17 pages • 34 minutes read
Parents
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Literary Devices
Irony
The poem ends on an ironic note. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker describes the ways children do not understand or appreciate their parents. The children believe the parents are old, wrinkly, mistake-prone, sick, smelly, and not as successful as the children will be.
At the end of the poem, though, the parents have died, and they have taken all their wisdom with them. As a result, the parents have left the speaker alone, and he is now an adult and a parent himself. As he comes to terms with death, he realizes his own children do not understand his new wisdom and fear, and he is in the same position he put his parents in before.
This is a form of situational irony where the speaker intends or expects one thing to happen, but then the opposite thing happens. The speaker intends to do better than their parents and intends not to become their parents, but the speaker ends up in the same place their parents were. This repeating cycle is only known to those who have already gone through it, and by the time someone goes through it, it is too late to change what came before.
Enjambment, Couplets, and Form
This guide has already covered the use of form and free verse in “Parents,” but there are two other formal elements worth discussing.
The first is Meredith’s use of couplets. The couplet, or two-line stanza, goes along with the title of the poem. The poem is about parents, plural. This implies two things: parents as a general concept and the experience of having two parents. Writing the poem in couplets mirrors the experience of having two parents. For each stanza, there are two lines. The first eight stanzas are all complete statements, suggesting they are all experiences from different people about different sets of parents.
However, Meredith enjambs Stanzas 9-12, meaning the lines run together despite line breaks. These lines all describe the resentment of parents’ deaths and the anxieties caused by that loss. The use of enjambment here and nowhere else in the poem suggests the most common aspect of having parents is losing parents.
Parallelism and Contrast
Though the poem doesn’t rhyme words or sounds, it does rhyme ideas. The first way the poem does this is with couplets. In many of the couplets, the second line either echoes or contrasts the first. For example, “They dandle us once too often, / these friends who become our enemies” (Lines 5-6), “They get wrinkles where it is better / smooth” (Lines 9-10), and “Their lives; surely, / we can do better than that” (Lines 15-16).
Additionally, there is constant contrast between parent and child. Many of the couplets present one image or idea about the parent followed by an image or idea about the child. This is most clear in the couplet “It is grotesque how they go on / loving us, we go on loving them” (Lines 11-12).
Finally, there is parallelism in the lives of the parents and the children as seen in the beginning and the end of the poem. At the beginning of the poem, the children do not understand the parents as the parents try to teach the children. The children sleep peacefully while the parents’ only sleep in the poem is death. The children wish to be older while the parents wither away with age. At the end of the poem, all of this is flipped, and the children now must go through the same struggles the parents went through while the new children repeat the cycle. That the parents and children experience parallel experiences is not coincidence. Meredith is saying our lives rhyme.
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