A later version of the poem from 1845 contains a Latin epigraph from Praeparatio evangelica: "Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges,"[1] which translates as "Restrain that force, for I will tell lies if you compel me.
"[2] The poem assumes the point of view of a father who recalls taking a walk with his five-year-old son, Edward, at Lyswin farm.
[7] Despite Wordsworth's explicit identification of the boy as Basil Montagu's son, and many critics promoting that reading,[8][9] Simpson suggests that the inspiration for the figure of Edward may have come from Caroline, the poet's daughter with a French woman named Annette Vallon.
[10][11] Thompson makes use of Simpson's analogy concerning the children's age and puts forward a theory that Edward was modelled on Maria, the child of John Thelwall—another one of Wordsworth's friends.
[23] The language in "Anecdote for Fathers" is not very figurative, although some simple metaphors appear ("then did the boy his tongue unlock", "his limbs were cast in beauty's mould").
[24] The style of the poem has been characterized as repetitive, and as such conveying the ineffectiveness of the father's questions and the meaninglessness of the child's answers, which in turn renders their dialogue pointless and the communication between the two impossible.
[41] The last stanza, in which the father states that he is able to learn from his son more than he could ever teach him, may suggest that the situation described in the poem makes him realize his mistake and draw a lesson from it.
[44] Following this line of interpretation, the father may be read as not learning a lesson from his inefficient small talk; instead, he decides to stay comfortably in his predetermined set of reasonable truths and principles.
[45] In fact, him regarding Edward's answer as a lie—just as the readers are prompted to do by the subtitle and the epigraph—might be improper, as it is not a lie for the child itself; it is simply the effect of his parents' urgency in the quest for logic.
[54] Bernstein calls the object on the roof a "totem" as it mediates between the artificial and the natural, being a product of civilisation that, nonetheless, imitates an animal and is moved by the wind.
This is manifested through the figure of the father who creates a "familiar schemata (…), comparing everything either explicitly or implicitly to other experiences, past or potential".
[57] Contrary to the man's intellectual capacity, the son relies on intuitive thinking to answer his father's persistent questions.
[58] Although the parent forces Edward to apply logic and justification to his words, they are based on his inner feeling and characterized by spontaneity and lack of constraints.
[63] They both introduce child figures who are believed to have been inspired by the children Wordsworth met in his life—Basil Montagu and a girl from the Goodrich Castle.