Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources Further Reading

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• In response to the tragic shootings in April 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, Hudgins wrote “When Bullies Ruled the Hallways,” published in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times, May 1, 1999. In this brief essay, Hudgins recalls in graphic detail the various strategies of domination and torture the “jock-kings” used at his own high school in Montgomery, Alabama. Hudgins admits to having “nursed revenge fantasies against the jocks who tormented me” but “never came close to acting them out.” He concludes, “I valued my life and theirs too much.”
• “The Secret Sister” is a recent memoir in The Hudson Review (Winter 1999), which tells how, at age ten, Andrew Hudgins stumbles upon a well-kept family secret. An “error” on his birth certificate begins the process of revelation that ends in a startling fact: there had been a sister, Andrea, killed at age two in a car accident in which his mother, pregnant with Andrew at the time, was the driver. “The Secret Sister,” like other Hudgins memoirs, radiates meaning from a central fact into many other family dynamics and incidents and even into a “bone-deep understanding” of his own life.
• The religious matter in much of Hudgins’s poetry is both strong and quite unorthodox. Two memoirs, “Half-Answered Prayers,” published in Southern Review (Summer 1998) and “Born Again” published in American Scholar (Spring 1999), step outside the usual language and formulae of religious testimonies and into the flesh-and-blood accounts of Hudgins’s own encounters with God.
• A Summons to Memphis (1986) by Tennessee-born Peter Taylor is a novel that revolves around the complex family relationships in a Southern family, especially between father and son. Like many of Andrew Hudgins’s poems and memoirs, Taylor’s story also deals with the power of childhood dislocations and the various ways memory is summoned to come to terms with the past.

that “the author writes as if he or she were in a foreign country, as if he or she were a foreigner in his or her own family.” “Elegy For My Father, Who Is Not Dead” works beautifully to reveal in an unsentimental way the grief that may come when a man must move beyond the beliefs of the people who have loved and raised him. Other notable examples in The Never-Ending, such as “Hunting With My Brother,” “The Adoration of the Magi,” “In The Game,” and “Suffer The Children,” express the poet’s recognition of the differences between himself and many of the members of his family. What is exceptional about this awareness is that, despite the differences, Hudgins has been able to stay connected with his family. He does not write as though he were a foreigner in his own family; he writes, rather, as though he were his family’s very own personal scribe. For many a gorgeous example of the way he’s managed to keep his heart affixed to the people and place that produced him, all interested parties should look further into the work of Andrew Hudgins.

Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Bryan Aubrey

Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English literature. In this essay, he considers “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead” in terms of many levels of gaps or distances: between the generations, between faith and doubt, and between belief and agnosticism or atheism.

Hudgins’s reputation as a poet has been built in part on his concern with religion, especially the kind of fundamentalist Protestant Christianity that has a strong hold in the southern United States, where Hudgins spent much of his adolescence and early adulthood. Many of his most admired poems contain what Clay Reynolds describes in Dictionary of Literary Biography as a “sense of the grotesque,” in which the reader is often shocked by horrific, morbid, or bizarre images intended to point attention to “the relationship between real behavior and religious conviction.”

In many of Hudgins’s poems, the poet steps outside accepted attitudes to biblical characters or objects of religious veneration (the figure of Christ as depicted in art, for example) and presents these objects in a fresh light. Often this is done through the eyes of a child who is contemplating them for the first time, without long years of religious training or indoctrination. In such poems, the poet stands outside the faith that he is examining. He sees it differently from its more enthusiastic and less reflective believers.

It is in this respect that “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead” reflects Hudgins’s characteristic concerns. In many other respects, the poem is not typical of his work: the imagery is neither disturbing nor violent, and the poem does not shock or make the reader reflect with a sudden twist of thought at the end. The simplicity and apparent artlessness of the poem’s language, scarcely distinguishable from prose, also mark it as different from much of Hudgins’s other work. But the poem is clearly linked to Hudgins’s favorite themes in that it presents widely different, irreconcilable points of view on matters of religion, especially relating to issues of life and death. The poem can be understood as a poem of gaps, of distances, of chasms, at a number of different levels, between different interpretations of life. There is the gap between father and son (although the speaker could also be the father’s daughter), the gap between the generations, and the wide gulf that separates faith from doubt, belief from agnosticism or atheism.

This sense of distance is established in the first two lines: “One day I’ll lift the telephone / and be told my father’s dead.” The speaker assumes that he will not be present at his father’s death; he will receive the news from someone else, perhaps a relative or hospital official, and even then not in person but via the telephone. The hint of estrangement, of separation, is clear, although the poet offers no explanation of why he is so certain that this is the way events will unfold. Nor does he offer any information about whether his father is already ill and dying; the poet may simply be imagining what will happen at some undetermined point in the future. Certainly, the speaker does not sound concerned or distressed about the prospect; the matter-of-fact, informal,

“The son, of course, does not believe a word of this, quietly dissenting from his father’s most deeply held beliefs.”

somewhat detached conversational tone sets the mood of the poem as a whole. (The tone is quite different from the emotional intensity of another poem in which a son contemplates the death of his father, Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”)

The poem is notable as much for what it does not say as for what it does say. The nature of the father’s religious faith is approached obliquely, in terms of his basic, unquestioned assumptions, which are clearly those of the fundamentalist Christian. The father believes in the Christian doctrine of an afterlife: that those who have kept the faith in this life will be rewarded by admission to the community of the righteous in heaven, a paradise ruled by Christ, in which all pain and suffering have been banished and life continues forever. This is the “world beyond this world” referred to in the poem. The fortunate souls who inhabit it are the “saved,” whose names are written in the “book of life” that is opened, according to the New Testament’s book of Revelation, at the time of judgment.

Christian fundamentalist belief is characterized by two more elements that are clearly part of the belief system of the father in “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead.” The first is that the conditions of salvation are unambiguous; a believer can know with absolute certainty that he is bound for heaven as long as he accepts that Christ is the Son of God and died for the sins of mankind, a doctrine that can be traced to the gospel of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believe in him should not perish but have eternal life.” It is because the speaker’s father accepts this belief that he can be so confident of his destination after death. He can make “reservations” for heaven, rather like a person might make flight reservations for a vacation (at least that is how the son sees it). For the religious fundamentalist, whether Christian, Muslim or adherent of another religion, there is never any room for doubt. For the Christian, doubting is considered the devil’s work, and issues of faith and morality usually divide neatly into two categories: right and wrong, good and evil, salvation and damnation. Intellectual questioning is not encouraged.

The second element of fundamentalist belief relevant to the poem is the literal nature of the father’s beliefs. He expects to live in heaven in the same physical form in which he lived on Earth. No doubt he has heard this preached from the pulpit on innumerable occasions. According to Christian doctrine, there is to be a resurrection of the body after the believer dies. In the Christian heaven, individuals are not transformed into disembodied spirits; souls still need bodies, even if the body concerned is, as St. Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians (15:44), a “spiritual body.” In the poem, the father clearly expects to be recognizably himself and to retain the same family ties that he had on Earth. He looks forward to the time when his son will join him and he is able to wrap him “in his arms and laugh, / the way he did when I arrived on earth.” The image nicely links death with rebirth; the newly arrived soul in heaven is like a newborn baby on Earth. (There are hints here also of the fundamentalist belief that when a person accepts Jesus, he is “born again.”)

The son, of course, does not believe a word of this, quietly dissenting from his father’s most deeply held beliefs. He addresses his difference of opinion to the reader, rather than to his father, perhaps because the gap between the two men is so great he feels there is no point in discussing the subject directly with his father. There is no meeting point, no possibility of dialogue, between such radically divergent views, although the son puts forward no positive beliefs of his own; he is merely unconvinced by the faith into which he was born and appears to regard the prospect of death with some unease. Unlike his father, he is no happy voyager on the ship that sails to eternity. However, his trepidation stops far short of the blank terror of annihilation that is the theme of another contemporary poem about death, Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.”

The final four lines of the poem convey most starkly the chasm between the two attitudes being presented. These lines build on the poem’s recurring image of the passage to death and beyond being like a sea voyage. Going to heaven is like being on a ship that docks in a harbor, finally safe on its journey home. This is a simple and universal image, but the speaker is clearly ready to deconstruct it. His choice of words suggests that both sets of beliefs, the faithful and the faithless, are no more than speculation in which the mind indulges:

I see myself on deck, convinced
his ship’s gone down, while he’s convinced
I’ll see him standing on the dock
and waving, shouting, Welcome back.

Looking into the future, the poet is “convinced” that the ship (that is, his father’s life) will go down, never to rise again, just as his father is “convinced” otherwise. To be convinced is simply to be persuaded of the truth of a certain statement or proposition. In this case, in the absence of any objectively verifiable proof — since death, as Hamlet famously said, is that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” — neither statement can claim to be truer than the other. To adapt the ship image, father and son are like the proverbial two ships passing each other on a dark night; one is on a voyage of faith, the other on a voyage of doubt. They cannot see each other; they cannot exchange signals. They share no common language.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Erik France

France is a librarian and teaches history and interdisciplinary studies at University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan. In the following essay, he considers how Hudgins’s poem is a twentieth-century American variant on the elegiac tradition that emphasizes anxiety about death rather than consolation in its aftermath.

“Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead” immediately suggests a twentieth-century tone that contrasts with earlier elegies. In previous centuries, elegies were usually meant to express lamentation, mourning, and praise for someone who had died. Like words spoken by a friend or relative of the deceased at a funeral, they often expressed sadness and feelings of loss but also provided consolation or comfort for the living. Two illustrative examples are Thomas Carew’s “An Elegy Upon the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s, Dr. John Donne” (1633) and Walt Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865). In Hudgins’s variation on the elegy, the speaker’s father, as the title immediately announces, is not dead. Furthermore, once one reads or hears the poem, it becomes clear that the speaker does not provide any direct consolation to the audience. In fact, the speaker emphatically doubts the father’s consoling notions. In contrasting the speaker’s anxiety about death with the father’s faith and belief in a cheerful afterlife, Hudgins inspires his audience to check on their own metaphysical beliefs: Why are we here, where did we come from, and where will we go next?

Hudgins’s speaker’s father takes a positive, even pleasant view of death. He conceives of death as a point of departure, as if what comes next will be as enjoyable and comfortable and fun as a luxury cruise with good friends. His images of travel are modern because luxury travel became practical and affordable to anyone but the wealthiest only in the twentieth century. The phrase “his reservations have / been made” suggests the modern transportation system in which one can go to a travel agent or make a phone call to make arrangements for a trip to any chosen destination. Near the end of the twentieth century, this system had become so automated that the speaker’s father could have connected to the Internet and, using a credit card number, made the reservations himself. He is so convinced that the afterlife will be like a pleasant trip that he is almost eager to go. The idea of wanting to see “fresh worlds” suggests that he wants to move on from this one, almost like a futuristic astronaut heading out to explore another galaxy. The speaker is not entirely sure exactly where his father wants to go or where he thinks he is going, only that it is a worthwhile place. Perhaps it is rather “older” worlds he will see — the speaker is unsure. When Americans speak of “the old country,” they are usually referring to the places from which they or their ancestors came. The phrase has been most often used by people of European descent in referring to some country or area of Europe, but it could just as well be any place of origin. In this case, the father is probably thinking in terms of the mystical place from which he came before he was born.

Hudgins leaves his speaker’s father’s age and state of health deliberately vague: he could be old or sick, but he may just as easily be healthy. There are clues that the father may be close to the end of his life in that he is “ready” for death, that the speaker “can’t / just say good-bye.” Nonetheless, “the sureness of his faith” and his belief in a positive afterlife are the most important things we learn about the speaker’s father. This belief unsettles the speaker, makes the speaker anxious and gloomy. The speaker disbelieves the father’s metaphysical views. The speaker takes a much more skeptical and negative view of things than the father does. The speaker sees technology, such as the telephone,

“The speaker sees technology, such as the telephone, as a conveyor of bad news and dwells on the image of a ship that has sunk rather than afloat and smoothly cruising along.”

as a conveyor of bad news and dwells on the image of a ship that has sunk rather than afloat and smoothly cruising along. Whereas the father is calm about death, the speaker is terrified by the thought of it. This terror is made more understandable when one considers the history of the 1900s.

Technological innovations made life both easier and more terrifying during the twentieth century. Travel has been made easier, but disasters like the sinking of the passenger ship Titanic in 1912, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, and hundreds of airplane crashes dramatically showed that modern transportation technology did not guarantee safety. More terribly, much technology was used during the 1900s to deliberately kill civilians (as well as military personnel) on a vast scale. The use of railroads and poison gas to efficiently carry out the Holocaust in Europe and fast-flying airplanes to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War are particularly terrifying examples of how technology was used for extremely violent purposes. Over the course of the twentieth century, technology also dramatically changed the way people communicated and thought about life: it sped things up and loaded people’s thoughts with huge amounts of information, leaving little time for quiet contemplation. News about disasters became harder to ignore as the century moved toward its end, giving many people a feeling of dread. This was largely due to the increasing availability, reach, and daily use of telephones, radios, televisions, and the Internet. All of these technologies changed from rare luxury items to seeming necessities. As 2001 approached, people anxiously coped with life-threatening issues such as AIDS, food-borne viruses, and random acts of terrorism. Without a calming belief system, one could easily be frightened by the thought of death in the twentieth century.

“Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead” does not reveal how or when, in spite of the scarier aspects of the twentieth-century world, the speaker’s father came to faith. Some people are more naturally optimistic whereas others remain pessimistic. Is the glass half full or half empty? Is the idea of traveling in space or at sea exciting or fraught with doom? The speaker’s father comes across clearly as a person who prefers to think on the bright side. He seems like a happy, loving person. The speaker strongly suggests that “he’ll wrap me in his arms and laugh, / the way he did when I arrived / on earth.” Yet the father’s love and affection do not bring consolation to the speaker, which leaves the latter feeling sad and hopeless.

The forcefulness of Hudgins’s speaker’s doubts — dwelling on fearful things like an imaginary telephone call announcing the father’s death or a ship that has sunk with the father on board — emphasize how uneasy the speaker feels. As long as the speaker remains anxious and haunted by death, though, there remains the possibility that the speaker will find faith and hope. Southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor, in her novel Wise Blood (1952), employed a protagonist named Hazel Motes to explore this theme. Like the speaker in Hudgins’s poem, Hazel takes a deeply skeptical view of faith but can never shake the torment of anxiety or find happiness. The speaker becomes more anxious and tortured the more the speaker denies faith. Eventually, Hazel in Wise Blood comes to find faith with as much apparent conviction as the speaker’s father has in “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead.” Just as Hazel finds faith, there is hope that the speaker in “Elegy” will find it as well.

Source: Erik France, Critical Essay on “Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead,” in Poetry for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

“Poets must ... work very hard to contain not only this emotion but all emotion. Indeed, it’s possibly even more risky to express wonder or love in a sincere way than sorrow or grief.”