Once Upon a Time by Gabriel Okara
Quick answer: Once Upon a Time by Gabriel Okara explained: summary, the fake smiles theme, the father and son frame, craft analysis and exam answers for this classic poem.
Some poems begin like bedtime stories on purpose. Gabriel Okara opens this one with the oldest storytelling formula in English, the phrase every child knows announces a tale of long ago, and then uses it to describe something devastating: a time when people laughed with their hearts. Sincerity itself, the title implies, has become a fairy tale. Okara, born in Nigeria's Niger Delta in 1921 and widely regarded as one of the first significant modern poets of English-speaking Africa, wrote the poem as a father speaking to his young son, and it has become a fixture of ISC and board syllabuses across India and beyond.
The situation is simple and the ache is not. A grown man looks at how adults greet one another, how he himself has learned to smile, and finds it all counterfeit. He catalogues the masks he has collected, confesses that his own laughter now frightens him in the mirror, and ends by asking his small son to teach him how to laugh again. It is a poem about lost sincerity, written in language plain enough for a child, which is exactly the point. What follows is a full walkthrough, the craft underneath it, and what you can take from it for your own writing.
What the poem says, movement by movement
The father begins with laughter. Once, he tells his son, people laughed with their hearts and their eyes; now they laugh only with their teeth while their eyes stay cold, searching the speaker's face the way one searches an empty street. The image is precise: modern laughter is a display of teeth, a bared surface, while the real attention behind it is calculating something else entirely.
Handshakes come next, and the same doubleness. There was a time when people shook hands with their hearts. Now the right hand performs warmth while the left hand, figuratively, checks the speaker's pockets. Hospitality has rotted in the same way: people say come again in voices full of welcome, and when the speaker takes them at their word, once, then twice, he finds the doors shut in his face. Each social ritual is examined and each fails the same test: the outside no longer matches the inside.
Then the confession turns inward, and this is where the poem earns its keep. The father admits he has learned to do all of it too. He has acquired a wardrobe of faces, one for home, one for the office, one for the street, one for hosting, one for cocktails, each worn with a fixed portrait smile. He has learned to say goodbye when he means good riddance and to say glad to meet you when he feels no gladness at all. The accuser is also the accused.
The ending: a father asks his son for lessons
The final movement reverses the natural order of the family. The father wants to unlearn these muting things, as he puts it, and relearn how to laugh the way he once did as a boy. But when he practises his laugh in the mirror, he sees only his teeth, bared like a snake's fangs. The simile is the poem's coldest moment: his own friendliness has become indistinguishable from a threat display.
So he asks the son to show him how to laugh, because the child still laughs the old way, with his whole face, with nothing behind it. A parent begging a child for instruction in being human is a startling inversion, and Okara plays it completely straight. There is no irony in the request. The child is the last native speaker of a language the adults have forgotten.
Themes: masks, manners and what got lost
The obvious theme is hypocrisy, the gap between social performance and genuine feeling. But Okara is doing something more specific than complaining about fake people. The poem was written in the years around Nigerian independence, and many readers hear in it a lament for the warmth of traditional community life displaced by imported urban manners: the cocktail face and the office face are the etiquette of a new, westernised professional world. The poem never names colonialism, which is part of its tact; it simply shows a man who has been trained out of his own sincerity.
The second theme is childhood as the uncorrupted state. The son is not idealised into an angel; he is simply someone who has not yet learned the tricks. That framing makes the poem an hourglass: the father can see exactly what he lost because he is looking at someone who still has it. Poems about innocence usually mourn the child growing up. This one mourns the adult, which is rarer and harder.
How it works: craft under the plain surface
The poem is a dramatic monologue in free verse, one speaker, one silent listener, no rhyme scheme, and line lengths that follow the movement of speech. The plainness is engineered. A poem accusing the world of ornamental fakery cannot afford ornamental language, so Okara keeps the diction almost childlike, letting a handful of similes carry the imagery: eyes like ice, teeth like a snake's fangs, faces changed like dresses, a smile fixed like a portrait.
Structure does the arguing. The first half catalogues the world's falseness ritual by ritual, laughter, handshakes, invitations; the middle confesses the speaker's own; the end pleads for reversal. Repetition binds it: the title phrase recurs, the verb 'learned' tolls through the confession stanzas, and 'unlearn' and 'relearn' answer it at the close. Okara also coins compound words for the masks, homeface, officeface, streetface, hostface, and the coinages themselves enact the theme: even language has started manufacturing interchangeable parts.
Why it lasts
Every generation thinks it invented insincerity, which is why every generation recognises this poem on first reading. Written decades before anyone curated a profile or posed for a grid of identical smiling photographs, it describes that condition with unnerving accuracy: a person maintaining multiple public faces and losing track of the original. Teachers keep setting it because students do not need footnotes to feel it.
It also lasts because the speaker indicts himself. Satire that only points outward flatters the reader; this poem removes that comfort in the middle stanzas, and the honesty buys the ending its emotion. When the father asks his son for help, we believe him, because he has already shown us the fangs in his own mirror.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the borrowed formula. Okara takes a phrase with centuries of associations, the fairy tale opening, and lets those associations do half his work: whatever follows it is being declared extinct. You can do the same with any ready-made phrase, a proverb, a form of greeting, a line from a school textbook, planted where its familiarity turns strange.
Steal the turn to self-accusation too. Draft your complaint about the world, then add the stanza that begins, in whatever words fit, 'and I have learned to do it also'. That single move converts satire into confession and roughly doubles a poem's power. Contest judges, including Writory's, consistently reward poems where the speaker risks something, and self-implication is the cheapest and most honest way to raise the stakes.
What poets can take from this
- Anchor every exam answer in the three-part structure: the world's falseness, the speaker's confession, the plea to the son.
- Name the form precisely: a free verse dramatic monologue addressed to the poet's son.
- Learn the four key similes, ice, fangs, dresses, portrait, and what each says about performed feeling.
- Do not reduce the poem to 'fake friends'; connect the masks to a changing, westernising society for full marks.
- Note the fairy tale title as irony: sincerity has become a story told about the past.
- Use the coined compound faces as evidence when discussing Okara's language.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to someone much younger than you, a child, a younger sibling, your own past self, confessing one social skill you wish you could unlearn. Include at least one mirror and one moment where you catch yourself mid-performance.
Questions
What is the main theme of Once Upon a Time by Gabriel Okara?
The poem mourns the loss of sincerity in adult social life. Laughter, handshakes and hospitality have become performances that hide cold calculation, and the speaker confesses he has learned the same tricks. Through the father's plea to his son, Okara holds up childhood honesty as the genuine way of being that adults have traded away.
Why does the father ask his son to teach him how to laugh?
The son still laughs with his whole heart, while the father's practised laugh shows only his teeth, which he compares to a snake's fangs in the mirror. Asking the child for lessons reverses the usual parent and child roles, and dramatises how completely the adult world has forgotten genuine feeling.
What poetic devices are used in Once Upon a Time?
The poem uses simile (eyes like ice, teeth like fangs, faces changed like dresses), irony (the fairy tale title applied to honesty), repetition of the title phrase and the verb 'learned', and invented compound words such as homeface and officeface. It is written in free verse as a dramatic monologue.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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