Summary, Structure & Form
English Lit: AQA GCSE Poetry - Love & Relationships, topic 8.1.1
Summary of Walking Away
Cecil Day Lewis was a modernist poet who often used natural imagery to explore and describe his personal experiences. Walking Away is about his relationship with his son Sean.
Background
- Cecil Day Lewis was a modernist poet. He was made poet laureate from 1968 until his death.
- Brought up by his father, Lewis focuses on father-son relationships in this poem.
- Walking Away is about his relationship with and love for his own son, Sean.
Summary
- Lewis’ narrator begins looking back on his memories of his son’s first game of football. This moment is used as a fixed moment in the past and a metaphor for Lewis’ son growing up.
- He uses cosmic and natural imagery to try and convey the poignant sense of loss a parent feels as their child grows up. He also tries to capture a parent's awareness that their child must and should break away from them in order to experience true ‘selfhood’.
Parental love
- Lewis explores familial love in this poem, a kind of love that is often presented as unconditional.
- But, even though Lewis will never stop loving his son, the way he expresses his love has to change as his son grows up – including allowing his son to metaphorically walk away from him.
- His pain at this 'loss' is lessened by his awareness that this is, in itself, an act of love. His son needs freedom to thrive and grow up.
Structure and Form in Walking Away
Here are some of the features of structure and form in Cecil Day Lewis' poem Walking Away
First-person narrative
- The poem is a first-person narrative, from the perspective of a father remembering his son’s first football match.
Real speech
- The poem attempts to create a sense of real speech with the use of enjambment and caesura.
- The use of words such as ‘perhaps’ and ‘roughly’ gives the sense that the poet is struggling to put into words how he feels.
- The use of dashes makes the reader feel like the narrator’s thoughts are interrupting the flow of the poem.
Development of narrator's thoughts
- As much as the poem is about development and growth, the poem itself reflects the development of the narrator’s thoughts.
- He begins focusing on memory in the first two stanzas.
- In the middle two stanzas, he reflects on these memories and the raw pain he feels.
- In the final stanza, he comes to the painful conclusion that while this is difficult for him – it is an act of love to let his son go.
Test yourself on Summary, Structure & Form
What memory does Lewis begin the poem with?
What type of poet was Cecil Day Lewis?
Development of the Narrator's Thoughts
What person is the poem Walking Away written in?
How does the poet try to mimic real speech in Walking Away?