22 pages • 44 minutes read
My Father's Hats
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Themes
Mourning the Wonder Born from Childhood Ritual and Imagination as an Adult
Irwin demonstrates how children bring wonder and joy to mundane adult life. Irwin’s speaker had a childhood ritual of exploring his father’s hats on Sundays, hinting that he enjoys the activity because he repeats and remembers it.
The speaker would take a chair and enter into the closet, an adult space (Lines 1-3). A closet promises privacy and a sense of identity since it holds clothes and other possessions. As the speaker “reach[es] higher” into the closet, he changes the unmoving stored hats into an active, growing forest (Lines 3-6). By linking the scent his father’s hair left on the hats to the forest, Irwin’s younger self transforms the everyday, familiar world into an outdoor landscape teeming with adventure (Lines 7-13).
Through the lens of “climbing a tree,” the speaker frames “being / held” as magical, exciting, and desired rather than a routine taken for granted (Lines 12-13). A yellow fruit growing from the tree represents gaining more insight into father, an enticing end goal for his journey (Line 14).
Irwin celebrates childhood imaginations’ ability to generate awe and happiness. He also mourns its loss by contrasting it with the speaker’s adulthood imagination at the poem’s end. While the speaker “now” still senses “the godsome / air” that occurs when he thinks about his father, the other images he calls up are less stable and verdant (Lines 14-16).
“I stand on this canyon,” the speaker says after mentioning his father’s sleep (Lines 16-17). Instead of a forest full of pines, the canyon lacks distinguishing features and feels like an open crack in the earth. He also does not ascend like in boyhood, but either stands still and gazes downward or in front of himself at “water I’m not sure is there” (Line 19). He never doubted if he was looking at pine trees as a boy (Line 7). The speaker watches “the light slowly close” and does not imagine investigating it as he would have the yellow fruit (Lines 14, 18).
While his use of “fabulous” and “godsome / air, as now” point to the speaker holding onto his boyhood emotions and perspectives, the canyon imagery and the inability to act like the imagined water showcases a transition between childhood and adulthood (Lines 15-19). Irwin’s speaker still imagines, but uncertainty and worry restrict its vibrancy.
Imagination as a Way to Preserve Memory and Relationships
“Reason forgets, the imagination never,” Irwin quotes in a 2008 American Poetry Review article. In “My Father’s Hats,” the imagination becomes a place where Irwin’s speaker can enshrine memories and information about his father, especially when his father seems unavailable.
The speaker, as an adult, thinks about his father engaging in “fabulous sleep,” and suddenly, the speaker stands on “this canyon floor” (Lines 16-17). The father’s sleep contextualizes the canyon as a response to the speaker enduring his father’s absence. A canyon, an open and deep rift in the earth, conjures images of ledges peering into a far-off bottom or staring up from below into the distant yet rock-bound sky. His father’s absence feels like a vast barrier formed between the speaker and his father. The speaker feels bereft. He feels he cannot even verify if the water, assumingly at the bottom since erosions help form canyons, exists.
Instead, he moves back into his childhood imagination to retrieve any definite, secure knowledge about his father. Father sleeps so cannot actively engage, so he must call upon his memory to engage in the relationship in the current moment. Irwin never illuminates if the canyon is a reoccurring sensation for the speaker. He does, however, reveal the speaker imagining his father’s closet as a forest solidified in his memory thanks to repeated trips on Sunday mornings (Lines 1-6). Despite happening years ago, the speaker still can recollect the exact scent of his father’s hats and feels his father’s hugs through the framework of the imagined forest (Lines 9-13). The hats smelt “musky” like “rain clinging to a damp earth” in “a forest” of “pine” (Lines 7-11). The scent would then remind him of his father’s hugs, which he compares to tree climbing (Line 11-13).
The speaker does not highlight specific moments where his father hugged him or wore hats. Instead, he maintains his paternal bond by knowing what he associates with his father and how that makes him feel overall. The memories were preserved thanks to his younger self wrapping his emotions and experiences in fantastic images.
Alternatively, as Irwin said in The American Poetry Review, “The imagination, or truth partially withheld is what we don’t forget because we must work to retrieve it.”
Knowledge as Paradox: The More We Know & Grow, the More Uncertain We Are
The paradox is both an important literary and philosophical device. When used as a literary device, a paradox is a figure of speech that contradicts itself yet reveals a factual or emotional truth. For example, “I know nothing” or “Jumbo shrimp.” On the other hand, the paradox arises not from a figure of speech but a lived condition in philosophy. In other words, the conclusion emerges from reason yet looks illogical.
Irwin thematically examines an experiential paradox in “My Father’s Hats” rather than only as a literary device. He explores a knowledge paradox: The more knowledge one possesses about the world, the less sure one can predict outcomes.
Death and uncertainty do not seem to register when the speaker is a child. The speaker does not say that he knows his father’s location on Sunday mornings, only that he knew that Sundays were the time to explore his father’s closet (Line 1). It remains his sole focus. However, his determination to reach his father’s hats despite being unable to reach them without aid speak of an intense desire to engage with his father in some way (Lines 1-4).
The act of reaching for something touchable yet out of sight repeats in the poem. The action could represent a way to learn about the father. The speaker does not need visual confirmation to identify the hats’ components, but he still needs to reach them.
He envisions climbing a tree and touching the yellow fruit (Lines 13-14). “The” marks the fruit as singular and an endpoint. Because of the Biblical Tree of Knowledge and the pomegranate that bound Persephone to the underworld, Western cultures may use fruit to represent knowledge, trickery, or coming-of-age. Fruits incubate seeds, so fruits can also symbolize inter-generational inheritance and wisdom. The fruit’s yellow color calls delight, warmth, and value to mind. The sun often appears yellow in art. Plants need the sun to grow, further linking the idea that reaching the yellow fruit helped the speaker develop.
While the speaker remembers only touching the hats, he remains sure about their impact on his boyhood imagination. Touching “the soft crowns,” he “was in a forest” (Lines 5-6). The speaker also presents the reader with vivid, concrete details about the forest. The wind sings hymns “through pines,” rain soaks the dirt and releases a musk odor, a yellow fruit hangs in a tree, the leaves emit the same scent as cloves (Lines 6-8, 13-15).
Compare these distinct images to the details the speaker gives the reader as an adult. The speaker now knows his father’s location: He is asleep (Lines 16-17). The speaker demonstrates he achieved a more intimate and complete understanding of his father since sleep makes one appear vulnerable. However, the knowledge of his father also disrupts his confidence in creating solutions.
As a boy, he could not see his father’s hats directly, so he envisioned a forest and relied on other senses. As an adult, he does not tell the reader if he considered using another sense besides sight to discern if the water is there (Lines 18-19). He also does not try to imagine an alternative to the water to soothe his anxiousness.
When the speaker brings in the canyon, he employs scant details and does not describe it in more than three lines. The image reads simply as “canyon floor” and only emerges after the speaker brings up his father’s sleep (Lines 16-17). The canyon signals a panicked, nervous response rather than a child seeking information and using a comparison to fill in the blanks. Lines 18 and 19 imply that the speaker has a limited timeframe to figure out something. The speaker observes “light slowly close on the water,” but he “is not sure” the water “is there” (Lines 18-19). The speaker also does not make clear if he stands and looks down into the canyon while standing on a floor in his home or if the canyon floor refers to the canyon’s actual bottom.
The closing light’s proximity, the father’s sleep, and time as indicated in “now” (Line 16) hint at the speaker’s insight. He might not know his father as well as he wants, or he does not know the exact amount of time until or how his father dies.
The speaker knows about death, and he understands he cannot fully understand or predict it. He only knows that his father might die sooner than later [“light slowly closes”] (Line 18).
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