Walking Away

Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis remembers the day, eighteen years earlier, when the poet watched his son walk away from him at school. The memory still hurts, but he has come to see that letting a child go is part of loving them.

Day-Lewis, later Poet Laureate, published it in 1962. It is dedicated to his eldest son, Sean, and remembers him starting at boarding school.

The poem has four five-line stanzas with an ABACA rhyme scheme, often with half-rhymes, and a calm, reflective tone.

It moves from the memory itself, in the first two stanzas, to what the father has learnt from it in the last two. It opens with an exact time, ‘It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day’, showing how sharply he remembers.

His son is like a satellite ‘Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away’: the boy is pulled from his father's world. ‘Wrenched’ suggests pain.

He has ‘the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free’, like a baby bird leaving the nest before it is ready, and later is ‘like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem’. Both images come from nature: growing up and leaving is natural.

The father admits ‘I have had worse partings, but none that so’ hurt. The last line gives his conclusion: ‘love is proved in the letting go’.

Themes: family; a parent's love; growing up and separation; memory.

Compares well with:

• Mother, any distance: the same moment of separation, from the child's side.
• Follower: a father and son, with the roles reversing.
• Before You Were Mine: memory and a parent seen from a distance.