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My Father's Hats
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Background
Biographical Context
Mark Irwin states that his personal experience shapes and moves many of his poems. “I tend to accumulate experience for poems, often for years until I’m floored,” he stated in a 2016 interview with his alma mater Case Western Reserve.
“My Father’s Hats” began as three to four lines Irwin wrote during a hike in 1996. He eventually used the lines in a poem memorializing his father two years later. “When my father died in 1998, I wrote the entire poem out in fifteen minutes,” Irwin recalled (Poets.org).
Irwin pulled the speaker’s Sunday treks into his father’s closet from adventures Irwin had at five to six years old. “While my father was at church, I often crawled into his closet, stood on a stool, and tried on all of his hats,” he elaborates (Poets.org).
The speaker does not try on any of the hats in the poem. However, Irwin states he and the speaker shared the habit of “smelling the crowns” (Poets.org).
Irwin transforms his childhood habit by adding images of the natural world, fueling the poem through “both recollection and imagining” (Wessels, Andrew. "Four Questions on Memorability." The Offending Adam).
Literary Context: American Elegies
The elegy, a poem of mourning for a deceased person, is a crucial component in the American poetic tradition.
The form originated in Ancient Greece and traditionally followed a three-step sequence. An elegy opens with the speaker’s lament [expression of sorrow]. The middle focuses on celebrating and praising the deceased individual. Then, the end offers consolation, typically through the promise of the afterlife or memorial (“Elegy.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets). The 18th century saw the introduction of the elegiac stanza, where four lines carried an ABAB rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter (“Elegy.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation).
According to scholar Max Cavitch, the elegiac form was once the most commonly read and written form of poetry (Cavitch, Max. “American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman.” University of Minnesota Press, University of Minnesota, 2011). For Americans, it often acted as a way for communities to cope with loss or externalize private grief. Poets did not only compose elegies about people they knew closely. Poets write elegies about public figures too, such as President Lincoln. As the years have passed, the form frequently became used to explore metaphysical conundrums or expose and heal from mass political injustice.
Elegies and death poetry became especially prominent during and following the Civil War, which saw mass death and the murder of President Lincoln. Important American literary figures Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, Edgar Allen Poe, and Louisa May Alcott have all contributed to the genre.
However, the American elegy evolved in the 20th century after the two world wars, an increase in agnosticism, and obscurity by medical advancements. These developments often chafed against the Christian immortal afterlife, solace, and direct witnessing/engagement with death often presented in elegies. As a result, many contemporary American poets like Irwin have played with the form (Spencer, Eleanor. “The Art of Losing: American Elegy since 1945.” American Poetry since 1945, 1st ed., Palgrave, London, 2017).
Irwin plays with the elegiac form by leaving the father’s status ambiguous since he refers to the father as sleeping and not dead. Instead, it reflects upon the speaker’s relationship with the subject, his father, and allows the reader to draw their conclusions about the stakes of their relationship.
The traditional elegies end with solace and comfort for the reader, subject, and speaker. However, Irwin gives his poem an ambiguous finish. The speaker watches the water yet does not know if it is there (Lines 17-19). If one looks at water through a symbolic lens, the element often represents life or the afterlife. When the speaker does not know if the water is there, it could be concern over the afterlife’s existence or how much life his father has left.
The water also links to the rain associated with his father’s scent (Lines 7-9, 11-12). If he is unsure the water is there, he could be unsure if his father is asleep or dead (Lines 15-16). The speaker, the reader, and the subject gain no consolation from the ending other than the inevitability of the light’s fall (Line 18).
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