Does the poem talk of an exclusively personal experience or is it fairly universal?

Though the poem seems to talk exclusively of the personal experiences of a father, it is fairly universal in the problems that it addresses from the father’s perspective.

At the surface, the poem communicates the pain and helplessness of a father who wishes to mend the differences with his son in order to be with him. However, the theme of the poem is universal. Generation gap and lack of communication between parents and children are quite common these days. It speaks of the pain that parents go through due to being distanced from their children, both physically and emotionally.