About the Poet and the Poem

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) was a well-known English poet whose work is admired for its quiet honesty, clear language and deep feeling. She often wrote about relationships, faith, loneliness and the difficulty of truly understanding another person. Unlike many poets of her time, she avoided showy experiment and preferred a plain, thoughtful voice that speaks straight to the reader.

Father to Son is a moving poem about the painful distance that has grown between a father and his grown-up son. The two have shared the same house for years, yet the father confesses that he does not understand his child and knows almost nothing about him. The poem explores the gulf of silence between them, the father's sense of guilt and helplessness, and his deep longing to be reconciled. Though it reads like a personal confession, it captures a universal experience — the emotional gap that so often opens up between parents and their children.