Appreciation of The Toys by Coventry Patmore
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His poem Toys gives a graphic picture of the sorrows of childhood and the fatherly relationship of God to man. The poet's motherless child spoke and behaved like grown-up people, which the poet disliked. For disobeying him for the seventh time, the poet beat him and sent him to bed without the usual kisses.
There is no “deep meaning” in this poem, which is to say that the reader does not need to read too deeply to feel the poem’s effects. It is overwhelmingly pathetic and moving in its depiction of the sad, brooding little boy “with darken’d eyelids…their lashes yet / From his late sobbing wet.” The boy has been crying because his father has recently spanked him for being disobedient. Moreover, the mother is dead, so there was no one in the house to console the child after his father’s severe admonishment. Thus, the father finds his son asleep with eyes and face still stained from recent tears. The sharpest pathos in the poem arises when the father looks at a table near the boy’s bed, upon which are set a variety of commonplace objects that the boy has “ranged there with careful art.” The emotion emanates not from the toys themselves, but from the fact that the boy has sweetly bestowed importance upon objects that adults otherwise ignore. Indeed, so great is the father’s pain at the recognition of his young son’s sweet childishness that he immediately after prays to God, not as much to ask for anything as to observe that God, the ultimate father, will one day look upon His children and overlook “their childishness”–i.e., the father’s swift and severe response to his son’s disobedience. God, the father believes, will do for the human race what he could not for his son.