Walking Away

Question 1

What type of poem is it?

Answer 1

Familial

Question 2

What are the key themes?

Answer 2

1. Memories
2. Independence
3. Parent child relationship
4. Distance
5. Growing up

Question 3

Key quotes for memories?

Answer 3

“,almost to the day-“ & “leaves just turning” - trying to remember and bring himself back to this time, remembers time period, this moment changed him as he’s remembering it, hasn’t blocked it out or been forgotten so it meant something to him

Painful verbs convey the intensity of the experience: “Wrenched”, “scorching”, “Gnaws”.

Question 4

Key quotes for independence?

Answer 4

“Love is proved in the letting go.” - full stop makes it feel like a hard truth, hard to accept but it’s true, to let go is to love, it’s inevitable, full stop is also like a foreshadowing or a foreboding sense of independence having to happen

Question 5

Key quotes for parent child relationship?

Answer 5

“Ordeals will fire one’s irresolute clay”: irresolute means ‘uncertain’. He now accepts that the experience will make his son more solid and strong, like fired clay.

Question 6

Key quotes for distance?

Answer 6

“Behind a scatter of boys. I can see” - the caesura emphasises the distance, the father is trying to find his son but something in blocking him, still trying to catch the last glimpse of son no matter how hard, would sacrifice anything for him, wants to see son before he starts truly growing up

Question 7

Key quotes for growing up?

Answer 7

“A half fledged thing set free into the wilderness”
“Like a satellite / wrenched from its orbit”
“Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem”

All of these quotes have natural/animal imagery, all of these suggest a foreboding and inescapable outcome of growing up, wildness and danger, “free into the wilderness” and “wretched from its orbit” and “loosened from its parent stem”, all of these quotes leave on a cliffhanger of what happens next but it can be assumed that the next bit of the story continues with some sort of danger, letting your child grow up is hard as it’ll encounter many issues and dangers in life

Question 8

Context?

Answer 8

Day Lewis had himself attended boarding school and so could appreciate the anxiety and pain from both sides of the relationship: this is apparent in the descriptions of his nervous son.

Question 9

Form and structure?

Answer 9

First-person narration conveys personal nature of the poem.
Steady rhyme scheme of ABACA reflects the consistency of the father’s love for his son.
First two stanzas describe the day (eighteen years ago) and the final two stanzas reflect on how the memory still pains him after so long

Question 10

Meaning and purpose?

Answer 10

First person narrative where the poet reflects back on the anxiety of dropping his young son off for his first game of football at boarding school.
Eighteen years on, he is still affected by the image of his son nervously walking away.
The poem ends with the acceptance that this is a process that all parents must go through, and “love is proved in the letting go”.