Sunn Walking Away Poem Analysis

The poet illustrates the anguish he experienced upon realizing that to sprint towards “selfhood”, his child would ‘walk way’ from him by likening it to physical pain. Lewis compares his son’s act of “walking away” from him, his father, to “a satellite/wrenched from its orbit”. The star or planet about which the satellite revolves around is the heart of its universe, the same way parents are, in their child’s mind, the centre of their existence. This simile depicts children’s dependence on their parents, who keep them sheltered in an orbit which stops them from “drifting away”. The use of the verb ‘wrenched’ indicates a painful separation. This denotes the agonising distress the poet must have felt, having had his son sharply yanked from his

The poet describes his soon walking away from him “with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free/into a wilderness”. This depiction of Sean walking away is both literal and metaphorical, and by stating that his son possessed the ‘pathos’ of a “half-fledged thing”, the poet highlights his son’s lack of life experiences. This comparison is a reference to a bird or another animal who’s thrust into the wilderness to learn to survive on its own but isn’t nearly half ready. By describing his son as being “half-fledged”, the poet brings brings to mind images of a bird learning to fly out of the comfort of its nest for the first time, and in doing so, the poet justifies his anxieties of the “wilderness” full of uncertainties his son will soon be entering. Sean, who walks with “the gait of one/who finds no path where the path should be” is depicted by Lewis as being completely unassisted in the world. His “gait”, which is his way of walking, symbolizes the way he’ll go through life. By stating that his son has the gait of someone “who finds no path where the path should be”, Lewis implies that Sean will have to forge his own path, not being able to the find the one set out for him by others. This is stated in a uneasy tone; by describing Sean’s inability to find a path that “should” be there and by suggesting he create his own path, the poet evokes the same sense of apprehension and ambiguity clouding his son’s future that he, as a father, felt. The reader is forced to reflect on how they, as a parent, would respond to the cloud of uncertainty masking their child’s future and whether or not they would let their child construct their own path, no matter how