Stanza-by-Stanza Explanation

This lesson reads the six eight-line stanzas of "Dockery and Son" one at a time, using line numbers. It shows what each stanza does in the poem's movement, which images carry its meaning, and how the stanzas are linked into a single argument.

The poem moves through six stages: a meeting with the Dean (stanza 1), a locked door and a train (stanza 2), a drowsy pause at Sheffield (stanza 3), a comparison of two lives that is suddenly corrected (stanza 4), a questioning of the source of our assumptions (stanza 5) and a bleak conclusion about life and death (stanza 6). Stanzas 2 to 5 end without punctuation, so the sense runs on, and only the last stanza ends with a full stop. As the poem goes on, the action shrinks, the thinking grows, and the speaker's "I" gives way to "we" and "us".

How the poem is built. "Dockery and Son" has six stanzas of eight lines each, 48 lines in all. The lines are rhymed, though the rhyme is often hidden by the flow of the sentences. The stanzas are tightly linked. Stanza 1 ends with a colon that points at the first word of stanza 2. Stanzas 2, 3, 4 and 5 end without punctuation, so the sense runs on into the next stanza. Only stanza 6 ends with a full stop. The poem therefore reads as one continuous train of thought, which suits its setting on a journey. The line numbers below count from 1 to 48 across the whole poem.

Stanza 1 (lines 1 to 8): the Dean's news. The poem opens in the middle of a conversation. The Dean, in direct speech, reminds the speaker that Dockery came to the college after him and tells him that Dockery's son is at the college now (lines 1 and 2). The Dean addresses the speaker as "you", and the speaker's reply is a nod (line 3). Quotation marks mark spoken words in lines 1 to 4 and in line 7, and the conversation goes on, with a question in line 7. In line 3 the speaker calls himself a visitor, using a formal word that can also mean a ghostly visitor, and describes his dark clothes in a compound word that ties them to death. He looks like a mourner in a place full of young people, and the first hint of death has entered the poem. The stanza ends with a small private act: he tries the door to his old college room (line 8). The colon makes the reader wait for the result. The tone is formal, a little awkward and dry.

Stanza 2 (lines 9 to 16): the locked door and the train. The first word of the stanza, a single blunt word, gives the result of the attempt: the door is locked (line 9). Against it the poem sets a wide, bright lawn lying in the light, so the open, sunlit space around him sharpens the speaker's exclusion. In line 10 a bell he knows rings, a familiar sound, and he catches his train. The poem adds that he does so unnoticed, which makes him a kind of ghost whom nobody sees leave. In line 11 the view from the train is given in a few plain words, a canal and a sky of clouds, and in line 12 the name of Dockery returns. In lines 13 to 16 the speaker works out the arithmetic of Dockery's fatherhood, the son's birth and the father's age at the time, nineteen or twenty. The tone is brisk and clipped, with short sentences, and it carries a dry bitterness. The stanza ends without punctuation, so the thought carries on into stanza 3.

Stanza 3 (lines 17 to 24): Cartwright, sleep and Sheffield. After the sharp arithmetic of stanza 2 the poem goes slack on purpose. The speaker's thoughts drift to college rooms and to a man named Cartwright, later killed (lines 17 and 18). The death is mentioned in passing, almost casually, which makes it more chilling. In lines 19 and 20 he yawns and falls asleep. In line 21 the train reaches Sheffield, where he must change, and lines 22 and 23 give the dull details of waiting: something to eat and the platform. The stanza closes with the railway lines that part and fork away from one another (line 24). Many readers hear in this plain, physical image a hint at the different directions lives can take, though the poem does not spell it out. The tone is weary and flat, with a hint of seriousness under the flatness. The unglamorous details, a northern junction and a snack, root the poem in everyday English life.

Stanza 4 (lines 25 to 32): what he lacks, and the correction. The poem turns from events to self-examination. Lines 25 and 26 list what the speaker does not have: a wife, a child, a home and property. The list is built on a repeated "no", and he admits that going without these things had seemed ordinary. Lines 27 to 29 widen the thought to life and to other men, Dockery among them. In lines 30 and 31 he imagines Dockery, at nineteen, weighing up his wishes and being equal to them, which is a neat, rational explanation. Then, in line 32, he cuts himself short with a "no" and says that the difference lies elsewhere. The correction is the turning point of the poem. From here the question is no longer who planned better but where choices come from at all. The tone is uneasy and self-questioning. The stanza ends without punctuation, so the corrected explanation arrives in the first line of stanza 5.

Stanza 5 (lines 33 to 40): add or dilute, and the source of assumptions. Line 33 completes the correction: the real difference was Dockery's conviction that a child would enlarge his life, and the exclamation mark shows the speaker's amazement. In lines 34 and 35 he asks why Dockery thought that adding a child meant a gain, and he answers for himself that for him it would have been a dilution. The two words are opposite readings of the same sum: to one man a child adds, to the other a child weakens. In lines 35 and 36 he asks the poem's biggest question, what the source is of such inborn assumptions. Line 37 says what they are not: not our firmest beliefs, and not our strongest wishes. Line 38 first compares those beliefs and wishes, in a simile, to doors that warp in their frames until they will not open, and then says what the assumptions are like: a manner or style that arrives with a life. Lines 39 and 40 add that the manner starts as habit and then suddenly sets hard into all that we have. The simile echoes the locked door of lines 8 and 9: the speaker is locked out of his past, and now he sees that even what we most believe and most want can warp shut. From line 37 the pronouns move from "I" and "he" to "we" and "our", so his case becomes everybody's. The tone is argumentative and probing, with long, winding sentences and abstract words.

Stanza 6 (lines 41 to 48): the sand and the end. The sentence that began at the end of stanza 5 runs on into stanza 6. Looking back, the hardened assumptions loom like vast, dense clouds of sand (lines 41 and 42), a simile that suggests something huge, close and suffocating. In Dockery's case they stand for fatherhood, and in the speaker's case for nothing. That word ends line 43 and begins line 44, so it echoes across the line break, and the speaker adds a sour note about a son's patronage (line 44). Line 45 is a notably short, end-stopped sentence that names the two stages of life as boredom and fear. Lines 46 to 48 finish the poem. Life goes by regardless of how it is used (line 46), it leaves behind only what some hidden force decided for us (line 47), and what follows is old age, with death as its single end (line 48). By now the speaker says "we" and "us", not "I". This is the only stanza that ends with a full stop, and the poem offers no consolation. The tone is stark and resigned.

Reading the stanzas together. If you give each stanza one word, the poem runs: meeting, leaving, waiting, comparing, asking, ending. The outward action shrinks as the poem goes on, from a conversation in stanza 1 to a train and a platform and then to no action at all, while the thinking grows. The language moves from concrete things (a door, a lawn, a bell, a snack) to abstract ones (assumptions, habit, boredom, fear), the pronouns widen from "I" to "we", and the tone darkens from awkward courtesy to resigned bleakness. If the poem began with its conclusion it would sound like a lecture. Because the reader travels with the speaker, the final stanza feels earned.

How to use this in an examination. When you are asked about a stanza, state its place in the poem's movement, give two or three precise details with line numbers, and name one device and its effect. Do not quote the poem at length; refer to lines by number and describe images in your own words.