The Toys - Coventry Patmore - Recitation by Cornelia Otis Skinner - Poem - Animation

Here's a virtual movie of the Victorian Poem about fatherly Remorse "The Toys by Coventry Patmore recition by the American actress,Monologist,and author Cornelia Otis Skinner. Cornelia Otis Skinner (May 30, 1899 – July 9, 1979) was an American author and actress. 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. Thus, the most remarkable aspect of this poem is not any profound, metaphysical notion, but rather the simple and yet sublime emotions attached with this paternal sentiment. Though this sentimentality was gobbled up by the hyper-sentimental Victorians of Patmore’s time, the pathos is sharp enough and universal enough that the poem transcends being a mere period piece and edges towards the realm of eternally relevant humanistic literature.

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