Most poems about parents and children look in one direction: the child admiring the parent, or the parent worrying over the child. "Tribute" manages to look in both at once, and it does so through a small scene, a boy speaking a few words to his mother on an ordinary day. Elizabeth von Schonberg builds the whole poem around the moment a child stops seeing his father only as "Dad" and starts seeing him as a person.
The speaker is the boy's mother, and the poem is carefully arranged to delay that fact. We watch the "freckled, snub-nosed youngster" approach, hear his halting explanation, and only in the final line learn that the man he is praising belongs to her as well: "he's MY Dad, too!" The capital letters and the word "too" turn the last line into a small surprise, and a gently comic one. The mother has been standing in the position of listener, a kind of audience, and suddenly claims her stake. The pride that tightens her throat is not just pride in her son's insight but pride in the husband he is describing.
The boy's speech is the heart of the poem, and it is beautifully handled. He stumbles toward his meaning: "Not as my father, but—you know— / As people—man to man!" The dash and the filler phrase "you know" capture the self-consciousness of a child reaching for an adult idea. The phrase "man to man" is touching precisely because he is borrowing grown-up language and wearing it a little too large. What he has discovered is that a parent exists outside the role of parent, and that this person can be measured and admired on his own terms. His comparison, "next to, maybe, Lincoln," is funny and sincere in equal parts. The hesitant "maybe" shows a boy being scrupulously fair, unwilling to rank his father above the most revered figure he can think of, yet clearly unable to name anyone else.
The imagery is sparse but well chosen. The boy's freckles and snub nose give him a particular, almost cartoon-like childishness, and the poem returns to them at the pivotal moment: "the earnest eyes looked out / Across the freckles' tan." The word "earnest" matters, since the eyes carry the seriousness while the freckles carry the boyhood, and the poem lets us see both at once. Then those eyes "Came back to look deep into mine." The mother's reaction, "a moment's awe," comes from realizing that "Yesterday's boy was growing up." That line compresses time neatly: the child who was a boy yesterday is already on the way to something else, and she sees "so much there."
Formally, the poem is plain and conversational, which suits its subject. The lines are short, mostly built on a loose four-beat rhythm, and the rhyme is light rather than insistent. Some stanza endings chime ("said" with "Dad," "man" with "tan"), but the pattern is not rigidly held, and the poem's looseness keeps it sounding like speech rather than recitation. The stanzas are uneven in length, and the final one is a quatrain that begins with the boy's quoted words and ends with the mother's confession, so the two voices meet in a single stanza at the close.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It would have been easy to gush about fatherhood, but the poem lets a child's awkward, honest sentence do the work. The title, "Tribute," points two ways. The boy pays tribute to his father, and the poem, in turn, pays tribute to the quiet moment when a child begins to see the people who raised him clearly. The mother's tight throat is the poem's real emotional peak, and it is felt rather than explained. In under twenty lines, it captures something many families recognize: the day a child says something unexpectedly grown-up, and a parent realizes how fast the years are moving.