My Parents – Stephen Spender

This poem could be a description of Spender's early life .He suffered the disability of a club foot and a speech impediment. The use of the first person, contrasts, and ambiguity give us a vivid picture of a child troubled by a superiority/inferiority complex. 

 While his parents are condescending towards the rough coarse children, the child appears envious of their carefree liberty, their unbridled animal prowess and uninhibited playfulness, yet resentful of their bullying behaviour to him.   

We can visualise the narrator’s voice through antithesis.  He is everything that they are not; softly spoken “words like stones”, well dressed “torn clothes”, “rags”, passive “they ran and climbed”,  inhibited - modesty “they stripped by country streams”, weak “muscles of iron”, well mannered “salt coarse pointing” lisp (parodied by copying), clumsy “lithe”, and friendly ( hostile- “they never smiled”). 

His attempts at conciliation and acceptance are refused but he appears to blame his parents for psychologically damaging him by over protection or shielding him from a natural childhood.  While their superior attitude has excluded him from mainstream society he undecidedly identifies with his parents by having the boys spring “like dogs to bark at our world”.

In conclusion the author leaves us with the idea of an ambiguous blame with the reader trying to find who has more blame, the child or his parents. But in fact the boy is too young to have account of his own thoughts, he just follows what his parents say.