Patten shows all his hurt and pain that he experiences in his childhood, with a strong metaphor: “In that raw cocoon of parental hate is where I learned that one and one stayed one.” He reveals how vulnerable he felt as a child – instead of being in a home of being in a home growing up protected by love, he felt raw, without security or warmth around him.
Patten explains how he never let love stay long enough to truly affect him or to take hold of him in any way. He says: “I never let love stay long enough to take root.” He uses this metaphor to describe love as a tree or flower, saying that he rejected it before it could start to grow in him and develop into something greater. He says: “I crushed all its messengers”. He is relating how he would reject any attraction that might come his way, imagining that it would have a negative influence on him if he encouraged it and that it was in any way doomed to fail.
Patten says that he “Grew or did not grow”. His ambiguous use of the idea of growth shows us his awareness that while he was growing physically, he was not growing emotionally. He is saying that his emotional growth was stunted because of his fears about allowing any love or emotions to hurt him and make him vulnerable.
Compare the ways that the theme of family relationships are explored in the three poems “The Sick Equation”, “Looking For Dad”, and “Long Distance”.
Patten uses a metaphor to describe his “Dreams of flight”. He was so worried that he should avoid love: “ Kept my head down and drifted with the crowd”, constantly anxious that it would find a way into his life. This affected him negatively, stopping him from leading a normal life. He believed that being married kept you tied down and was a burden:“Weighed down the soul.” He reconciled himself with the idea that his married friends now must regret the marriage and secretly wish they could escape from it: “The too still harboured dreams of flying free”.
Patten describes divorce as being “The shadow of that albatross”. An albatross is symbolic of bringing doom and disaster. It is stereotypical of him, that he is using his own experience of a failed relationship to foresee divorce for every married couple. He comments that he takes “small comfort“ in believing this, aware of the inevitable pain and hurt that other people will suffer, as he has.
Towards the end of the poem, his feelings change when he does fall in love. He writes: “ I am better off for knowing now that given love, by taking love all can in time refute the lessons that our parents taught.” He is revealing how he has learned that falling in love and experiencing it has enabled him to grow emotionally and realise that love can work out happily. The last line “And in their sick equation not get caught” shows how Patten realised that he had at last escaped from his childhood memories of love that had hampered him. He has learned that love can be a healthy and positive experience that has at last helped him to grow in all areas of his life.
“Long Distance” by Tony Harrison is about the pain and grief that a son and his father experiences following the death of their mother/wife. It is written in free verse and every alternate line rhymes. Harrison emphasises time or opinion changes by leaving gaps at the end of each verse to indicate the passing of time. This is effective, because in each verse, the father evidently becomes less able to cope with the loss of his wife. He denies her absence to himself with a pretence that she has only gone to get the tea ready and will soon return, continuing the daily routine as if she were still alive and nearby. The title of the poem is significant, because the wife has been dead a long time –two years, and is in some distant place where they cannot contact or see her. In addition, when the father later dies, the son still tries to call him, “The disconnected number I still call”, which could be seen ironically as a long distant call. Moreover, the relationship between the son and the father is distant. This is because the father does not share his feelings with his son, hiding from him the evidence of his way of coping, in case he may appear foolish to his son. His father’s way of coping is to continue his life as if his wife had not died; there is a hint of some disdain from the son towards his father for this. However, we learn at the end of the poem that the son actually ends up doing something similar himself - calling his father’s disconnected number after his death. Harrison describes how the father hides the evidence of his desperate grief for her loss from his son, “ He’d put you off an hour to give him time to clear away her things and look alone.”
The husband brings back his wife from the long distance away, by creating a fantasy world where she is nearer – in the kitchen - and the evidence of her life is still all around him as if she still exists. The fantasy ends when the son comes home to visit and he has to clear away these props and re-establish his role as a widower.
Compare the ways that the theme of family relationships are explored in the three poems “The Sick Equation”, “Looking For Dad”, and “Long Distance”.
Harrison describes the father’s fear of his son seeing the evidence of this fantasy and not believing in it; he realises that the son’s disbelief would spoil or destroy the fantasy: “He couldn’t risk my blight of disbelief”.
He describes the father’s love for his wife as “raw love”. This could be ambiguous: that his father’s love is blatant and undisguised, yet also that it is sensitive, sore and painful for him.
“Looking for Dad” is also by Brian Patten. It describes the poet’s childhood misunderstanding of the reasons why his dad left home. He believed that his father left, because his son never used to tidy his room when told to; he does not realise or understand that the real reason was that his marriage was not working out.
It is written in free verse, of approximately four words per line and every alternate line rhymes. There are no gaps to show a change in time or in the poet’s opinion. This is because the poet writes as a child throughout, describing the feelings and anxieties of a child. The continuous flow of writing, without pause, relates the way a child would speak, blurting each sentence out until they run out of breath. It is very effective, because it enables the reader to relate to the child’s thoughts and feelings more easily and feel empathy towards him.
Patten shows the child’s emphasis of how the words were spoken to him, by writing them in capital letters: “TIDY UP YOUR ROOM!” and he uses child-like descriptions: “old robots” and “old toy cars”. He repeats pronouns such as “I” and “we”, which is effective in showing how the child’s thoughts are all centred around himself and family. Frequent repetitions about his room are made: ”The room’s awful mess” and “I had not tidied my room because I was too full of gloom.” This child-like rhyme is significant to the genre of the poem and emphasises the pathos of the child’s misery. He talks about his untidy room as being the cause his father’s anger and upset; the child could only think of this reason for his father’s leaving home. His feelings are described frequently throughout the text: “despair”, “unhappier than even me”, “did not care.” The child’s confusion and unhappiness are very evident. Furthermore, his child-like and naïve expression of his feelings are very blatantly shown, using adjectives to express his emotions, because he cannot describe them in a more subtle way.
When comparing “Looking For Dad” to “The Sick Equation”, it is clear that both poems have similar themes of loss, separation and the pains of childhood. While Patten writes about his misunderstanding and confusion concerning his father leaving home in “Looking For Dad”, in “The Sick Equation”, the emphasis is more on how his parent’s marriage breakdown caused him to conclude that love could never work and how it damaged his emotional development. In “Long Distance”, Harrison explores the means that the father and son cope with the death of his wife/mother. The poem deals with communication breakdown, because the father and son hide from each other how they are dealing with their loss. Similarly, it can be concluded that there was no communication given to the boy about the real reason why his father left home, in “Looking For Dad”. In the same way, Patten describes how he kept his head down and avoided any emotional communication with anyone to avoid love, in “The Sick Equation”.
All three poems share a theme of examining whether and how past experiences change people’s behaviour. In “Sick Equation”, Patten ends by showing that he had been wrong to generalise in the past that all love was doomed and to behave as he did because of that. He learns this when he changes his behaviour and lets love into his life. However, in “Long Distance”, Harrison ends by showing that he cannot escape the past, as he feels compelled to phone his dead father’s disconnected number, even though he had watched his father doing similar things after his wife had died, unable to accept her death. Similarly, in “Looking for Dad”, the boy wakes up one day and realises his untidy room had not caused his parents’ unhappiness. The poem ends by saying that the boy is now sitting in his “very tidy room”, hoping his dad will come back. Harrison is perhaps hinting here that the boy has changed his previous habit of untidiness in the unconscious hope that this will make everything in his life come back to normal and be all right again.
While “Sick Equation” and “Looking for Dad” are both poems where the person is talking about himself to us, “Long Distance” is the only poem in which the writer is talking to his dead father, the subject of his poem. It is like a confession: he tells his father he realised he could not cope with the reality of her death, admits he looked down on his father at the time for this and confesses that he now cannot totally accept his father’s death and his way of coping is to ring his number.
All three poems share the theme of reaction to loss of a loved one and how people find something or someone to blame for their loss: the little boy blames himself in “Looking For Dad”, the man blames love for its “sickness”, in “ The Sick Equation”, and the son blames his dad for not being able to accept his wife’s death in “Long Distance”. Although the poems share similarities, “Looking For Dad” stops at his childhood experience, “The Sick Equation” is a resume of his emotional life and “Long Distance” is a description of two years of grief.
