Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University ofToronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer interprets Ondaatje's poem as a story of two lives and two universes separated by protective masks, and he evaluates how the distance between these two universes is bridged through Ondaatje's use of color imagery.

Michael Ondaatje's "To a Sad Daughter" is a poem about the way that surfaces mask much deeper emotions. The recurring theme of the hockey goalie, those caged athletes who don the personas of highly decorated masks not only to protect themselves but to make a statement about their own identities to the shooters from the opposing teams, act almost as mouthpieces—personas in the sense of classical drama—through which a father can speak lovingly to a teenaged...