My Father's Hats

“My Father’s Hats” is a narrative, free verse poem told through the first-person perspective. The word father only appears in the poem’s title. The speaker refers to the father as “him” in the poem’s text. As a result, the poem feels intimate and private. The intimate tone implies three options: The speaker knows and trusts the reader. Alternatively, the reader gained access to the speaker’s private thoughts. Lastly, Irwin invites the reader to find a mirror of their experiences in the speaker’s circumstances.

The poem runs over a single stanza, a group of lines. The adult speaker recounts his childhood ritual of pulling up a chair to his father’s closet on Sunday mornings so the speaker can investigate his father’s hats (Lines 1-5).

The father’s dark closet conjures mystery and discovery, which Irwin enforces by skimming visual details (Line 2). Instead, he mirrors the speaker’s limited view and access by vividly describing smell and sound.

Scent, sound, and touch fit as the primary senses featured in the piece, as the boy’s height also prevents him from fully seeing the hats. Irwin uses the first four lines to establish that the speaker recalls an earlier period in his life, which Irwin indicates through the speaker’s short stature. Even standing on a chair, the speaker had to tiptoe to get to the hats (Lines 2-4). When he does reach them, he does not express his awe at their beauty. Instead, his actions are “touching, sometimes fumbling / the soft crowns,” suggesting a hand searching (Lines 4-5). He is only tall enough to feel them.

Because he cannot see the hats, their sensations lead him to imagine a forest surrounding him in lines five through nine. The reader learns this fantasy exists because he associates the scent of his father’s hair and hats with “the musky scent of rain clinging to” a forest floor (Lines 7-12). The “damp earth” evokes a softness found in the hats’ “bands” and “inner silk” (Lines 8-10).

The poem’s main concerns intersect in the speaker’s memory of his imagined space. What is the relationship between imagination and knowledge? What does it mean to know a parent as a person? After all, hats sit on the head, which holds the personality and memory-making organ, the brain.

Even though the speaker’s childhood self does not have full access to every fact about the hats, he can create a world using what he knows. Irwin uses “I was in a forest,” and precise details about the forest setting, to lend a steady and secure tone regarding the speaker’s imaginary world (Lines 5-6). The speaker knows precisely his location. He hears the “wind hymning / through pines” and feels joy at the “musky scent” coming from the “damp earth” (Lines 6-8).

Despite the speaker feeling comfortable and knowledgeable in his dream forest, his love for his father inspires him to learn more about him. When the speaker thinks of “the musky scent” from the rain on the “damp earth,” he thinks of his father’s hats and hair (Lines 7-12). His father’s hair reminds him of “being held,” which makes him ponder “climbing a tree” (Lines 12-13).

Arguably, embracing and climbing could be seen as opposites since embraces require holding and being where one wants to be. Climbing needs a participant to move freely, usually toward the desired point—however, the speaker links hugging his father with tree climbing. Irwin re-packages in Lines 13 through 15 the speaker’s quest at the poem’s start. The speaker ascends with an end goal both times, except the hats are now a yellow fruit. Once again, Irwin uses “touching” and “scent” while describing the boy’s experiences in the tree. “Touching / the yellow fruit” and “leaves whose scent / was that of clove” connect the fruit and leaves to the speaker’s earlier comparisons between his father and nature (Lines 13-15). His climb is not for hats or fruits. They are symbols. He reaches to know his father better out of love.

However, this knowledge comes at a price. In the last four lines of the poem, the mood switches from nostalgic, sweet, and spiritual to mournful and hesitant. The extended metaphor of the closet as a forest also ends. It marks the speaker’s transition from remembering his childhood to engaging in his present. The speaker still feels the leaves’ clove scent “in the godsome / air” when he thinks about his dad (Lines 15-16). However, his thoughts seem melancholy as his dad sleeps (Lines 16-17). The father’s slumber is the most active the father gets. Because the speaker informs the reader that his dad sleeps, it implies that his younger self succeeded in his quest to gain more intimacy with his father. His success does not yield comfort. It emotionally wounds him and clouds his ability to imagine.

Thoughts of his father’s “fabulous / sleep” lead into the speaker saying that the speaker “stand[s] on this canyon floor” (Lines 16-17). The canyon invokes a sense of deep and vast division, holes, emptiness, and dread. When compared to the multiple lines depicting the forests and trees he dreamed of in childhood, the “canyon floor” phrase’s brevity implies that the speaker’s anxiety does not allow him to enter into his dream world fully (Line 17). Alternatively, this is not an “Imagine / I was in a forest” moment that occurs only at a set time during a set procedure (Lines 5-6). The concision in “The canyon floor” may hint that the speaker consistently worries about his father and feels uncertain (Line 17).

Even though the speaker recognizes his dread and where it comes from, he still reeks of uncertainty. He “watches the light slowly close on the water” (Lines 18-19). The speaker knows the light fades—time progresses—but he does not know what it closes on since he cannot tell if the water “is there” (Lines 18-19).

Unlike his childhood self, his definitive knowledge destabilizes and presents a soothing fantasy from fully forming. His inability to know if the water exists comes from his awareness of his father’s sleep. The light “slowly clos[ing]” sounds like a sunset, which evokes closure, endings, and death (Line 18). The father’s sleep also evokes death since Western culture often uses sleep as a metaphor for dying. Even if one ignores the link between sleep and death, the father’s rest prevents him from directly engaging with his son in the poem. The canyon appears like a rupture in seemingly connected earth. These images all point to a looming and insurmountable division between son and father. The speaker knows he possesses limited time with his father before the separation. However, he cannot identify the exact amount of time. Irwin indicates this through the speaker’s fixation on the light’s speed and movement and his concern if he sees water where there is none. His vigilance and self-awareness cost the speaker a singular imaginative experience since he cannot afford to fill in any blanks.