The Child is Father of the Man
This has been a day for and about fathers. It marked the 41st time I was on the receiving end of a card or gift sent my way because someone claimed me as his/her dad. But I was a child long before I was a father, and even though my own dad has been out of my sight for twenty years now, he is far from being out of mind. I count it a blessing to have had a father who loved me, stood by me, and helped steer and direct me through the minefields of adolescence into an adulthood that I entered, thanks to him and my mom, with confidence and promise. Is there anything that I, or any of us can say to fully express what our dads have meant to us? Is there anything I can offer beyond I love you, I miss you, I thank you?
Talking about fathers to a broad audience requires some disclaimers. For some, the word father arouses feelings of resentment, abandonment, cruelty or even shame. For some, the mention of a father rings no bells at all, since they were raised without any father exerting any influence upon them, good or bad. For me, and I suspect for many people, speaking of or thinking about one’s father engenders a near and dear-to- the-heart flood of emotions. So I write knowing that the mere thought of one’s father can bring tears to the eyes and smiles to the face, or it can provoke a tightening of the stomach and clenching of the fist.
I guess you could say I was lucky, favored by having one father who was a constant in my life from the day I was born until his death in 2001, his 84th year. Along the way I inherited a second father, through marriage, whom I also called “Dad”. Like my birth father, he was a strong and steady force in his family, welcoming me into his circle of love and trust for over four decades. I can’t minimize nor overstate how great an impact these two men made on my life, leaving an imprint on who I am and what I’ve become that is more and more evident to me with each passing year.
As someone who was both a child and a father (and now a grandfather too) I have been drawn to a saying that succinctly connects these roles and relationships: The Child is Father of the Man. I first saw it in a Beach Boys song title in the 1960s and then, about the same time, on a Blood, Sweat and Tears album cover. I’m not surprised it was so used, as it seems to convey some profound meaning that musicians from that era were eager to co-opt. Yet at first glance, or after much reflection, it comes across as either really profound, or really nonsensical. Like an Escher art image, it can make you wonder if you are coming or going. How can a child father a man?
Since then I learned that the phrase was not some psychedelic wisdom from my teenage years. Rather it was first penned long before I, or my father figures, were even born. The English poet, William Wordsworth, included it in his very short poem, My Heart Leaps, written in 1802:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Reading it many times over and trying to cipher what the poet was trying to express, I’m struck by how the line in question seems out of place, both in content and rhythm. It’s as if Wordsworth interrupted his musings about childhood inspiration, looked away for a moment, and then pronounced his one line soliloquy pondering the connection between childhood and adulthood. Having given it voice he resumed his rainbow-triggered thought, hoping against hope that his youthful wonderment would somehow persist in his heart as long as he lived.
Did Wordsworth mean to convey that in each man is preserved at least an inkling of his childlike essence, no mater how old he becomes? Each man is fathered, so to speak, by what he has experienced and incorporated from his childhood, a childhood that, in large measure, depends on the impact of his own father and those others who helped father him. While the poet’s language is distinctively male—as one would expect from 19th-century literature--yet his meaning, I believe, need not be bound by gender. Does it not also speak to women about their mothers, or their fathers, in much the same way as it does to me in thinking about my own dad?
Child…Father…Man. It may not be the chronological sequence we’d expect in one sentence, yet the three so ordered sketch for me a circle in which each gives birth to the other, and each passes on to the next so much of what determines our identity and possibilities as we move through the years of our life’s progression. And then the cycle repeats itself in cumulative embellishments over time, as one generation begets another. The Child is Father of the Man.
On this Father’s Day, thinking about my own dad and about the father I inherited through marriage, I realize how lucky I am to have had such good people, of such integrity and faithfulness to their families, both of whom I was privileged to call Dad. What they did for me, and meant to me when I was a child not only gave birth to what I have become as a man. It set before my eyes and within my heart a standard of conduct, of commitment and of fidelity to and for those whom I have been given the opportunity, the responsibility and the joy of being a father.
