22 pages • 44-minute read
My Father's Hats
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Literary Devices
Free Verse
“My Father’s Hats” is a free verse poem, meaning it has no fixed rhyme or meter.
Meter happens when a poet creates a specific pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Stressed syllables are the parts of a word that someone usually emphasizes when speaking. For example, the stress in the word Sunday falls on Sun, leaving the day unstressed.
In “My Father’s Hats,” Irwin forgoes a set number of syllables or stresses per and across lines:
Sunday mornings I would reach
high into his dark closet while standing
on a chair and tiptoeing reach (Lines 1-3)
As seen above, the lines’ number of stressed and unstressed syllables fluctuates. The stresses’ locations shift too: The first and third sounds are stressed in the first line but unstressed in the following two lines. Most of the lines’ opening sounds are unstressed. The total syllables and words per line are close but do not form any consistent pattern.
On the other hand, rhyme is when words with similar sounds are placed near each other or share the same point in their respective lines to make a sonic effect. Irwin repeats -ing words at the ends of the second, fourth, and sixth lines. However, he breaks the pattern in the eighth line with “was.” “Reach” appears in the first and third lines but does not rhyme with “imagine” or “scent.”
The lack of meter and rhyme fits the poem’s content. While “My Father’s Hats” deals with childhood, it lacks whimsy, a current child’s perspective, or a reversion to child-like wonder. The adult speaker looks back at that wonder and feels unsure he can re-enter that space. Because they follow a pattern, meter and rhyme can express certainty, security, and an expected path. Meter and rhyme flow like water following a riverbed.
The reader does not know if the speaker sees a river, lake, or ocean. The speaker only states that what he watches is water that might not be there (Line 19). The free verse form embodies the speaker feeling unmoored in a predictably unpredictable world.
Narrative Poem
One of the oldest literary traditions, a narrative poem tells a story. Typically, it will feature one or more characters. Fixed poetic forms, such as sonnets and sestinas, can frame narrative poems too. Some famous examples include “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop, “Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and “Incident” by Natasha Trethewey.
Narrative poems also vary in length. Some of the longest and most famous belong to the epic genre, such as The Odyssey and Beowulf. Narrative poems can also use any story structure. The most common structure possesses a beginning, middle, and end with a conflict, rising action, and resolution.
Irwin’s poem does not feature this structure as he both introduces the speaker’s worries near the end and leaves the speaker grappling with them.
A plot’s conflict can come externally (i.e., I need to save the world from a supervillain) or internally (i.e., I want to make friends, but I am shy and skittish). “My Father’s Hats” flirts with both an internal and external conflict. Externally, the speaker’s conflicts are with the height of his father’s hats in the closet as a child and time’s progression as an adult (Lines 1-5, 16-18). Internally, he fears not recognizing the sights of an impending end (Lines 18-19). He also appears worried that he no longer seems able to fully enter into his imagination the same way he did as a child.
Instead, Irwin structures his poem’s plot as a moment and reflection within the speaker’s life. The speaker begins his story with the reoccurring action of surveying his father’s closet. The speaker explains that his explorations felt like being in a forest. The remembrance of his father’s hats’ scent and those moments’ atmospheres remind and return him to his present situation. His father sleeps well, but the speaker feels like he stands in a canyon and cannot see if the water truly exists. Through this sequence, Irwin takes the reader through one moment in the speaker’s life. Irwin uses a stream-of-conscious story structure, where the plot moves forward through a character’s internal monologue. Stream-of-conscious stories often mirror the thought process by emphasizing repetition, digressions, sensory details, free association, and experimental language.
Conceit
Irwin moves “My Father’s Hats” by employing conceit. A conceit is when a writer creates an intricate, sustained comparison between dissimilar or seemingly unrelated things. Writers use metaphors (a direct comparison through is or are), similes (an indirect comparison through like or as), and other figurative techniques to weave and maintain the connection between the things.
Irwin’s conceit arises from comparing the father’s closet to a forest. When the speaker is “touching…the soft crowns,” the speaker states he “was in a forest” (Lines 4-5). The hats’ smells remind the speaker of the rain-washed earth’s “musky scent,” which would make him think of “being / held or climbing a tree” (Lines 7-13).
Irwin forges these connections to infer that a father’s love is natural and all-encompassing. At the same time, Irwin gives the natural world a sense of safety and welcome when he sets “being / held” and “climbing a tree” as two sides of the same coin through “or” (Lines 12-13).
Then Irwin extends his conceit by paralleling the boy touching his father’s hats with the boy touching the climbed tree’s yellow fruits (Lines 3-4, 13-14). In a sense, one’s fascination and desire to immerse oneself in a parent’s world appears to grow organically from a child’s curiosity.
The conceit continues to the poem’s end. The speaker debatably imagines a canyon and water he is not sure exists (Lines 17, 19). As a result, the uncertainty also becomes a natural progression.
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