"To a Sad Daughter" appears in Michael Ondaatje's 11th collection of poetry, Secular Love, published in 1984. In "Coming Through: A Review of Secular Love," critic Sam Solecki comments that the poems in this book read "more like the chapters of a novel than parts of a collection." "To a Sad Daughter," however, can easily be pulled from the rest and enjoyed alone, for it encompasses a theme common in many of our lives and presents it in a striking, not-so-common way: a father's love for his daughter and his longing to guide her "into the wild world" (line 64) gently, but with eyes wide open.
While there have been countless father-daughter poems written over the decades, not many include hockey goalies, purple moods, and Creatures From the Black Lagoon.
Ondaatje's poetry is rich in all forms of human experience, and his use of everyday language and everyday events to define that experience makes his work both compelling and accessible. "To a Sad Daughter" is written while the speaker sits at his daughter's bedroom desk when she is not present. At one point, he refers to the poem as his "first lecture" to the 16-year-old, but it is a lecture full of love and wonderment and admitted anxiety, not anger and rebuke.
While the title identifies the daughter as melancholy or grieving, she is not actually present in the work, and so we must consider the word "sad" as only an interpretation of the father's. After reading the poem, we may also consider that the doleful adjective is really a reflection of the speaker's own emotion and that he too experiences the apprehension, blue funk, and growing pains that his adolescent daughter does.
This complete Introduction contains 283 words. This
study guide contains 10,515 words (approx. 35 pages at 300
words per page).
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