Walking Away by Cecil Day-Lewis: what it is about, its context, and how Day-Lewis uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day', 'like a satellite / Wrenched from its orbit', 'Behind a scatter of boys', 'With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free', 'Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem', 'I have had worse partings, but none that so / Gnaws at my mind still', 'How selfhood begins with a walking away', 'And love is proved in the letting go'.
Form: four five-line stanzas with a regular rhyme scheme, and the reflective final stanza.
Context: Day-Lewis writing about his son, and a parent's love as letting go.
Comparisons with Mother, any distance, Follower and Eden Rock.
