Ruthven Todd
Paternal relationships can often be fraught with complex emotions.
Here is a poem by Ruthven Todd (June 14, 1914 – October 11, 1978), Scottish poet, artist and novelist, best known as an editor of the works of William Blake, and expert on his printing techniques.
In Memoriam: My Father
29 April, 1944
Shut in his frosty valley at the Northern fringe of time,
Beyond the tundra and the ever-howling wolves,
The hours went slowly by, the minutes knocking lame,
As sixty summers lay counted on his shelves.
A life ebbed slowly down the Solway of its years,
Forgetting the floods of youth, the tides that swept
More cruel in their intensity than all the heartfelt tears
Which stained the linen pillow on which the dreamer slept.
The lock-gates of the life he always loved
Could still withstand the batterings of disease,
Despite Death’s mathematics which had often proved
Himself the one physician to bring perfect ease.
Now I, lying all these hundred miles to south,
Can think of him dispassionately, with pity;
Recalling tonight the weak but usually kindly mouth,
The mind that shuddered from the world’s immensity;
Recalling the man whose universe was sometimes shut
Within the unmeasured boundaries of a postage-stamp;
The man for whom the mellow whisky could garotte
The marchers of history with their metronomic tramp;
The man who built as strong as man could build
Yet saw, before his end, how bricks and concrete fell away
As the destiny he always feared was finally fulfilled
And all the horror of his youth again held sway.
This man, as complex as an antique clock,
Was my own father whom I cannot see quite round;
I work all night and yet my portraits lack
Those final touches which would show I understand.
The man as man, divorced from being only me,
Copying my own image in an eternal mirror:
The facts which others now report can only be
The distortions caused by my inevitable error.
When last I saw him, lying uneasy on his bed,
I knew that I at length had grown to be a man,
For all my rancours and my fears were dead;
I saw him once again as when my memory began.
And it is thus I hope I will remember him;
Before his share of the world’s apple proved too sour,
Before his dreams of greatness loomed too dim
In the haze which helped to pass the intolerable hour.
I would remember him as the man who drew
With coloured chalks upon my childhood’s page,
The witch from whom no small boy ever flew,
The friendly troll, the ogre who had hardly any rage.
So to his memory, I dedicate these lines,
Dumb with a feeling I cannot now express;
Glad that, at least, the heartache which remains
Instead of hating learned how to bless.
--Ruthven Todd