Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis and Eden Rock by Charles Causley are both poems about parent-child relationships, and the impact of the passage of time on growing up. Walking Away was written by Cecil Day Lewis. His poetry is often romantic and he uses nature to explore personal experiences, Walking Away is about his son Sean, from his first marriage. When Cecil Day Lewis was four, his mother passed away due to cancer and his father became very overprotective and loved him too much.
This is reflected in the poem as it is written form the perspective of an overprotective father.Like Cecil Day Lewis, Charles Causley also lost a parent at a young age, for him however, it was his father. This lead to him having a particularly close relationship with his mother. His relationship was so close that he even gave up relationships to nurse his mother when she became ill and was eventually buried alongside his parents. His poem Eden Rock is an autobiographical account about an imagined experience where the poet meets his parents, who are sat on the opposite bank of a stream and beckon him over.
Walking Away is written in retrospect, looking back at a prominent event in the narrator’s life. It is about the father looking retrospectively back at his son’s first day of school and how he felt on that day. The memory of the day still deeply affects him eighteen years later however, he comes to understand that this is a natural process that every parent and child has to experience; letting go. The child lets go of their childhood and the parents lets go of the child. Eden Rock can be interpreted in a similar way to this, one of its interpretations talks about how the poem can depict the passing on from life to death; the letting go of life. The poems as a whole could be seen as a metaphor of the narrator moving from life to death, crossing the stream to meet his parents on the other side, who have already made the crossing, from life to death.