David Wagoner’s My Father’s Garden and the Use of Imagery

David Wagoner’s “My Father’s Garden” is a poem bursting at the seams with vividly drawn imagery that ranges from dragons in hell to cogwheels as flowers. In four stanzas almost overwhelmed with brilliant metaphors, David Wagoner shows us what he thinks of his father’s job, what he thinks of his father’s “garden,” and what he thinks of his father’s education and subsequent life choices. The poem is also exquisite in how it illuminates the concept of beauty in the eye of the beholder as the author comes to finally comprehend how father could conceive that something as unpromising as a junkyard could be transformed into something as wonderful as a garden.

Images of heat and fire incinerate the poem’s opening stanza, describing what Wagoner thought of his father’s workplace when he was still a child; it was a location that had a mostly negative impact on him. The father works in a steel mill, surrounded by huge cauldrons of molten steel. The connection between fire and hell is made complete when Wagoner describes the cauldron’s as nothing less than satanic.

Continuing with his underworld ambience he asserts that his father’s job is “To pierce the fireclay and set loose demons.” Clearly the steel mill represents a place to be fear and to stay away from. But then just when it seems as if Wagoner can find nothing positive at all to say about where his father works, he surprises the reader by remarking that he sometimes viewed his father as a kind of medieval knight armed with a lance and chasing after dragons. One leaves the first stanza almost sweating from the effective use of heat imagery contained within it.

Wagoner fuses the second stanza of his poem with images of less brutality than he showed in the first as he takes pains to make it seem as though the junkyard were a place of comfort for his father, a place to get away from the stifling fervor of the mill. If the first stanza was taking place in Hell, then it can be argued that the second stanza takes place in the Garden of Eden. The narrator describes how his father’s perspective of the junkyard was as something much more than simply a repository for outcast odds and ends. The scene is a safe place away from the excessive and oppressive heat of the steel mill that colored the view the narrator had of the place. In the second stanza can be found more natural and benign images of such things as rockeries and grottoes.

This is an almost enchanted place, where can be found small treasures if only one would look with an open mind. The father obviously loved coming to this place; a place where he could find freedom from the banality of his life, and he urged his children to understand this point of view as well. The father could set out on a treasure hunt, finding such items as “small gears and cogwheels,” to bring home to his children as other fathers might bring flowers or toys. But even in the garden he can’t entirely escape his work. He still finds reminders of his hot steel in the lead pipes and ball bearings he occasionally brings home. The junkyard is a garden, indeed, to the father and the narrator seemed to have accepted this view of things when he was a child. The imagery is almost remindful of an isolated island, peopled with old, used appliances and small pieces of machinery.

In the third and fourth stanzas of the poem, the imagery used suggests that the narrator questions whether his father allowed his great early promise to escape, leaving him less of a hero to the narrator than he might otherwise have been. A vivid image is suggestive of whether the steel mill not only melted the steel, but also his father’s brain. Was his father corrupted by the mind-numbing task of melting the same steel over and over again in an unending litany of labor? Could his father have inspired the wonders of what his new steel would become?

The answers to both questions are no. His father did allow his brain to be melted. But he wasn’t able to forge it into something new and exciting. It not only melted, but it ran “Down and away from him.” His learning literally ran away from him, as if terrified of not being used. Where was there to put use of his classical learning in a steel mill? In the end, he could only use tiny parts of his learning while doing crosswords. He could not give his children anything that came from the fruits of his knowledge; that was a situation that could no longer exist.

The narrator’s father was stuck where he was and he knew it and had no choice but to accept it. All he had to give the children were scraps of iron and lead he found on his trips to his garden, the junkyard. The junkyard also became representative of his life, with so much discarded and with little promise for future use.

The imagery in “My Father’s Garden” is used to illustrate how the narrator feels about his father and how his father felt about his garden. His father’s place of work was a frightening picture of laboring in Hell while still alive. It was also a place that could melt the resources of one’s brain through constant, repetitive labor. In contrast to that was the junkyard which to his father was as beautiful and wondrous as any garden; a haven from the dehumanizing machinery of the man. The junkyard was an oasis to which his father would go to escape from the dreaded steel mill and to find small treasures for his family.