This paper applies a formalist critical framework to Howard Nemerov's poem "September: The First Day of School," examining how the poem's diction, imagery, structure, and allusions work together to convey meaning. Through close reading, the paper traces the narrator's emotional journey as he brings his son to school for the first time, exploring how Nemerov uses enjambment, semicolons, and biblical allusion to illuminate the inherent loneliness of human experience. The analysis shows how the poem simultaneously unifies and separates father and son through the shared yet solitary experience of education, ultimately arguing that the work highlights the unavoidable solitude of the individual within society.
The paper exemplifies formalist close reading: it isolates individual poetic devices — enjambment, punctuation, diction, allusion — and explains how each contributes to the poem's overall argument. This technique is particularly visible in the analysis of the semicolon in line three, where a mechanical textual detail is linked directly to the emotional experience of the narrator.
The paper opens by defining the formalist method before applying it progressively to the poem. It follows the poem's own stanza sequence, which creates a natural and readable arc. Each body paragraph introduces a new textual element, analyzes it, and connects it to the central thesis about human loneliness and the solitude of the individual within shared experience. The conclusion returns to the poem's opening image to signal thematic closure.
Literary formalism holds that everything a reader needs to understand a piece of literature — such as a poem — exists within the text itself. A formalist reading requires careful consideration of both the poem's individual elements and the poem as a whole. This reading begins with the poem's diction, allusions, imagery, and symbols. After examining these basic elements, the formalist critic turns to the work as a whole and considers its structure, the interrelationships of its parts, and its tone, point of view, theme, and ambiguities. The final step of a formalist examination is determining how these different elements come together to convey an overall message — and what that message is.
A formalist reading of Howard Nemerov's "September: The First Day of School" reveals the author's internal struggle as his son begins school, which allows him to juxtapose his own past with his son's present. The poem highlights an inherent human loneliness by juxtaposing the public experience of schooling — one that the narrator and the vast majority of adults have undergone — with that of the narrator's son. The narrator stresses his inability to help or guide his son through the experience of schooling and growth, ultimately showing the solitude of any human being despite being part of society as a whole.
The poem begins with the narrator taking his son to school for the first time. The first image the reader encounters is that of the narrator and his son walking to school hand in hand, creating a powerful image of familial unity. This familial bond is almost immediately disrupted, however, as the son lets go of his father's hand and walks into his classroom. The narrator pauses to acknowledge this necessary separation: "And when I leave him at the first-grade door / He cries a little but is brave; he does / Let go" (2–4).
By placing a semicolon in the middle of the third line, the narrator creates a pause that conveys the necessity of a similar pause in his own day — a moment to accommodate his son's inevitable crying before entering class for the first time. Additionally, the enjambment at the end of the third line signifies the forced separation that must occur between father and son in order for both to move forward. Just as the line's stop is unnatural and forced, so too is the separation between them.
After discussing his son's difficulty in separating from his father, the narrator reflects on his own experience as a first-grade student. He notes, "Selfish tears remind me now / I cried before that door a life ago" (4–5). He is crying just as his son is, but these tears are not shed in sympathy. Rather, they are a bitter reminder of his own experience as a student.
The final two lines of the first stanza simultaneously unify and separate the narrator from his son. They are at once united by their mutual experience of schooling, and at the same time made aware of the distance between them. A lifetime separates father and son, yet the experience they go through is essentially the same. Even though what his son feels is nearly identical to what he himself felt at that age, the narrator cannot help his son — the boy must face his schooling alone. The narrator develops this idea of solitude within unity in the following stanza: "Each fall the children must endure together / What every child also endures alone" (6–7). The education the children receive will forever both unite and separate them.
The narrator displays a momentary assertion of his own authority — earned through the experience of having already gone through school — by using the words "so arbitrary, so peremptory." In a sense, this is his way of demonstrating that he has already navigated the experience his son is now beginning. He knows what his son and his classmates will be learning, even if they do not yet know it themselves. He knows more about their educational future than the children do. And yet he must allow every one of these students to experience life on their own terms and stand idly by, waiting for his son to stop crying. At the same time, the words "peremptory" and "arbitrary" function as expressive metaphors for life itself — the narrator's life, his son's life, and the lives of people in general. Life is indeed peremptory, but we all need to make our own mistakes in order to understand it. The individual experience of going through school, of finding one's own way through life and making one's own mistakes, is invaluable and cannot be substituted. Mistakes must be made, tears must be shed, hands must be pried away.
The poem comes full circle as the narrator reminds his reader of the ritualistic aspect of this separation and revisits the story of Joseph, concluding with "But may great kindness come of it in the end" (35). Like many fathers before him, the narrator is forced to face the separation from his son and to relinquish their familial comfort in order to allow his son to prosper on his own. The narrator's struggles stem from having to stand idly by as he witnesses his son begin to make a life for himself, unable to guide him, help him, or participate in the journey. The narrator's unity with his son is quickly disrupted as both are forced to take their own paths in life, deepening the poem's central idea of human solitude — a theme that becomes a focal point throughout the work.
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