Parents

William Meredith began his writing career during a free verse revolution in American poetry. Many modernist and postmodernist poets, who favored free verse that didn’t abide by the constraints form demanded, were rejecting the structure that defined poetry for centuries. However, Meredith preferred to write in form. His main poetic influence was Robert Frost, another poet who straddled the line between modernism and formal poetry. Much like Frost, Meredith wrote in a style that combined elements of free verse and structured poetry. While most of Meredith’s work uses set structures or set rhythms, the language he uses is, as he put it, “a little nearer / the language of the tribe” (Herrington, Neva. “The Language of the Tribe: William Meredith’s Poetry.” Southwest Review, vol. 67, no. 1, winter 1982, p. 2.). This means Meredith consciously chose to write with language and speech patterns that resembled normal speech instead of writing in an academic style with elevated language and complex syntax.

In “Parents,” the element of structure isn’t necessarily rhythm or rhyme, but it is in the use of couplets. The poem uses 13 couplets to help anchor the rhythm and weight of the lines. There is no set rhythm throughout the couplets, but most of the lines hover around eight syllables with around three or four stressed beats per line. While the rhythm isn’t consistent, there are moments where patterns appear. For example, the last couplet uses some repetitive metrical feet:

Father, mother, we cry, wrinkling,

to our uncomprehending children and grandchildren (Lines 25-26).

Throughout the poem, there are repetitive structures like this in different couplets, but the emphasis of the poem is on the “language of the tribe.” Phrases like “we can imagine sooner” (Line 2), “once too often” (Line 5), “surely, / we can do better than that” (Lines 15-16), and “they all do it” (Line 19) echo some of the colloquialisms and speech patterns that would have been common to Meredith growing up in New England during the middle of the 20th century. Additionally, another element of common speech patterns he uses is the tendency to follow up long clauses with short phrases that respond to the clause in some way. An example of this is in the following lines (the short phrases are bolded): “What it must be like to be an angel / or a squirrel, we can imagine sooner” (Lines 1-2), “The last time we go to bed good, / they are there, lying about darkness” (Lines 3-4), “It is grotesque how they go on / loving us, we go on loving them” (Lines 11-12), and “The effrontery, barely imaginable, / of having caused us. And of how” (Lines 13-14).

The effect of these structures is a certain kind of wit and tone. Little bits of wisdom tacked on to the end of a line add weight to the statement and the couplet, and because Meredith delivers these short bursts of wit so nonchalantly, they build the speaker’s wise ethos. In a sense, they act like punchlines at the end of a joke, delivering a powerful moment of reflection for the reader at the end of the line.