zaki

parental love is depicted as being extremely strong in both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Jon Stallworthy’s poem The Almond Tree. In the play, Prospero assures his daughter that he has "done nothing but in care of thee": her well-being is his entire motivation for all his actions in the play, including summoning the violent storm at the beginning of the play. He acts as a parent of various types and in various ways in The Tempest, to Miranda, to Caliban and to Ariel. It is only to Miranda that Prospero is a true father, however, and even she is subject to his discipline and plots, as he tries to see if Ferdinand is a good enough husband for her. In Stallworthy’s The Almond Tree a child is born, but the poem conveys the strength of love that is so strong that upon learning of his son’s Downs Syndrome, it became his "first death". The emotion is so strong that the poem describes an out of body experience, as he "wrestled against gravity".
The imagery of Stallworthy’s poem is also reminiscent of the play: Stallworthy laments that his son will never "come/ ashore into my kingdom/ speaking my language". The misery of not being able to pass on what he treasures – his"language" – is as strong as Prospero’s anger at his dukedom having been usurped. The strength of parental love is a common motif in poems featuring parent/child relationships. Ben Jonson’s On My First Son is full of the overwhelming grief of a father whose son has died aged seven, and as a result he vows never to love anything so much ever again. The similar imagery of Stallworthy and Jonson – their sons described as "my best poem!" and "his best piece of poetry" respectively – suggests how important their children are to them, and how perfect in their eyes.
This sense that a parent creates a child is not the only way in which parental love is shown, though. In both Stallworthy’s poem and the play there is a sense that parents are changed by their children also. Prospero vows to "abjure" "this rough magic" so that he and his daughter can rejoin Milanese society, leaving behind their isolated island. Stallworthy goes further, creating the metaphor of"labour", and saying that he has been "fathered" by his son, so that he has finally been reborn into another person, "shattered and set free" by his parental love. The idea of labour is also used by Gillian Clarke in her poem Catrin, which describes the fierce fight of the narrator and her daughter to become "separate","to be two, to be ourselves". The difference in the emotions – still strong, but with a sense of desired separation – is perhaps because it is in relation to maternal rather than paternal love. The relationship trails "love and conflict", according to the narrator. In some ways there is conflict in the parent/child relationship in The Tempest too, as Miranda begins to grow up, challenging her father, and falling in love with Ferdinand.
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