Our Parents

Dunn, Stephen

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
  • Date of entry: Aug-01-2002

Summary

In this poem, dedicated to his brother, Stephen Dunn reflects back on childhood (and childish) parent-child relationships. The first stanza concerns the dead and the stories that keep them alive: parents who "died at least twice, / the second time when we forgot their stories . . . " The transitional second stanza asks, "what is the past if not unfinished work," prefacing the last stanza, in which the adult poet recognizes how self centered children are--"the only needy people on earth"--and wonders what his parents "must have wanted . . . back from us." But, he concludes, "We know what it is, don't we? / We've been alive long enough."

Commentary

This is an interesting meditation on parent-child relationships--relationships that continue, and continue to change, long after parents have died, and on how storytelling both sustains and alters the past and those relationships. It is also a poem about "growing up"--growing out of one's self.

Miscellaneous

The collection in which this poem appears (Different Hours) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Primary Source

Different Hours

Publisher

W. W. Norton

Place Published

New York

Edition

2000