The Full Text of “Once Upon a Time”
The Full Text of “Once Upon a Time”
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“Once Upon a Time” Introduction
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Gabriel Okara's "Once Upon a Time" laments the social pretensions of modern life. The poem's speaker reflects on a time when people were earnest and friendly; when they meant what they said and could still "laugh with their hearts." The world has become insincere, mistrustful, and selfish—and the speaker has, too. The speaker thus turns to their son, asking him to show them the way back to real joy and sincerity. The world and people alike can become cynical as they get older, the poem suggests—but a child's happy, earnest way of greeting the world might offer a cure for despair. This poem first appeared in Okara's 1978 collection The Fisherman's Invocation.
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“Once Upon a Time” Summary
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The speaker addresses their son, telling him that back in the day, people used to laugh and mean it: their laughter reached their faces and their hearts. Nowadays, though, when people laugh they're just showing their teeth, all the while searching the person they're talking to with cold, judgmental eyes.
Back in the day, the speaker goes on, people greeted each other with sincere warmth. Now, they only shake hands so that they can rifle each other's pockets with their free hands.
The speaker observes that people are always insincerely telling their guests how welcome they are. But when the speaker makes repeat visits to people they thought were friends, they only find the door closed in their face.
Such behavior, the speaker tells their son, has taught them to put on false faces: at home, at the office, on the street, as a host, at a cocktail party, the speaker gets along with the crowd by always wearing a fake smile, like the one you'd hold in a portrait.
The speaker has also learned to laugh falsely and offer false warmth; to insincerely say a polite "goodbye" to people they never want to see again; to pretend to be glad to have met people they can't stand; and to pretend they enjoyed talking to people who bore them.
More than anything, the speaker wants to be like their son again: to drop all this falsehood and especially to learn how to laugh sincerely. These days, when the speaker sees their own laugh in the mirror, they can only see themselves as a snake baring its fangs.
The speaker thus asks their son to teach them how to laugh again—the way they used to laugh when, long ago, they were a child like he is.
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“Once Upon a Time” Themes
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Distrust, Conformity, and Insincerity in the Modern World
In the opinion of this poem's speaker, modern-day society has become false and mistrustful. "Once upon a time," the speaker wistfully tells their son, people used to greet each other warmly, mean what they said, and enjoy each other's company. But something has changed. "Now," the speaker says, "they shake hands without hearts." In other words, people don't feel connected to each other; they say polite but insincere things to each other (like saying "'Glad to meet you,' / without being glad") and mostly seem to be interacting at all only to get ahead.
The speaker clearly despises this kind of behavior—but they're just as guilty of it as anyone else. "I have learned many things," they declare: they've taught themselves to "wear many faces" like masks, putting on "homeface, / officeface, streetface, hostface, / cocktailface" as necessary in order to fit in with the world around them.
Such false and conformist behavior, this poem suggests, is profoundly dehumanizing. Through years of putting on a social mask, the speaker comes to feel that their own sincere feelings are "mut[ed]" and drowned out. When they catch themselves laughing in a mirror, they're horrified to see "only my teeth like a snake's bare fangs": having pretended to laugh for long enough, they can't laugh sincerely anymore! A society that demands polite insincerity, this poem thus suggests, is one that eventually degrades its citizens to little more than "snake[s]" in the grass, hiding their true selves and caring only for their own gain.
Note that, in this speaker's particular insistence that things used to be different, some readers have seen a subtle critique of British colonialism in Nigeria. Okara, a Nigerian writer, often pondered the effects of Western culture on his native country, and the picture here of a world that was once friendly and is now devoured by false politeness certainly sounds like a jab at British manners!
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-43
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The Innocence and Openness of Youth
To the speaker of "Once Upon a Time," the only antidote for a false society that produces false selves is a return to natural, childlike innocence. All through this poem, the speaker addresses their son (or a younger man whom they're calling "son" colloquially), telling him about how life used to be way back in the day when people "used to laugh with their hearts" and "shake hands with their hearts," greeting each other with sincere, open warmth. Times have changed now, however, and the speaker feels as if they've learned to put on a false face in order to get by in a world that has become "ice-block-cold" and inherently insincere.
The speaker therefore turns to their child for a lesson, asking him to teach them how to "be what I used to be / when I was like you." Children, this line suggests, know nothing of deceit, selfishness, and guile: they know "how to laugh" with their whole hearts, and they never pretend to like someone when they don't. Adults, in trying to please each other and get by in an insincere world, lose that connection with their real feelings—and with it, their ability to feel true joy.
The poem thus begins as the speaker's fairy-tale-like storytelling about a long-ago happier world, but it ends with a wish for the son to educate his parent. "Show me, son / how to laugh," the speaker pleads, longing for a return to a kind of innate openness that (in their view) comes naturally to kids. Perhaps it's not that the world itself has become more false: perhaps it's just that the world the speaker interacts with now is the guarded, self-serving world of adults!
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 33-43
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Once Upon a Time”
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Lines 1-6
Once upon a ...
... behind my shadow.The poem begins with words that sound like they're from a fairy tale: “Once upon a time.” But the story the poem tells isn’t a fairy tale set in a far-off land that never was. Instead, it’s something sadder: a fairy tale about a real time, a time the speaker remembers.
Back in the day, the speaker tells their son, people “used to laugh with their hearts / and laugh with their eyes.” By this, the speaker means that their laughter was earnest and genuine: one could see their sincere feelings on their faces. Now, things have changed. People only “laugh with their teeth,” baring their fangs in an insincere grin. Meanwhile, their eyes are “ice-block-cold,” frigid and unwelcoming. They scan “behind [the speaker’s] shadow,” as if trying to uncover a dark secret.
No one, in other words, trusts anyone anymore. The same people who used to laugh openheartedly now put up a false front. The parallel language and sentence structures in lines 2-4 underscore the change, sharply juxtaposing the warm past with the chilly present:
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes:
but now they only laugh with their teeth,This, then, will be a poem about a discomfiting loss, a story in which a parent wistfully tells their child about better times.
The speaker will tell this tale across seven irregular stanzas of free verse. This flexible form, without a regular rhyme scheme or meter, allows the poem to change shape spontaneously to match the speaker’s emotions. In this first stanza, for instance, slow-paced lines of roughly equal length capture the speaker’s pensive, heavy mood.
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Lines 7-12
There was a ...
... my empty pockets. -
Lines 13-18
"Feel at home!" ...
... shut on me. -
Lines 19-24
So I have ...
... fixed portrait smile. -
Lines 25-32
And I have ...
... after being bored. -
Lines 33-39
But believe me, ...
... snake's bare fangs! -
Lines 40-43
So show me, ...
... was like you.
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“Once Upon a Time” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Simile
The poem's similes capture the speaker's sense of insincerity while also warning of such insincerity's dangers. "Once upon a time," the speaker tells their child, they used to be a warm, open person living in an equally warm and open society. Things have changed now, though, and they have had to learn "to wear many faces / like dresses" in order to get by. In this simile, the speaker's outward presentation becomes a costume; they put on expressions like outfits, changing "officeface" for "streetface" and "homeface" for "cocktailface" as necessary. The look their face wears, in other words, has nothing to do with how they're actually feeling.
This simile also implies that there's a different, more honest, naked feeling beneath all those fancy metaphorical clothes. In a society that runs on concealment, the speaker feels that they, too, have to cover up. They also have to make sure that this cover-up looks good. The "conforming smiles" that the speaker wears out in the world are "like a fixed portrait smile": a fake, slightly strained beam like the one you'd see in a posed photo. That simile suggests the speaker is anxious to make a good impression. Just as a photo portrait is meant to capture a person at their best (and often ends up capturing something rather artificial instead), the speaker's smile is meant to suggest they're perfectly at ease with the way things are. Clearly, that's not true.
All this pretense means the speaker ends up feeling false on the inside as well as the outside. When they look at their own "laugh in the mirror" these days, they see no real joy: just their "teeth like a snake's bare fangs." That dangerous image hints that a life of deceit can become downright poisonous. It also draws on traditional snake symbolism, in which the snake is often used as an image of trickiness and dangerous deceit. The speaker, to their horror, has become as much of a snake in the grass as any of the other people they despair over.
Where simile appears in the poem:- Lines 20-21: “I have learned to wear many faces / like dresses”
- Lines 23-24: “all their conforming smiles / like a fixed portrait smile”
- Lines 38-39: “my laugh in the mirror / shows only my teeth like a snake's bare fangs”
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Metaphor
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Parallelism
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Juxtaposition
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Enjambment
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"Once Upon a Time" 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.
- Ice-block-cold
- Thrice
- Homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface, cocktailface
- Conforming
- Fixed
- Muting
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(Location in poem: Lines 5-6: “while their ice-block-cold eyes / search behind my shadow.”)
The speaker is saying that people's eyes are, metaphorically, as cold and stiff as blocks of ice. That is, they are decidedly unfriendly.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Once Upon a Time”
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Form
"Once Upon a Time" is a free verse poem, with no regular rhyme scheme, meter, or stanza form. Okara divides the poem's 43 lines into seven irregular stanzas that evolve alongside the speaker's thoughts and mood:
- The first four stanzas, for instance, are all neat sestets—stanzas of six lines. In these passages, the speaker talks about how they've learned to live in a false, mistrustful world: by becoming false and mistrustful. The regular pace of these stanzas suggests just how ordinary a life of insincerity has come to feel for this speaker.
- In the fifth and sixth stanzas, the speaker seems to gain momentum and energy: their frustration with the life they're leading makes the stanzas swell, first to eight lines, then to an awkward seven. That seven-line stanza in particular feels sharp and alarming: the only stanza in the poem with an odd number of lines, it ends with the dreadful image of the speaker's teeth revealed in a false smile like "a snake's bare fangs."
- The final stanza uses just four lines, and makes a simple plea: the speaker implores their son to teach them how to be sincere and loving again.
Overall, this poem's form suggests a parent coming to a realization. First, they simply describe how they live (and, wistfully, how things used to be); next, they get fed up; and finally, they realize that they need to relearn their childlike simplicity and sincerity.
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Meter
"Once Upon a Time" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. Instead, the poem creates its rhythms through changing line lengths, striking repetitions, and startling enjambments.
The first stanza, for example, paces itself with steady line breaks:
Once upon a time, son,
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes:
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
while their ice-block-cold eyes
search behind my shadow.Each new idea here gets a line of its own. The laughing hearts and eyes of the past each take up their own space, an effect that sharpens the contrast with the chilly, emotionless hearts and eyes of the present day.
The measured, slow, thoughtful pace here might also give readers a sense of the speaker's tone and personality. These unhurried lines capture a voice heavy with sorrow.
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Rhyme Scheme
A free verse poem, "Once Upon a Time" doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Instead, the speaker turns to devices like alliteration and repetition to give the poem its music. In lines 28-32, for instance, the speaker describes all the insincerities they've learned with emphatic repetitions:
I have also learned to say, "Goodbye,"
when I mean "Good-riddance";
to say "Glad to meet you,"
without being glad; and to say "It's been
nice talking to you," after being bored.The repeated words here (emphasized by echoing /g/ and /b/ sounds) make the speaker's disgusted self-assessment feel particularly potent.
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“Once Upon a Time” Speaker
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The speaker of "Once Upon a Time" is a parent addressing their son, telling him about a happier time, long ago, when people were sincere and welcoming. It's also possible that the speaker is using "son" in a less literal, more colloquial sense and simply talking to a young man. Either way, there's a clear generational gap between the speaker and the person they're talking to.
The whole world, in this speaker's view, has become untrusting and untrustworthy these days. People who used to "laugh with their hearts" now "only laugh with their teeth." People are suspicious of each other and don't say what they really mean. Worst of all, the speaker has become one of these false faces, putting on a "conforming smile[]" to get along in a world that fears and hates earnest warmth. The speaker lists out the metaphorical masks they wear in order to fit in and get by: "homeface, / officeface, streetface, hostface, / cocktailface." In other words, they're a different person at home, at work, on the street, while having company over, at parties. Their true self remains hidden and isolated behind these masks, which they slip on as easily as "dresses."
This is a lonely, frustrating existence, which is why the speaker turns to their son for a lesson in childlike, spontaneous joy. The speaker's son still knows how to "laugh and smile" in a real way—the way that the speaker used to "once upon a time when I was like you." The speaker longs for the kind of warmth, connection, and genuine emotion that, the poem implies, are only possible in youth.
Readers get the impression that this speaker is an earnest, nostalgic sort of person who hates falsity. Children, they feel, have much to teach adults about how to live (and how to treat other people).
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“Once Upon a Time” Setting
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There's no clear setting in "Once Upon a Time." The speaker's wistful look back at the good old days could come from any era and any place; lamenting that things used to be nicer before and are nastier now is a timeless human activity. A few details the speaker drops about their life, however—like listing "cocktailface," the face you put on for a cocktail party, among their masks—suggest that the poem might be set around the time Okara published it in 1978 (a cocktail-party-heavy era).
With that in mind, readers might interpret the poem as Okara's personal impression of life in the 1970s, perhaps inflected by the civil war in his native Nigeria. That conflict, which raged from 1967-70, most certainly affected the way Nigerian people saw and treated each other; ethnic, political, and regional divisions all turned Nigerians against each other in mistrust and hatred.
The poem might also subtly reflect on the legacy of British colonialism in Nigeria, which brought British reserve (and scrupulous but insincere politenesses, like saying "'Glad to meet you,' / without being glad") to a traditionally warm and open Nigerian culture.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Once Upon a Time”
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Literary Context
Gabriel Okara (1921-2019) was a prominent Nigerian poet, novelist, and children's author. A fervent proponent of the idea that literature must be rooted in the culture it comes from, Okara strove to use a distinctly Nigerian voice in his work, even when writing in English. In one particularly striking example, he wrote his acclaimed 1964 novel The Voice in Ijo (a language spoken in southern Nigeria) and then made a literal translation into English, preserving Ijo idioms and syntax in an attempt to capture Ijo manners of speech and thought.
Much of Okara's work takes an interest in the collision between Nigerian tradition and Western colonial influences. "Once Upon a Time," for instance, is sometimes read as a lament for a more open, welcoming Nigerian culture that existed before the arrival of British colonialism.
The collection in which this poem appears, The Fisherman's Invocation, was published in 1978. It won the 1979 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, bringing Okara attention on an international scale. He became an important figure in a rich Nigerian literary culture, part of a pantheon including writers from Chinua Achebe (a contemporary of Okara's) to the more recent British-Nigerian novelist Helen Oyeyemi.
Historical Context
Okara published this poem a few years after the end of the Nigerian Civil War, which ran from 1967-1970. Like many major conflicts of the later 20th century (like Partition, which split Pakistan from India, and the horrors of Black July in Sri Lanka), this war had its roots in the end of British colonialism.
Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960. While independence was a great victory for Nigeria, Britain's abrupt withdrawal also created an unstable situation in which conflicting Nigerian regions, ethnic groups, and powers found themselves striving for dominance. At last, people from the Igbo ethnic group formed a secessionist state known as Biafra. The Biafrans and the rest of Nigeria then fell into civil war. Appalling bloodshed, ethnic persecution, starvation, and any number of other humanitarian crises were the result.
By 1978, when this poem was published, the dominant Nigerian government had defeated the Biafrans, and Nigeria was again a united country—but a deeply scarred and mistrustful one. Okawa's picture of former friends greeting each other with suspicion might be read as a sorrowful portrait of a lost national unity as much as a worsening world in general.
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More “Once Upon a Time” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Okara's life and work via the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Okara's Legacy — Read Okara's obituary and learn more about his influence on Nigerian literature.
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An Interview with Okara — Listen to a 1974 interview with Okara in which he discusses and reads his work.
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The Nigerian Civil War — Learn more about the conflict that influenced Okara's visions of a broken, mistrustful society.
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