separating forces of nature and the hand of God.
In Eden Rock a mood of dreamy otherworldliness is evoked by the idyllic setting of the Biblical Garden of Eden, the references to light and radiance and the almost angelic figure of his mother. The details of the deliberate calm actions of the parents give a sense of tranquillity.