Papa’s Bridge by Richard Blanco: Father’s Love in The Heart of His Son

Papa’s Bridge is a famous poem written by Richard Blanco. According to the poet, people often ask him certain questions about how does he manage such different works, engineer and poet. He answers to the people in a way that he is an engineer by profession while a poet by passion. In both disciplines, he tries to recreate artificial landscapes for the people to which they could respond emotionally. In this poem, according to him, he has attempted to establish the link or bridge between emotions, landscape and memory. Being a dad, he wanted to discuss the relation of a father with his son. Drowned in sympathy and love for each other, the poem is one of its kinds for the unmatchable love. When a father dies, the love and affiliation of a son is at the highest level as he not only starts missing the presence of his dad, but the guiding role of father is also felt by him to the maximum. The poet exemplifies many realities of life with the materialistic objects and events. Some of these examples are discussed below.

Places or physical landscapes are so important that we always tend to relate our relationships or physical landscapes with some places, the poet thinks. The poem starts with the scene of a morning where the son along-with his dad sees the rising son when the day starts and the sun start its journey to set into the western side of the earth. According to him the time goes on throughout the day with the movement of earth. The poet writes about his relationship with his old dad who accompanies him in the hospital when his dad was recovering from some surgery.

He mentions that he sees the world through window of a hospital room. He can see the fast moving objects like cars and people going to render their jobs throughout the day. In the literary meaning, it can be conceived that the poet is discussing such fast moving objects and people and exemplifies them as a passing time. While being in a hospital with his dad, he writes that he was feeling that the sun was moving to set into the west very quickly. Similarly, while looking after his closest relationship in hospital, his dad, he mentioned that he did his best efforts to pamper his dad and helped him starting his first walk after hospitalization. Through these verses, the poet resembles the life affairs with his work at hospital along-with his father. It can be perceived that, hospital room may be a test lab for out problems, moving cars may be the passing seconds of time, pampering his dad might have been denoted for love and care for relationships and loved ones around us and the final advice of the dad to make bridges is possibly for bringing ease in the people’s lives.

As the sun rises and sets once in a day. Similarly, there are many events that are faced by the human beings during their lives. They encounter many of such situations that don’t come again in their lives. Therefore, the time keeps moving on which gives birth to many unique events in our lives. After having done with his father’s recovery, the father asks his son to learn someday about how to build such bridges in lives which exemplifies bringing opportunities and ease to the others’ lives.

The poem is an account of a father’s love in the heart of his son. Richard Blanco has mentioned that the father’s love never fades away in the heart of a son even after his death. A dad, who guides his son during his childhood and leads him to the youth. He shows him right path at every stage of his life. Similarly, the son who seeks the guidance of his dad throughout his life doesn’t feel good when he doesn’t find his dad along after his death. In the poem, the poet has mentioned that while accompanying his dad in a hospital room, he took every care of his father as prescribed and advised by the doctors. He remained with him in the hospital room and pampered him like a responsible and caring son. Being a son, he gave him medicine, helped him healing his stitches and took him for first walk in hospital after recovering from surgery. He felt that the life outside the window of hospital room is far different than that of inside. At the end, the father, as a normal gesture of a dad, advised him that he would come to know someday how to build such bridges that could ease out other’s lives which the poet realized after years when he passed through the same city, same buildings and same bridges. Therefore, the poet successfully describes the secret love of his father that he feels for him even when he was not with him.