The Full Text of “Walking Away”
The Full Text of “Walking Away”
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“Walking Away” Introduction
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"Walking Away" is a poem published in 1962 by Cecil Day-Lewis, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. It is an autobiographical poem dedicated to the poet's son Sean. Beginning with a memory of Sean's first football game, it is a meditation on the challenges children must brave on their own in order to grow up and on the pain parents suffer in allowing their children to "walk away" and face those challenges on their own.
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“Walking Away” Summary
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The speaker begins by recalling a specific event that happened almost exactly 18 years ago. It was a sunny day at the end of summer when the leaves were just starting to change color and the sidelines had just been repainted on the football field. That event was his son's first football game. After the game, the son moved uncertainly away from his father, like a satellite that had been dislodged from its established path, to join a disorganized group of other boys.
The speaker can still picture in his mind how his son looked as he walked away from his father towards the school. The boy's appearance provoked sharp, poignant emotions in the speaker, similar to the emotions he would experience seeing a half-grown bird released into the wild. The boy moves uncertainly as if he is looking for some kind of guidance or direction but not finding any.
When he remembers how uncertain his son looked, moving away from his father for the first time but also, in a way, for good, the speaker feels there is some lesson in the memory that is hard to put into words. It is a lesson about the natural progression of life: parents are given children to care for but then the natural course of maturity takes those children away. That maturing process involves many minor but still difficult challenges that help the child grow strong and establish his permanent adult identity.
The speaker has other memories of saying goodbye to people, but none of those memories still draws his attention or generates emotional pain so strongly. The speaker wonders if the reason that this memory still haunts him so powerfully is that it suggests an important idea that only God could truly convey to people. The idea is this: that at a certain moment in their lives, it is best for children to leave behind the guidance and protection of their parents so they can become mature adults; and parents, if they love their children, must allow their children to leave them.
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“Walking Away” Themes
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Growing Up
The poem is a reflection on one of the poet’s memories about his own son, and asks how children grow up. At first, the path to maturity seems to be undergoing certain established rituals and experiences. But then the poem suggests that maturity is even more about a certain kind of experience tied to independent exploration and challenges. The pathway to maturity, the poem thus suggests, may not necessarily be about walking to some set destination, but about walking away from structure and security—especially that offered by adults and parents. Children must leave behind that guidance and protection if they are to learn, grow, and take on their own adult identity.
At the start of the poem, the child is undergoing several coming-of-age experiences—playing sports, attending school. These experiences are traditional stepping stones to maturity, but for the child first encountering them, they are new, unfamiliar worlds that he must learn to navigate on his own. Just as the season is about to change—the leaves are "just turning"—the child, too, is entering an important phase of change in his life.
The speaker begins with a memory of his son playing his “first game of football” with the “touch-lines new-ruled.” The football field is a new territory with new rules that the child must master. And after the game, the child “drift[s] away” like a “satellite / Wrenched from its orbit.” The child has had one consistent orbit or environment in his life so far, a place close to his parents. Now, however, he “walks away” from the parent “towards the school,” another unknown territory whose rules and codes he must learn on his own.
The poem thus suggests that maturity is less about the specific experiences a child undergoes and more about learning to navigate those disorienting new experiences independently. The fact that the speaker's son drifts away to join a “scatter of boys” and walks towards the school as if walking “[i]nto a wilderness” suggests that he will experience chaos and disorder in his new environments. And he will not be told exactly how to navigate this chaotic world; he finds “no path where the path should be.” The child is used to having guidance in unfamiliar territory, but he needs to venture out on his own and explore unmapped territories in order to grow up.
The child thus departs “[l]ike a winged seed loosened from its parent stem.” If a seed simply fell to the ground when it left parent plant, the parent might block its access to light and nutrients. Seeds have wings so they can be carried through the air to a new place, where the seed can find all the resources it needs to survive and grow. But there are no set paths through the air. The journey the seed must make is uncharted. The speaker describes this journey as one of “the small, the scorching / Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.” It may be painful as well as challenging for the child to make an uncharted journey. But as the fire is necessary to give the clay its own shape, the journey is necessary to help the child find his own identity.
Maturity, then, does not mean following a clear path smoothly towards a set goal. It means struggling on a path that is often unclear, towards an unknown destination—without the protective help of adults. In the last stanza, the speaker acknowledges that the child’s journey to “selfhood,” his own adult identity, therefore “begins with a walking away.” In stanza two, the child was “walking away” “towards the school.” Now, however, the child is simply “walking away.” He doesn’t have a set destination. He is just setting out on his own. It is not so much particular activities that allow a child to grow up so much as acting independently.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-12
- Line 19
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Parental Love and Letting Go
The poem explores the nature of parental love and the painful costs of that love. Early on, the speaker’s metaphors suggest that children need their parents to provide structure and guidance. But as the poem goes on, the speaker acknowledges that what the child really needs is to be allowed to find his own way, even if the way is painful. The poem finally concludes that true parental love means letting go of control over a child’s life, even though this letting go also brings pain for the parent.
The poem’s imagery initially suggests that a parent’s job is to provide their children with structure and guidance. The speaker’s child is compared to “a satellite / Wrenched from its orbit.” A satellite is meant to follow a set path. This image is used when the child starts “drifting away” from the parent, implying that the parent provides the stabilizing path the child needs. Being “[w]renched” away from that stability seems painful for both parent and child.
The child is next compared to a “half-fledged thing,” a bird that has only partially developed the feathers it needs to fly. If the bird is not ready to fly, the image implies, it should remain in the nest with the parent. This “half-fledged thing” also “finds no path where the path should be.” Just as the satellite needs an orbit, the parent believes the child needs a path. He should not have to find his own way through the “wilderness.”
Later, however, the child is described with images of things that cannot reach their full potential unless they are set free and subjected to stress. The speaker acknowledges that parents must allow their children to face challenging experiences in order to grow—however challenging this proves for the parent on the sidelines.
The departing child is now compared to a “seed loosened from its parent stem” and a clay vessel being “fire[d].” Seeds must detach in order to grow; clay must be fired in an oven to achieve strength and structure. A child, similarly, needs to detach from his parents and undergo difficult “[o]rdeals” to develop strength and form his own adult identity. But these ordeals can be “[s]corching,” not only for the child, but also for the parent who must watch the child struggle and resist the desire to help. The child is described as “one’s clay,” the parent’s own creation. The parent still feels a strong connection to the child and suffers alongside him.
The speaker again affirms that true parental love means allowing the child to face these challenges on his own, so he can achieve maturity and independence. But it has also been challenging and painful for him to let his child go. The child needs to “walk[] away” from the parent to mature and develop his own “selfhood.” As such, if the parent loves his child, then he will “prove[]” it by “letting [the child] go.”
“[P]rove,” means not only “demonstrate” but also “to test, to put to trial.” Letting the child go is a painful trial for the parent. Indeed, the fact that this memory still haunts the speaker after eighteen years reveals just how painful a parent’s job can be.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Walking Away”
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Lines 1-3
It is eighteen ...
... watched you playThe speaker begins by setting up the context for his poem. The poem is a description of a memory recounted from the first-person point of view, as the pronoun "I" in line 3 indicates. This description is addressed directly to someone, the "you" in line 3, who is also the subject of the memory. The apostrophe—the first-person address directly to another person—gives the poem a particularly strong sense of emotional intimacy, almost as if readers are overhearing a private conversation (the speaker's conversation with another person or even with himself, since the "you" being addressed is someone who is not necessarily present to the speaker).
The reader can infer that this memory has strong emotional significance for the speaker. The speaker remembers the exact day when the event took place ("almost to the day") even though it was "eighteen years ago." He delays saying exactly what the event was until lines 3-4, establishing the setting first. The time was a "sunny day with the leaves just turning"—the ending of summer and the beginning of fall, with the leaves just starting to change color. The place was a playing field with "touch-lines," or sidelines, "new-ruled" for the start of the new season. These details not only allow the reader to picture the event but also carry symbolic significance: it turns out that this event marks the end of one season and the beginning of another in the life of the speaker's son, the "you" being addressed.
The event is the son's "first game of football." Participation in organized sports is a traditional rite of passage for young people, especially young men. The football game is a well established, well organized experience. There are touch-lines that demarcate the field and tell the son where he can and can't go, and those lines are "new-ruled," or set down on the field again, at the start of every new season, as the games take place regularly every year. But even if football is a familiar tradition in the larger culture, it is new for this particular boy. He has to learn the rules and rituals that belong to this unfamiliar environment.
The first stanza also establishes the irregular meter of the poem. The irregular meter, combined with the frequent device of enjambment, means the poem sounds less like a formal artistic artifact and more like the authentic, spontaneous recollection of a genuine memory.
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Lines 4-5
Your first game ...
... go drifting away -
Lines 6-8
Behind a scatter ...
... thing set free -
Lines 9-10
Into a wilderness, ...
... path should be. -
Lines 11-12
That hesitant figure, ...
... its parent stem, -
Lines 13-15
Has something I ...
... one’s irresolute clay. -
Lines 16-18
I have had ...
... perfectly show – -
Lines 19-20
How selfhood begins ...
... the letting go.
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“Walking Away” Symbols
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Changing Seasons
One symbolic aspect of the poem is the time of year. The speaker is relating his memory of his son's first football game, which took place as the seasons were changing, at the end of summer and the beginning of autumn. As the poet's son recounts, this poem is based on his first day of school in 1938, and so the event likely did really happen at this time of year. But the speaker makes the time symbolic with the way he describes it. He does not simply say "A sunny day in early September." He indicates the time, rather, by saying the leaves were "just turning."
The verb "turning" forces the reader to imagine two different states: the before and after, what the leaves turn from and what the leaves turn to. The poem is likewise focused on the transition between two states: childhood and adulthood, and how this moment represents the speaker's son changing from one to the other. So with this description of the time of year, the speaker makes the changing seasons a symbol of the change in the son's life.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 2: “leaves just turning”
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Walking Away
The poem is based on the speaker's taking his son's literal act of walking away and expressing it as a symbol for the whole process of maturing and growing into adulthood. The speaker first describes the memory of this particular event, the son "walking away from [him] towards the school" after playing his "first game of football." After using similes and metaphors to express his conflicting emotions, the fear and hope raised by this event, the speaker discusses what this parting was really "[s]aying"—what its meaning or symbolism was. He concludes that "selfhood begins with a walking away." In other words, this one act of the boy walking away from his father after the football game symbolized the whole process of how children grow up and seek their own adult identity, and the way they must leave behind parental guidance and protection in order to undergo this process.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 7: “You walking away from me”
- Line 19: “selfhood begins with a walking away”
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“Walking Away” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
Similes help the speaker both to articulate a difficult truth and to accept it. The poem describes a memory that the speaker has carried for eighteen years and that has "something [he] never quite grasped to convey." It has been difficult for him to fully comprehend the meaning of his memory and to convey that meaning, or put it into words. But similes allow him to get at that "something" by approaching it indirectly, saying what it is like even if he can't say exactly what it is.
The central event of the poem is the speaker's son walking away from him after playing his "first game of football." The speaker uses several similes to describe this event, how the boy's figure appeared as he left. In lines 4-5, the speaker says the boy went "drifting away" "like a satellite / Wrenched from its orbit." This simile not only conveys the boy's sense of unfamiliarity and unease in his new environment but also helps explain it: the boy is uncomfortable because he has left the path he ought to be following, as satellites are meant to follow their same orbits.
It is true that, while they are young, children need to be guided along a secure path, usually by their parents. But it is also true that, at a certain point, they need to be allowed to leave that path behind. Another simile helps the speaker see and accept this difficult truth of parenting. In line 12, he describes the same event, the boy's walking away, with the simile of "a winged seed loosened from its parent stem." Unlike a satellite, a seed is meant to leave its old environment behind. If it doesn't find a new territory to grow, where it won't have to compete with the parent plant for resources, it won't survive.
The satellite simile represented the child's departure as unnatural. But the seed helps the speaker understand how it can be natural and necessary for children to leave their old, secure environments, even if they seem painfully insecure as they do so. This simile, then, helps the speaker towards his final conclusion a few lines later, in line 20, that "love is proved in the letting go." If the winged seed needs to be "loosened" in order to grow, then the loving parent must be willing to loosen it.
Where simile appears in the poem:- Lines 4-5: “like a satellite / Wrenched from its orbit”
- Line 12: “Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem”
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Metaphor
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Repetition
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Enjambment
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Apostrophe
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Aporia
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Parallelism
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Consonance
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Assonance
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"Walking Away" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Touch-lines
- New-ruled
- Satellite
- Pathos
- Half-fledged
- Gait
- Eddying
- Winged
- Scorching
- Ordeals
- Fire
- Irresolute
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(Location in poem: Line 3: “touch-lines”)
The lines on either side of a playing field for football (called "sidelines" in American football).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Walking Away”
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Form
The poem is divided into four stanzas of five lines each (making them quintains or quintets). The different stanzas perform different functions in the development of the poem. Stanza 1 is largely a neutral description of the memory. Stanza 2 begins to develop the speaker's emotional response to the memory with images that suggest that the child is not ready to part from the parent (the "half-fledged thing") or that he's in an environment where he shouldn't be ("a wilderness").
Stanza 3 starts to shift that emotional response with a different set of images. Now the images suggest that the child should depart from the parent (the "winged seed") and that this environment, though challenging, will help him grow (with "[o]rdeals which fire one's irresolute clay"). In stanza 4, the speaker steps back to reflect on what he has learned over the course of this emotional journey. The painful emotions reflected in stanza two still haunt him, but he has also come to accept that the images in stanza three reflect the real truth about parenting and growing up: that parting is necessary for the child to mature, and reflects the parent's love. The four stanzas help clarify how the speaker's response to this memory develop over the course of the poem, from recollection, to resistance, to acceptance, to reflection.
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Meter
The poem has a highly irregular meter that is perhaps categorized as free verse (though, given the steady rhyme scheme, some might argue this isn't actually true free verse). Some lines have four beats (tetrameter) while others have five (pentameter); sometimes the rhythm is anapestic (da da DUM) and sometimes iambic (da DUM); some lines end with a stressed syllable (masculine endings), others with an unstressed syllable (feminine endings). The irregular meter, along with the frequent enjambment, creates a conversational tone to the poem, as though the speaker is simply saying what's on his mind rather than carefully altering his words to fit an artistic form. The conversational tone adds to the intimacy and sincerity of this autobiographical poem.
The last two lines, however, do have a more regular meter. They scan like this:
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting goBoth lines begin with an unstressed syllable and end with a stressed syllable; both are also end-stopped. Line 19 is almost perfectly anapestic, with just one irregular two-syllable foot in "How self-." Line 20, similarly, is almost perfectly iambic, with just one three-syllable foot in "in the let-." With this comparatively regular meter, fit into end-stopped lines, the speaker does offer a more perfectly crafted poetic form at the poem's very end. The sense of control and precision in the meter enhances the sense of confidence and finality in the words, which sum up the difficult lesson that the speaker has spent the whole poem trying to reach.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem follows a rhyme scheme of ABACA. Take the first stanza:
A ... almost to the day –
B ... just turning,
A ... watched you play
C ... like a satellite
A ... go drifting awayEvery rhyme in the poem is a perfect rhyme. This highly regular rhyme scheme combines with the poem's uneven meter to create a balance between the intimacy and authenticity of ordinary conversation and the more regular musical form of lyric poetry. Lyrics were originally poems set to music, which often feature repeating refrains. Repeating the A rhyme sounds three times in each stanza creates the slight suggestion of a refrain through this more frequently repeated sound.
In particular, the poem creates a partial refrain from the word "away." It features as one of the A rhymes in stanzas 1 and 3 (lines 5 and 11). "Away" is the C line in stanza 4 ("I have had ...") and so it has no rhyming line in that stanza, but it is close enough to third stanza that the reader still hears "walking away" in line 19 as rhyming with "irresolute clay" in line 15 and the other long /a/ sounds ("away," "convey") in stanza 3. Turning "away" into a faint refrain for the poem serves to highlight the key theme of the poem and give the reader a sense of how this memory has been constantly repeating, like a refrain, in the speaker's mind during the eighteen years since the "walking away" occurred.
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“Walking Away” Speaker
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The speaker is very closely identified with the poet, Cecil Day-Lewis. The poem was dedicated "To Sean" when it appeared in Day-Lewis's published work. Sean is Cecil Day-Lewis's first-born son, and Sean Day-Lewis himself has written that the poem looks back to his "nervous first day of school in 1938." The reader can infer, then, that the speaker is, like the poet, an older man and a father, looking back on a memory of his son.
The poem is told from the first-person point of view and is addressed to "you," the son, although the son is not imagined to be physically present (making this address and example of apostrophe). As it proceeds, it reveals more and more of the speaker's reaction to this memory.
The speaker begins by simply describing the memory. Only the fact that he recalls it so vividly after 18 years indicates how significant it is to him. In stanza 2, the word "pathos" suggests more of the speaker's emotional reaction to the memory: the image of his son's retreating figure evoked sadness and pity in him. In stanza 3, he reveals that he has been struggling over the past 18 years to understand the meaning of this moment. He also reflects more explicitly on that meaning—how the moment represents a natural, universal process but how the process is painful nevertheless. Finally, in the fourth stanza, the speaker says most clearly that this moment was, in some way, the most difficult parting of his life. But he also reveals that he has finally understood and accepted the lessons contained in that moment about maturity and parental love.
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“Walking Away” Setting
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The poem centers on the speaker's memory of his son's first football game. The only concrete setting described in the poem is the setting of the game. The time was the end of summer and the beginning of the fall, when the leaves were "just turning." (This is a usual time of year for football, but it is also a symbolic time, representing the end of the son's childhood and the beginning of his adulthood.) The place was a football field on the grounds of the school, towards which the son walks after the game.
In the concrete, literal sense, the setting is an ordinary and orderly place. It is just a school and a playing field, one that is well tended with the "touch-lines new ruled." But the actual setting, where the event really took place, is gradually transformed in the reader's mind by the speaker's description. The speaker describes the son walking towards the school with the metaphor of a young bird "set free / Into a wilderness." If the reader visualizes this image, they will picture a wild, harsh, disorderly place. There are no neat lines here telling the son where he can and cannot go, as there were on the newly lined football field. Here, there are "no path[s]." So the actual setting where the event took place differs significantly from the "imaginative setting." This imaginative setting conveys what this first football game represents to the speaker (that is, his son setting off on his own into the unknown).
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Literary and Historical Context of “Walking Away”
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Literary Context
Cecil Day-Lewis was highly attuned to the traditions of poetry and to his place within those traditions. He once said, “I myself have been technically influenced, and enabled to clarify my thoughts, by such diverse poets as Yeats, Wordsworth, Robert Frost, Virgil, Valery, Auden and Hardy. They suggested to me ways of saying what I had to say." In the early part of his career in the 1930s, Day-Lewis was actually part of a literary group with W.H. Auden and the poet Stephen Spender. In the 1960s, when he published “Walking Away” in his volume The Gate, he was thinking especially about the tradition of English lyric poetry.
The term "lyric" originally referred to a poem written to be set to music (such as Robert Burns’s “A Red, Red Rose”). Lyrical or lyric poetry has a simplicity and a melodic quality that connects it back to music. In a 1965 lecture titled “The Lyric Impulse,” Day-Lewis wrote that lyric poetry is “the purest and simplest form of poetry.” It “expresses a single state of mind, a single mood, or sets two simple moods one against the other.” It is not dominated by “irony or complexity,” but “say[s] … only one thing at a time” with “[b]revity, simplicity, purity."
Day-Lewis discussed romantic love poems as a primary example of lyric poetry, citing Wordsworth’s “A Slumber did My Spirit Steal.” But “Walking Away,” with its exploration of parental love and loss, is a closely related kind of love lyric. It could be described as “set[ting] two simple moods one against the other”—the parent’s pain at the child’s departure against his acceptance of it—but there is also a simplicity to these moods in that both stem ultimately from the parent’s love of the child. The poem’s frank, unqualified declaration of love aligns it closely with Day-Lewis’s description of the “lyric impulse,” which, he said, “asks one thing of [a poet] above all, a pure commitment without reserve or circumspection to the creature of his love."
Historical Context
“Walking Away” was published in 1962 in Day-Lewis’s volume of poetry The Gate. It appears with the dedication “For Sean” at the top. Sean is Cecil Day-Lewis’s first-born son, and Sean Day-Lewis wrote that “Walking Away” is “a memory poem, looking back to my nervous first day at school in 1938.” But although the poem is closely autobiographical, Sean also affirms that it is “addressed to all caring parents at all times.” Jill Balcon, Cecil Day-Lewis’s second wife, has noted that the poem does, indeed, “usually bring[] many reactions whenever it is broadcast or read in public … Anyone who has lost a child, or simply left one at the new school gate, can identify with the parting" (Complete Poems, "Introduction").
Day-Lewis’s concern with the relationship between parent and child, and their separation, may have been influenced by his own childhood. His mother died when he was young, and he had a difficult relationship with his own father. They grew estranged, especially after his father remarried, and this division between them brought troubling feelings of guilt for Day-Lewis when his father died in 1937. He wrote in his autobiography that he had dreams “[f]or many years after my father’s death” about their fractured relationship. If “Walking Away” was inspired by an event one year after his father’s death, he may have been thinking back to his relationship with his father and hoping that his own son’s departure need not anticipate the same division between them.
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More “Walking Away” Resources
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External Resources
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Sean Day-Lewis Reflects on "Walking Away" — A reflection on the poem by the poet's son Sean Day-Lewis, to whom "Walking Away" is dedicated.
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Recitation of "Walking Away" — A recording of the poem "Walking Away" read aloud.
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Biography of Cecil Day-Lewis — A detailed biography of Cecil Day-Lewis that focuses on the development of his poetry.
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Cecil Day-Lewis's "Complete Poems" — A Google book edition of Cecil Day-Lewis's "Complete Poems," with extensive previews of the text.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Cecil Day-Lewis
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