Becoming a godfather, for the speaker of Thomas McAfee's "To My Godson," is not a warm, sentimental event. It is a loss of innocence. The moment he is "named a father to this child," the sky stops being a comfortable backdrop and turns threatening, and the poem traces how responsibility for a young life forces him to abandon the pretty illusions he once lived among and adopt a harder, more honest way of seeing.
The first target is the moon. Poets, the speaker says, have long kept it "romantic," and he mocks the tradition with the dry phrase "the sonneteer." What he sees now is "gray, / Deep-pocked—an impotent, unlovely child / Of Earth and Sun." The adjectives are blunt and almost clinical, and the moon is reduced to something scarred and powerless. Notice the word "child" there: the moon is called a child just as the baby is, and the repetition quietly links the two. A "child of Earth and Sun" is a thing born of forces it cannot control, and the speaker may be thinking of the real child in the same terms, vulnerable and made by circumstances larger than itself. The poem never says so outright, but the echo suggests why the sky now feels like "a wild / Presentiment," a vast, dark foreboding rather than a view.
The turning point is the claim that this "other child, my son," has "made me look too close." The phrase "my son" is intriguing, since the title calls the boy a godson; the speaker seems to let the spiritual bond slide into something closer to parenthood, a sign of how seriously he takes the duty. Looking "too close" is the key image. Distance had protected the romantic view; the moon is lovely from far off, and so is life. Nearness reveals craters. He admits the easy alternative, "the natural way / To look again with half-shut eyes," meaning to keep squinting until the harshness blurs back into beauty. But he rules it out. His "one / Course left" is "the harsher say / Of reason," a stern, sober scrutiny that will let him see "each thing / For its sad worth."
That last phrase is the poem's bleakest, and it is also its most interesting, because it comes paired with "those few lovely joys." The speaker does not abandon beauty; he rations it. Joys survive, but they are "few," and they are valued precisely because he has stopped inflating everything else. Seeing clearly, the poem argues, is a precondition for protecting what is actually good.
The form supports this argument. The poem is a fourteen-line sonnet, the very form the speaker mocks in his jibe at the sonneteer, and that irony seems deliberate: he uses the tradition of romantic verse to dismantle romantic illusions. The lines run in a loose iambic pentameter, but the rhymes are untidy. "Child" returns as an end word in lines one and six, and "child" and "wild" are the only perfect pair in the opening, while later endings like "way," "say," "sing," and "toys" fall into a rough pattern that never quite settles into a strict Shakespearean or Petrarchan scheme. Sentences also spill across line breaks, and the sense is pushed along by dashes and colons, so the voice sounds like someone thinking his way out loud rather than reciting.
The ending is where the tone shifts most. After so much stripped-down realism, the final couplet turns to "instructive songs" and "instructive toys." The repeated adjective is almost comic in its sobriety: even the songs and toys must teach. Yet there is tenderness under the dryness. The man who has given up lullabies of pure fantasy still intends to sing, and still intends to give gifts. His honesty becomes a form of love.
What makes the poem worth reading is this refusal of easy comfort. It treats parenthood, or something very like it, not as a glow but as a sobering, clarifying weight, and it finds dignity in a plainer, truer way of looking.