They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
This poem was written later in Charles Causley’s life, in 1988 when he was 71. It has since become one of his best known.
Sometimes poems find their way to you at the right time in your life. I discovered this one some years after both my parents had passed on. It might not have made as much sense to me if I had read it earlier.
The poem is a mixture of memory and vision. Causley is thinking of his parents as they were when they were young. He seems to be both longing to return to a happy childhood and also imagining being re-united with his parents in the afterlife. This is expressed by a mixture of realistic detail and other-worldly atmosphere, and finally he contemplates the river that, sooner or later, we all must cross.
There is a sense of time being frozen and the parents being thought of in an idealised way. Perhaps that is always how we think of those we have lost, as an ideal version of themselves.
The striking last line can be interpreted in more than one way and leads us to think back about what the poem has said.
The Good Reader 