This week’s poem is “Walking Away” by Cecil Day-Lewis. It is about the moment when a child begins to learn independence and a parent begins to learn to let go.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Cecil Day-Lewis (1904—1972)
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.
Poem 223. Walking Away
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day—
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away
Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.
I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show—
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
This poem pictures that moment when a parent sees their child take their first steps towards independence, walking away in a figurative as well as a literal sense. In Day-Lewis’s case, it is the moment after his son’s first football match when instead of returning to his father, the boy opts to follow his fellow players. Day-Lewis watches him go with mixed feelings, likening it to a seed being blown away from its stem by the wind.
He captures the feeling of mixed pride and apprehension we feel when our children start to become independent of us (“the small, the scorching/ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay”—the myriad of unremembered moments that eventually harden our initial uncertainty into resolution). I remember quite strongly the trepidation Nicola and I felt when David and Tom learned to drive: we would wait up for them to return, fearing the worst and hoping for the best, like any loving parent will.
The poem shows us in the end that although such moments are etched on the memory and the misgivings one feels—unwarrantably for the most part—it is when they start to move independently of us that our children become themselves, and our love for them tests true: “love is proved in the letting go”.
I like this poem because it is about a crucial part of life and parenthood, and it gently shows us the way that children find their path—hesitantly at first, but with surer and surer steps.
Links
- Listen to the poem on YouTube.