Fatherhood Quote by John Ciardi

Ciardi takes the famous “prodigal son” script and freezes it at the cruelest possible frame: the waiting. In the biblical parable, the story resolves into recognition, feasting, moral order. Ciardi’s version denies the payoff. The prodigal doesn’t come home, and the father’s role isn’t to forgive; it’s to endure. That small pivot turns a tale often used to tidy up human mess into a portrait of parenting as suspended time - a life lived with the door unlatched.

The line’s power is in its quiet, domestic staging. “Keep his house open to hope” makes hope feel less like an emotion than a household chore: maintain the welcome, resist the impulse to seal the wound by shutting the door. It also suggests a kind of powerless fidelity. Parenting is framed not as guidance or authority but as a vow you can’t revoke, even when the child has revoked you.

Subtextually, Ciardi is refusing the comforting myth that love plus virtue guarantees return. The father becomes “at some time” every parent, meaning this isn’t an exceptional tragedy but a built-in hazard of raising another person with agency. As a dramatist, Ciardi knows where the tension lives: not in reconciliation, but in the long middle act where nothing happens and everything is at stake.

Context matters too. Writing in mid-century America - an era of mobility, generational rupture, and changing moral codes - the “unreturned” prodigal reads as less sinner than runaway: someone swallowed by distance, pride, addiction, war, or simply a new life. The house stays open anyway, not because hope is rational, but because closing it would be a second abandonment.