Eden Rock

Eden Rock by Charles Causley describes the speaker's dead parents, young again, waiting for him at a picnic across a stream. They call him to cross over and join them: the poem imagines death as a gentle reunion.

Causley published it in 1988, when he was in his seventies. His father died when he was a young child, from the effects of the First World War. Eden Rock may be an invented place, but its name suggests the Garden of Eden: paradise.

The poem has four quatrains with loose half-rhymes, a three-line stanza, then one line on its own at the end.

The first stanzas are calm and detailed, like an old photograph. The final, separate line, ‘I had not thought that it would be like this.’, leaves a gap before it: the speaker may be crossing over into death.

The first line, ‘They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock’, is in the present tense, as though they are really there.

The parents are young, frozen at a happy time: ‘My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress’. Ordinary details, such as milk from ‘an old H.P. Sauce bottle’, make the scene feel real and homely.

The light becomes heavenly: ‘The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.’ Three suns may suggest the Holy Trinity, or the family of three. His parents reassure him: ‘Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

Themes: family; memory; death and the afterlife; childhood.

Compares well with:

• Before You Were Mine: a parent remembered as young, before the speaker was born.
• Follower: a child's memories of a parent.
• Walking Away: memory and separation between a parent and child.