17 pages • 34 minutes read
Daniel BeatyKnock Knock
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
“Knock Knock”
The phrase “knock knock” is the main motif in the poem, appearing 11 times in addition to the title. It unifies various parts of the poem and contributes to its structural and semantic coherence. The meaning of the phrase changes in different sections of the poem, reflecting the speaker’s personal growth. At the beginning, when the speaker is three years old, “knock knock” (Lines 3 and 10) refers to the father’s knocking on the boy’s bedroom door every morning. It is the sound that anticipates parental playfulness and affection that the boy cherishes. Here the boy passively awaits the father’s knocks, eager to be the object of his love. However, when the phrase reappears in the third stanza (Lines 23 and 25), it is the boy who knocks on the glass separating him from his father in the prison. He asserts his agency, “trying to break through the glass” (Line 23), revealing his uncomprehending anger at being disallowed to embrace his father.
Later, when the speaker is in his late 20s, that vague frustration turns into a meaningful conviction that he must actively confront the injustice that might have contributed to his father’s long absence. In the last stanza, “knock knock” is the sound of toppling racism and poverty (Line 53) and breaking open “doors of opportunity” (Line 54). The phrase now represents the speaker’s mature awareness of what he can and should do for the sake of his father and his own children (Lines 56-57). The last occurrence of the phrase mimics the silly joke—“Knock knock / “Who’s there?” (Lines 67-68)—which highlights through contrast the seriousness of the final line: “We are” (Line 69), the confident and motivated young people like the speaker who will keep knocking until they knock down the poverty and racism that knocked down their fathers.
Doors and Windows
Doors and windows can provide or prohibit access, and Beaty takes advantage of their contradictory implications in “Knock Knock.” At the beginning of the poem, the door of the boy’s room is a gateway to affection. The father comes in to wake his son up and to assure the boy of his love. The boy eagerly reciprocates by jumping into his father’s arms (Line 6). The father’s routine of walking through that door every morning embodies the strong emotional bond between him and his son. Once the father is imprisoned, the image of a welcoming door is replaced with the image of the forbidding “high / Rusty gates” of the prison complex (Lines 13-14). These gates are comparable to a door, but they represent separation rather than connection. They trigger the boy’s confusion and unease (Line 15) while his bedroom door inspires a sense of safety, comfort, and playful affection.
The windows separating inmates from visitors deepen the alienating atmosphere of the prison. The boy tries to break the window separating him from his father (Lines 23-24), almost as if he were aware that the window stands for the many years of his father’s absence that would follow. Twenty-five years later, the speaker, now experienced and self-aware, uses the image of doors more metaphorically in the letter he writes to himself on his father’s behalf. He refers to “doors of racism and poverty” (Line 53) that must collapse and “doors of opportunity” (Line 54) that must open more widely. Here, again, doors have contrasting implications: They can symbolize enforced narrowing of one’s path in life, caused by poverty and racism, as well as its broadening in a more equitable and just society. The speaker commits to fighting for such a society. He imagines his father writing, “These prison gates cannot contain my spirit” (Line 58), but the same is true for the speaker himself: His spirit breaks through the doors of poverty and racism.
Words
Words, both spoken and unspoken, play an important role in the speaker’s development. The words of greeting and love mark the beginning of each day during the boy’s early childhood (Lines 7-8). Later, the absence of the father’s words encapsulates his removal from the boy’s life. He “has never said a word” (Line 27) in 25 years, which prompts the son to “write these words” (Line 28), first as if he were still a small boy needing his father’s advice (Lines 30-40), and then as if he were the father responding to the boy’s pleas (Lines 45-60). This highlights the significance of words in the father-son relationship.
The son is eager for the father to speak to him man-to-man: about shaving, sports, and women (Lines 33-36). These words would facilitate his growth from boy to man. However, because the father is silent, the boy must “try to father [him]self” (Line 43) and find his own words. Significantly, the speaker answers his young self’s question about “How to dribble a ball” (Line 35) by suggesting that he “Dribble the page with the brilliance of your ballpoint pen” (Line 49). For this young man, the childhood desire to express himself through sports has changed into an adult desire to express himself through writing. The prison might have silenced his father, but the speaker believes that his own confident and powerful words, joined by the words of many like him, can make a difference both in his life and in the lives of Black people everywhere.
