My Father's Love Letters

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2001

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Domestic Violence

The first five lines of “My Father’s Love Letters” appear to set a sentimental tone, relaying a sweet recollection of a childhood bonding experience between father and son as the son writes a letter to his mother on his father’s behalf. The poem takes an immediate turn with Lines 6 and 7, as the speaker remembers his father “[p]romising to never beat her / Again.” The poem changes from a narrative of a father-son connection to a demonstration of the consequences of domestic violence.

The speaker’s mother has left the family, ostensibly to escape her husband’s abuse. No matter how much the speaker’s father labors “over a simple word” (Line 35), the speaker-son imagines his mother laughing at the letters and holding “them over a gas burner” (Line 27). In the poem, the speaker demonstrates how spousal violence has upset the balance of his entire family, as his father, who “could only sign / His name” (Lines 28-29), must “ask me to write a letter to my mother” (Line 3). The love letters of the poem’s title are not a private communication between a husband and his estranged wife, but a family affair.

The Emptiness of Language

The title of the poem leads readers astray, setting the stage for a tender poem about a father’s love for his wife. Instead, the speaker emphasizes that his father has a need to “beg” (Line 6) his mother to return, revealing to the reader how badly his father has behaved. The son knows, on two levels, that his father’s words are meaningless: firstly, his father, being illiterate, would be unable to read them without help, and secondly, because no words can heal the wounds the speaker’s father has inflicted on his wife.

The speaker demonstrates the inability of language to heal most clearly at the end of the poem, where he describes the father “[w]ith eyes closed & fists balled, Laboring over a simple word” (Lines 34-35). While the reader does not know for certain what this “simple word” (Line 35) may be, these lines recall the earlier lines in the poem and the words that “rolled from under the pressure / Of my ballpoint: Love, / Baby, Honey, Please” (Lines 16-18). As these terms are the only direct quotations from the love letters, the speaker clearly means for the reader to associate the terms with the language that “almost / Redeemed” (Lines 35-36) the speaker’s father. These words may have lost their meaning through repetition and the disconnect between their sentiments and the father’s actual behavior.

The Ethics of Work

The speaker describes his father as hardworking. Whether it be his father’s dedication to his work and his capabilities as a mill worker or the way he would “stand there / With eyes closed & fists balled, / Laboring over a simple word” (Lines 33-35), the speaker’s father is clearly a man with a work ethic. Similarly, though the act of writing words comes more easily for the speaker, they still “rolled from under the pressure / Of my ballpoint” (Lines 16-17). He might feel “pressure” (Line 16) due to his father’s presence, but this sensation also refers to his own efforts and his own developing work ethic as a writer.

In comparison to the attitude of the now-liberated mother, “[w]ho sent postcards” (Line 4) and probably “laughed” (Line 26) as she burned the father’s letters, the male figures in the poem strive to work hard. Even the setting of the poem, in the father’s “toolshed” (Line 25) surrounded by the literal tools of his trade, connects the work efforts of the father to those of his writerly son. Though the son has no interest in taking up “the quiet brutality / Of voltage meters & pipe threaders” (Lines 19-20), the father insists that the shed is where work must be done. Since crafting a persuasive letter to the wife is work for the illiterate blue-collar worker, he and his son must remain there until it is completed. Despite these conditions, the speaker asserts that hard work alone is not enough to make up for the evil his father has done in the past.