16 pages • 32 minutes read
Peter MeinkeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
One of the more overlooked themes of “Advice to My Son” is the complex way in which humans negotiate time, and by extension, mortality. On a close reading, the poem is suffused by this conundrum. The very first line considers how to live “one’s days.” The word “days” immediately conjures up a sense of one’s time being borrowed and limited, measured in days. Yet even though all lives are finite and temporal, time runs fast or slow depending on the particular circumstances. While the bulk of life, with its mundane, practical activities like work, domestic matters, child-raising, and gardening—all of which the poem either directly or indirectly mentions—passes slowly, some phases seem to whiz past. Sometimes, death overtakes life, as in the case of youth abruptly interrupted by the violence of accidents and wars.
Even for the majority of folks who make it to the middle of life, the scepter of time’s unpredictability looms large. That is why the speaker advises the son to prepare for both summer and winter, symbolizing the sunny and umbral phases of life. Though the blush of love briefly frees one of time’s chains, the speaker advises the son to “marry a pretty girl / after meeting her mother” (Lines 17-18) so as to better predict the girl’s—and the son’s own—future. The speaker suggests that life’s unpredictability cannot be ignored or swept under the carpet. All a person can do is accept the puzzle of mortal existence and adapt or even celebrate it. The poem builds up to this note of celebration through the mentions of bountiful harvest, nectar, bread, and wine, invoking a full, hospitable table.
“Advice to My Son” ponders various, contradicting elements of experience: the practical and the whimsical, the realist and the fanciful, the tragic and the comic, the temporal and the timeless, and the secular and the religious. Considering so many oppositional pairs, the overarching theme of the poem is seeking balance rather than resolution. Perhaps the best advice the speaker can offer the son is to balance different aspects of one’s own being. Thus, the son must temper his youthful recklessness and carpe diem spirit with a mellow thoughtfulness. The son’s garden—which refers to a number of things from his lifestyle to his character—must contain both the flowers that feed the soul and the fruit that sustains the stomach. The juxtaposition of the soul’s yearning for “nectar, in the desert” (Line 14) with the stomach’s crude hunger for stronger sustenance establishes the idea that human beings have both spiritual and bodily needs. The son need not subsume one into another; he must accommodate both.
Meinke’s poem is a masterclass in contradictory and often impossible-to-follow advice, ranging from living fast and slow at the same time, to “show your soul to one man, / work with another” (Lines 19-20). Why does the speaker offer their son such dizzying rules? At one level, the speaker is gently mocking the genre of the “advice poem”—an established genre in English poetry. Advice poems from parents to children are often serious and high-minded in tone, which Meinke satirizes here. The other reason for the levity, of course, is that the speaker acknowledges that no one can really tell anyone else how to live their life. Though humans would like to believe life seems to follow a template, the reality is that it rarely does. A child has to chart their own course, forged by their own experiences and learnings.
Though the well-meaning parent wishes to solve life to ease their children’s burden, the truth is that no parent can inhabit their child’s suffering. Further, even practical hacks and tricks to game life are often a mixed bag. In Lines xx, the poem refers to the common advice about being able to tell how a woman will age by looking at her mother. Yet, the knowing irony of the speaker’s tone suggests that telling the future is impossible. The final line delivers a twist in the advice poem: Though the speaker builds up to the central advice of balancing life symbolized by serving both bread and wine, in the end they tell the son to “always serve wine” (Line 22), undercutting everything that has gone before.