Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Department
English
Abstract
This collection is my meditation on parenthood from the perspective of a young man who is certainly not yet a father but wants to be one someday. Inevitably, a meditation on parenthood is also a meditation on childhood, for you can’t have a parental structure without a child being involved. As I tried to characterize childhood, hope became a prominent theme—it seems all children share a gift for hope. And perhaps, as some of my poems query, parenthood thus brings with it a fundamental hope too. As I worked through these poems of growth, I thought about many of the people who have contributed to my own growth in some way or another. As an act of gratitude, I began to dedicate several of my poems to the people who inspired them. I had seen poems dedicated before, but the idea really stuck with me when I read John Burnside’s Gift Songs last summer. A review of the book begins, “To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song’s goodness was how much of a gift it was.” I began to consider some of my own poems as “gift songs,” and I knew they wouldn't be complete unless I actually “gave” them (through dedication and through an actual presentation) to the people who inspired them. So I hope this collection bears witness to the influence of just a few of the many people who have made me who I am. I hope these poems are gift songs for them, but I also hope they are universal, that they bear enough truth to be gift songs for all my readers.
Recommended Citation
Saylor, Dallas, "Father Face in the Dark" (2016). Honors Projects and Presentations: Undergraduate. 17.
https://mosaic.messiah.edu/honors/17
