Into His Hand
How important is the title of a poem to the reader’s understanding of the poet’s intention? Of course, many sonnets have no title or are dubbed “Untitled”, or simply “Sonnet”, or are numbered either by the authors themselves or their literary executors. I love poems with great titles and enjoy the process of looking for clues in them in order to more fully appreciate the poem. To help me “get” it.
In a sonnet, we all know that every word is precious and that sonnet writers must be what Keats called “misers of sound and syllable”. Here, the poet has taken the prepositional phrase of the title, and used it, in effect, as part of the first line. As the expression immediately brought to my mind is Jesus’ last words on the cross, the meaning of the title enriched my understanding of what followed.
The biblical quote is, of course: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), and the phrase is also anticipated in Psalm 31:1-5. I surmised then, that “he” is possibly the father (we discover this in L9) of “you” (we find out who this is in L13), and that N. is recounting a recurring childhood experience. In the last line, the words of the title put everything into perspective, and yet leaves the significance of the son’s final “rite” open to the reader’s interpretation. In contrast to the biblical reference, here it is the son who is commending the all-important symbolic subway token, to the father.
I chose this sonnet because (among other reasons) of its wonderful images, its amazing rhymes, its successful bending of the traditional rules, and because it gave me the goose-bumps each and every time I read it.
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Threaded Mode
