17 pages • 34 minutes read
William MeredithParents
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Circular Nature of Life
The structure of “Parents” mirrors one of its most central themes. The poem’s narrative is circular, meaning it ends where it begins. The opening couplet suggests it is impossible to perceive ourselves as parents if we don’t already have children: “What it must be like to be an angel / or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner” (Lines 1-2). The end of the poem echoes this sentiment: “... we cry, wrinkling, / to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren” (Line 25-26). The speaker has gone through a journey from the beginning of the poem to the end. At the beginning, the speaker can't fathom being a parent; at the end, the speaker’s children and grandchildren cannot understand the speaker’s experience as a parent and grandparent. Because Meredith writes these experiences in the first-person plural, the argument here is this experience is universal, meaning all people in all generations will go through it or have already gone through it.
It’s possible to connect this concept to a broader view of life. Everyone is born, grows, changes, and then dies. People pass down their experiences to the next generation, and only with time do subsequent generations come to understand the wisdom (and faults) of previous generations.
The Duality of Innocence and Experience
The duality of innocence and experience is a common theme in poetry and other forms of art. Most notably, William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience deal with the opposing ideas. For Blake and many other artists, innocence and childhood go hand in hand, and experience and adulthood go together. While Blake and other poets connect religious and philosophical ideas to the theme of innocence and experience, Meredith touches on the dueling concepts in a more tangible way.
“Parents” focuses on the way innocence turns into experience and on the ways innocence and experience are different. In the poem, children are naive. They think they will end up with better lives than their parents, and they find their parents’ ways to be wrong and foolish. At the same time, their parents protect this innocent, naive way of thinking. The poem notes this especially in the second couplet where the parents lie about darkness to help the children sleep.
But the experience of death destroys this innocence. Death is “the worst thing” parents do—not in the sense that it’s a bad thing that happens to them, but that it’s something they do that is wrong. The description between Stanzas 9 and 10 holds on to that childlike naivete. It seeks to blame the parents for their death. But not only does the parent die, so does the wisdom about the past. The lines of lament read like someone who is casting blame: “taking with them the last explanation … // // taking the last link / of that chain with them” (Lines 20, 23-24).
Experience comes in the last stanza when the children realize they have become their parents. Yet, the speaker makes no judgment about this change. The speaker does not tell the reader how to feel about this. Instead, the speaker presents the sad image of the crying, wrinkling adult speaking to deaf ears the same wisdom the speaker’s parents once spoke. Whether this loss of innocence is something to be sad about or whether it is something to understand neutrally is up to the reader.
The Value of Compassion
The theme of compassion comes from the implication of the poem. Considering life is a circle, and considering innocence will pass into experience, the poem presents a logical reason for compassion. People should be compassionate because everyone will eventually end up in the same place. It may feel natural and easy to judge our parents and our elders and to think ourselves better than them, but the young will become the old, and the new generation will judge just like previous generations judged their elders.
Meredith does not present this theme as an argument, though; instead, the poem simply offers the wisdom of experience. It is a meditation about this concept, not a lesson. There is no admonishment of the young, nor is there an appeal for people to change how they act. Instead, the poem assumes the reader will not truly “get it” until the reader experiences the things the poem describes. Just as the speaker in the poem notes we do not truly understand experience until we are experienced ourselves, the ability to truly internalize our elders’ wisdom doesn’t happen until we, ourselves, are elders.
