22 pages • 44 minutes read
My Father's Hats
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Symbols & Motifs
Plant Life
Irwin populates the dreamscape in “My Father’s Hats” with specific plants. The forest the boy envisions in his father’s closet is not just a forest. It is a pine forest after a rainstorm (Lines 7-8). The wind sings hymns, and the ground still smells “musky” from the “rain clinging” to it (Lines 6-8).
While Irwin does not identify the tree later in the poem, he clarifies that it produces “yellow fruit” and “leaves” that smell like “a clove” (Lines 14-15).
Through these images, Irwin creates specificity. Specifics inform a reader about the boy’s personality and paternal bond. In the forest, the trees grow, the earth changes texture in the rain, and fruit grows that the boy wants to touch. When the boy layers a forest over his father’s hats, he shows he associates his father with growth and curiosity.
Scents
Sense of smell plays a vital role in “My Father’s Hats” as it is the speaker’s main way to recognize his father.
Despite feeling the hats, Irwin does not vividly describe the hats visually. Their “soft crowns…bands, leather,” and “inner silk” are the most visual and tactile traits he gives (Lines 5, 10).
Instead, smell propels the poem’s arc, guiding the reader to each critical moment. The speaker explains that the hats’ beloved aroma recalled “the musky scent of rain clinging to damp earth” (Lines 7-9). He imagines a forest because he thought it smelt similar to the hats.
The smell of “clove” from the “leaves” on the tree he dreamed of climbing as a boy returns him to the present. The speaker states the scent lingered in “the godsome / air, as now,” when he currently thinks about his father too (Lines 14-17).
The smells and love of his dad stayed the same into adulthood. Throughout the poem, Irwin identifies every scent: “pine,” “damp earth,” “clove,” and seems not to be generated by external factors like shampoo (Lines 7-8, 15). The scents drive the speaker’s daydreams or emerge from his reflections. As a result, Irwin foregrounds the speaker’s love for his father rather than specific shared memories. Irwin’s decision creates the idea that the speaker’s love remains strong despite the time’s progression.
Heights and Scale
Irwin uses height and distance to symbolize the speaker’s relationship with knowledge and his father. The poem begins in a flashback to the speaker’s boyhood. Irwin shows the speaker’s small stature and lofty goals by emphasizing the boy’s methods for getting to the hats. Even standing on a chair, he needs tiptoeing to raise himself higher. The word “reach” ends both the first and third lines, stretching out his action and creating an illusion of struggle. Irwin further highlights the boy’s struggle with variations of the word high following reach on the second and fourth lines’ starts. The speaker eventually gets to his father’s hats. Nevertheless, the focus on the hats’ smell, the speaker’s “touching, sometimes fumbling / the soft crowns,” and dearth of concrete details paint the hats as remaining above his eye line (Lines 4-5, 9). The “bands, leather,” and “silk crowns” could be determined through touch and prior knowledge and not only through sight (Lines 10-11).
Even towards the memory’s end, the speaker still feels like he tries to reach. Pines and forests evoke trees, which grow upwards and out of the line of sight (Lines 6-7). The boy envisions climbing a tree to touch the fruit (Lines 13-14). Arguably by going into his father’s closet, the speaker searches for something he knows exists but wants to re-encounter (Lines 1-5). If the poem were simply about aiming for something out of reach or knowledge in general, the specificity of the objects’ owner would not be needed. The hats belonging to the father are essential because the hats stand-in for his father. Through the scale and emphasis on the hats, the poem becomes about a boy’s attempts to access his father.
The speaker’s positive associations with the hats’ scent and familiarity with “being / held” hint at a loving relationship between parent and child (Lines 12-13). It is not a quest to earn or replicate his father’s affections. By process of elimination, the boyhood speaker’s interest in his father’s hats seems motivated by curiosity. The fruit’s presence strengthens this reading because it evokes Eve and Adam’s fruit that granted them knowledge.
By the poem’s end, the speaker shifts from past to present (Lines 15-16). The direction of sight shifts from upwards to downwards, going from forest to canyon (Lines 6, 17). The speaker does not try to reach and hold an object anymore. Instead, he stands still, firmly on the floor, and tries to understand an object by watching it at a distance (Lines 17-19).
“Canyon floor” could be read that the floor of the speaker’s house feels like standing on a canyon’s edge or at the canyon’s bottom (Line 17). Depending on the interpretation of the phrase, the speaker either looks down at the water or directly at it (Line 19). Regardless, the word canyon evokes pits and holes going beneath or downwards.
The descending scale presents two interpretations. When the boy reaches for his father’s hats, he moves towards understanding his father more. By adulthood, he fully comprehends his father. However, he acknowledges the next phase—his father’s twilight years—and recognizes he cannot know its specific trajectory. The slowly closing light and the cultural linking of sleep and death evoke the specter of death and decline (Lines 16-17, 18). The speaker can only observe (Line 18). He hopes the dying process is not actively happening because he cannot confirm the signs [“watch […] water I’m not sure is there”] (Lines 18-19).
The canyon also contextualizes a possible change in the father and son’s relationship. At the poem’s beginning, the speaker can access his fathers’ hats even if his father is not there. However, the speaker only has access to his memories and imaginings during his father’s “fabulous sleep” at the end (Lines 16-17). The canyon, then, represents a threat or real gap in the speaker’s knowledge and bond with his father.
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