Background to the poem

Gently surreal, this moving elegy explores the complex relationship between a father and his son. In some ways the father is presented as an attractive, authoritative figure. He is associated with the glamour of space exploration, for example, and he acts as a sort of scientific tour guide to life, naming its features in a factual way, as if they were features of the moon: ‘This is the Crater of Childhood.’

But there are more troubling resonances: the spaceman image suggests emotional distance between father and son; childhood is described as a ‘Crater’ and, even more ominously, as an ‘abyss’. Whereas the father is a powerfully active force in the poem, his son is so passive he has become the moon’s surface, trodden on, mapped, examined by the spaceman. In writing the poem, the poet repeats this passivity by withholding any commentary on the relationship he describes.

And isn’t this father, in his white space suit, a surrogate for the ultimate father, God? At the end of the poem, is God dead?

About Yehuda Amichai

Born in Germany to Orthodox Jewish parents, Yehuda Amichai moved with his family to Jerusalem, where he attended a religious school. He fought with the British Army in the Second World War and later in the Israeli War of Independence, the Sinai War and the Yom Kippur War. In between, he studied the Bible and Hebrew literature and started to write and publish his poems. He taught literature at the University of California, Berkeley, at New York University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

With clear but tender intelligence, Amichai’s poems characteristically probe philosophical issues in a down-to-earth style. Featuring surprising turns of imagery, his pensive poems take the reader on a voyage through religious doubt accompanied by an observant, perceptive and evidently wise guide.

Amichai was greatly admired by the poet Ted Hughes. His work has been translated into more than forty languages and awarded many prestigious national and international poetry prizes.