Parents

William Meredith’s “Parents,” from his 1980 collection The Cheer, is a free verse poem about the experience of having parents and becoming a parent. “Parents” does not follow a set metrical pattern and does not utilize a rhyme scheme, and it does not utilize many examples of figurative language; instead, the poem’s power comes from the depth of its conviction and its use of everyday language to express a common experience in an ironic and witty way. According to Meredith, the poem is about the way people see their parents; specifically, it’s about the feeling that one’s parents are “tacky” or embarrassing. However, midway through the poem, there is a shift from feeling embarrassment about one’s parents to actually becoming a parent. The light, slightly comedic tone of the poem, at this point, turns serious and a little dark as the speaker contemplates the feeling of loss and death, ultimately realizing life is a circle, and the things the speaker once noticed about his parents are now true of himself.

Poet Biography

William Meredith (1919-2007) is one of most well-regarded American poets of the 20th century. Born in New York City, Meredith began writing in college at Princeton. One of his earliest influences was Robert Frost, the famous New England poet often regarded as one of the most important writers in American history.

After college, Meredith worked for the New York Times before enlisting in the military to fight in World War II. Many of Meredith’s poems from the mid-1900s build on his experiences during WWII and the Korean War, as he was a pilot who flew on many dangerous missions in the Pacific, earning him numerous promotions and accolades.

Meredith’s career in poetry took off in the 1950s and 1960s when he wrote and taught at Connecticut College. In 1964, Meredith became Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 1978, he was the first gay poet to become the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, now known as the United States Poet Laureate, one of the highest honors an American poet can receive.

Meredith had a stroke in 1983, which resulted in expressive aphasia that made it difficult for him to speak. The stroke affected the rest of his life. He had to retire from teaching in 1983, and he spent many years rehabilitating his language skills.

Despite this, Meredith continued writing, and he produced his most lauded work in 1988. Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the most distinguished yearly award a poet can earn.

Meredith died in 2008 in Mystic, Connecticut. His partner, Richard Harteis, is now the president of the William Meredith Foundation.

Meredith built a strong legacy as a poet with a unique ability to capture the cadence and voice of the common person, and much of his poetry is easier to read and understand for people unfamiliar with poetry than other famous poets’ work. He is also known as a poet who produced a relatively small amount of work during his lifetime, as he only published 10 volumes of poetry over the course of 50 years. However, Meredith also left behind substantial contributions to art criticism and poetry translation.

Poem Text

Meredith, William. “Parents.” The Cheer, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

“Parents” begins with what can seem like a confusing opening stanza. However, the opening lines gain a little clarity when considered in the context of the rest of the poem. The speaker says it is easier to imagine being “an angel / or a squirrel” (Lines 1-2) than to imagine being an unnamed thing. However, the title of the poem hints at the nature of the comparison. In context, the opening stanza says it is easier to imagine being a squirrel or an angel than it is to imagine being a parent. The insinuation here is that the speaker, at this point of the poem, is not yet a parent. The use of “angel” and squirrel” points to two different yet equally impossible things. While this guide will discuss this comparison in more detail later, it is important to understand its literal context now: It sets up the difficulty the speaker has imagining himself as a parent.

The next stanza presents an image of parenthood. The speaker says parents are there “the last time we go to bed good” (Line 3), and he says parents lie “about darkness” (Line 4). This refers to the way parents comfort their children when they go to bed. Children are often afraid of the dark, and parents can tell them stories to help them feel safe as they fall asleep. Going to bed “good” refers to the innocence children have, as the pressures and anxieties of adulthood don’t tend to keep them up all night.

Stanzas 3-5 speak to the changes children see their parents go through as well as the way the parent-child relationship evolves over time. In Stanza 3, the speaker is critical of parents, saying they “dandle us once too often,” (Line 4), which leads to the next line about how parents start out as their children’s friends but become their enemies. “Dandle” means to move someone up and down in a playful way. This is a precise word to use when describing the way parents play with their children. But the implication in Line 5 is that parents hold on to that relationship longer than their children do, as children often end up resenting or rebelling against their parents. This happens when children reach an age where they wish to be older—not as old as their parents, but as old as their parents’ “juniors” (Line 7). And while this change in the relationship happens, children suddenly realize how old their parents are, or they perceive their parents as being too old. They suddenly notice their parents’ “wrinkles … / coughs, and smells” (Lines 9-10).

Stanzas 6-9 describe the time in the relationship when the children cannot understand their parents and when children see the relationship with their parents as unnatural or awkward. The speaker sees a parent’s love as “grotesque” (Line 11), and he can’t imagine how he is the offspring of his parents. He even says that at this stage, children think it is an affront that they came from their parents (Line 13). Comedically, the speaker also adds how awkward and repulsive it is to think about how he came from his parents (Line 14). Stanza 8 expresses a common thought among children that they can and will have better lives than their parents. And Stanza 9 says this kind of thinking—that parents do everything wrong—persists for a long time.

The rest of the poem, though, presents a turn. Stanza 10, using enjambment to punctuate the impact of the action, reminds the reader that all parents eventually die. And when they die, they take with them the understanding, knowledge, and wisdom that only a parent can give a child. Even though the speaker has aged at this point in the poem, he laments the loss of the parents he was just criticizing. He says they take “the last link / of that chain with them” (Lines 23-24), suggesting the speaker now realizes how important his parents were for connecting him to what came before.

Finally, the poem ends with an ironic image of the now grown child, a parent and grandparent himself, crying to his own children and grandchildren about the parents he has lost. The speaker has come full circle, and now his children will criticize him because they do not understand what he is talking about (Line 26).