Poetry
for Students
National Advisory Board
Susan Allison: Head Librarian, Lewiston High
School, Lewiston, Maine. Standards Committee
Chairperson for Maine School Library (MASL)
Programs. Board member, Julia Adams Morse
Memorial Library, Greene, Maine. Advisor to
Lewiston Public Library Planning Process.
Jennifer Hood: Young Adult/Reference Librarian,
Cumberland Public Library, Cumberland, Rhode
Island. Certified teacher, Rhode Island. Member
of the New England Library Association, Rhode
Island Library Association, and the Rhode Island Educational Media Association.
Ann Kearney: Head Librarian and Media Specialist, Christopher Columbus High School, Miami,
Florida, 1982–2002. Thirty-two years as Librarian in various educational institutions ranging
from grade schools through graduate programs.
Library positions at Miami-Dade Community
College, the University of Miami’s Medical
School Library, and Carrollton School in Coconut Grove, Florida. B.A. from University of
Detroit, 1967 (magna cum laude); M.L.S., University of Missouri–Columbia, l974. Volunteer
Project Leader for a school in rural Jamaica; volunteer with Adult Literacy programs.
Laurie St. Laurent: Head of Adult and Children’s
Services, East Lansing Public Library, East
Lansing, Michigan, 1994–. M.L.S. from Western Michigan University. Chair of Michigan
Library Association’s 1998 Michigan Summer
Reading Program; Chair of the Children’s
Services Division in 2000–2001; and VicePresident of the Association in 2002–2003.
Board member of several regional early childhood literacy organizations and member of the
Library of Michigan Youth Services Advisory
Committee.
Heidi Stohs: Instructor in Language Arts, grades
10–12, Solomon High School, Solomon,
Kansas. Received B.S. from Kansas State University; M.A. from Fort Hays State University.
PDF Not Available Due to Copyright Terms
PDF Not Available Due to Copyright Terms
Table of Contents
Guest Foreword
“Just a Few Lines on a Page”
by David J. Kelly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Literary Chronology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii
Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi
Apple sauce for Eve
(by Marge Piercy) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Poem Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Historical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Death Sentences
(by Radmila Lazić) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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23
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25
26
27
28
28
34
v
T a b l e
o f
C o n t e n t s
The Forest
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
(by Susan Stewart)
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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36
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
52
If
(by Rudyard Kipling) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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54
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
65
It’s a Woman’s World
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
(by Eavan Boland)
Author Biography
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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67
67
69
70
71
71
72
87
Metamorphoses
(by Ovid (Naso, Publius Ovidius)) . . . . 88
Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Poem Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Themes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Historical Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Omen
(by Edward Hirsch) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
v i
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107
107
107
108
110
111
Critical Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
On the Threshold
. . . . . . . . . . . 127
(by Eugenio Montale)
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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127
128
129
129
130
131
132
133
142
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
(by Christopher Marlowe) . . . . . . . . . 143
Author Biography
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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144
145
147
148
149
151
152
172
Pineapples and Pomegranates
(by Paul Muldoon) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Author Biography
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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173
174
176
177
177
178
178
185
The Satyr’s Heart
(by Brigit Pegeen Kelly) . . . . . . . . . . 186
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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186
187
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191
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192
192
200
The Toni Morrison Dreams
(by Elizabeth Alexander)
. . . . . . . . . 201
Author Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
Poem Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
T a b l e
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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203
205
206
206
206
207
213
Trompe l’Oeil
(by Mary Jo Salter) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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216
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219
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220
220
229
What I Would Ask My Husband’s
Dead Father
(by Sharon Hashimoto) . . . . . . . . . . 231
Author Biography
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
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231
232
233
234
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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C o n t e n t s
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234
235
235
242
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
(by Walt Whitman) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Author Biography
Poem Text . . . . . .
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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244
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249
250
251
254
Why The Classics
. . . . . . . . . . . 255
(by Zbigniew Herbert)
Author Biography
Poem Summary . .
Themes . . . . . . . .
Style . . . . . . . . . .
Historical Context
Critical Overview .
Criticism . . . . . . .
Further Reading . .
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256
257
258
260
262
263
264
284
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Cumulative Author/Title Index . . . . . . . . . 305
Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Subject/Theme Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Cumulative Index of First Lines . . . . . . . . 325
Cumulative Index of Last Lines . . . . . . . . 331
V o l u m e
2 2
v i i
Just a Few Lines on a Page
I have often thought that poets have the easiest job in the world. A poem, after all, is just a few
lines on a page, usually not even extending margin
to margin—how long would that take to write,
about five minutes? Maybe ten at the most, if you
wanted it to rhyme or have a repeating meter. Why,
I could start in the morning and produce a book of
poetry by dinnertime. But we all know that it isn’t
that easy. Anyone can come up with enough words,
but the poet’s job is about writing the right ones.
The right words will change lives, making people
see the world somewhat differently than they saw
it just a few minutes earlier. The right words can
make a reader who relies on the dictionary for
meanings take a greater responsibility for his or her
own personal understanding. A poem that is put on
the page correctly can bear any amount of analysis, probing, defining, explaining, and interrogating, and something about it will still feel new the
next time you read it.
It would be fine with me if I could talk about
poetry without using the word “magical,” because
that word is overused these days to imply “a really
good time,” often with a certain sweetness about it,
and a lot of poetry is neither of these. But if you
stop and think about magic—whether it brings to
mind sorcery, witchcraft, or bunnies pulled from
top hats—it always seems to involve stretching reality to produce a result greater than the sum of its
parts and pulling unexpected results out of thin air.
This book provides ample cases where a few simple words conjure up whole worlds. We do not ac-
tually travel to different times and different cultures, but the poems get into our minds, they find
what little we know about the places they are talking about, and then they make that little bit blossom into a bouquet of someone else’s life. Poets
make us think we are following simple, specific
events, but then they leave ideas in our heads that
cannot be found on the printed page. Abracadabra.
Sometimes when you finish a poem it doesn’t
feel as if it has left any supernatural effect on you,
like it did not have any more to say beyond the actual words that it used. This happens to everybody,
but most often to inexperienced readers: regardless
of what is often said about young people’s infinite
capacity to be amazed, you have to understand what
usually does happen, and what could have happened instead, if you are going to be moved by
what someone has accomplished. In those cases in
which you finish a poem with a “So what?” attitude, the information provided in Poetry for Students comes in handy. Readers can feel assured that
the poems included here actually are potent magic,
not just because a few (or a hundred or ten thousand) professors of literature say they are: they’re
significant because they can withstand close inspection and still amaze the very same people who
have just finished taking them apart and seeing how
they work. Turn them inside out, and they will still
be able to come alive, again and again. Poetry for
Students gives readers of any age good practice in
feeling the ways poems relate to both the reality of
the time and place the poet lived in and the reality
i x
F o r e w o r d
of our emotions. Practice is just another word for
being a student. The information given here helps
you understand the way to read poetry; what to look
for, what to expect.
With all of this in mind, I really don’t think I
would actually like to have a poet’s job at all. There
are too many skills involved, including precision,
honesty, taste, courage, linguistics, passion, compassion, and the ability to keep all sorts of people
entertained at once. And that is just what they do
with one hand, while the other hand pulls some sort
of trick that most of us will never fully understand.
I can’t even pack all that I need for a weekend into
one suitcase, so what would be my chances of stuffing so much life into a few lines? With all that Poetry for Students tells us about each poem, I am
impressed that any poet can finish three or four poems a year. Read the inside stories of these poems,
and you won’t be able to approach any poem in the
same way you did before.
David J. Kelly
College of Lake County
x
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Introduction
Purpose of the Book
The purpose of Poetry for Students (PfS) is to
provide readers with a guide to understanding, enjoying, and studying poems by giving them easy
access to information about the work. Part of Gale’s
“For Students” Literature line, PfS is specifically
designed to meet the curricular needs of high school
and undergraduate college students and their teachers, as well as the interests of general readers and
researchers considering specific poems. While each
volume contains entries on “classic” poems frequently studied in classrooms, there are also entries
containing hard-to-find information on contemporary poems, including works by multicultural, international, and women poets.
poem. A unique feature of PfS is a specially commissioned critical essay on each poem, targeted toward the student reader.
To further aid the student in studying and enjoying each poem, information on media adaptations is provided (if available), as well as reading
suggestions for works of fiction and nonfiction on
similar themes and topics. Classroom aids include
ideas for research papers and lists of critical sources
that provide additional material on the poem.
Selection Criteria
The information covered in each entry includes
an introduction to the poem and the poem’s author;
the actual poem text (if possible); a poem summary,
to help readers unravel and understand the meaning of the poem; analysis of important themes in
the poem; and an explanation of important literary
techniques and movements as they are demonstrated in the poem.
The titles for each volume of PfS were selected
by surveying numerous sources on teaching literature and analyzing course curricula for various
school districts. Some of the sources surveyed included: literature anthologies; Reading Lists for
College-Bound Students: The Books Most Recommended by America’s Top Colleges; textbooks on
teaching the poem; a College Board survey of poems commonly studied in high schools; and a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
survey of poems commonly studied in high schools.
In addition to this material, which helps the
readers analyze the poem itself, students are also
provided with important information on the literary and historical background informing each
work. This includes a historical context essay, a
box comparing the time or place the poem was written to modern Western culture, a critical overview
essay, and excerpts from critical essays on the
Input was also solicited from our advisory
board, as well as educators from various areas. From
these discussions, it was determined that each volume should have a mix of “classic” poems (those
works commonly taught in literature classes) and
contemporary poems for which information is often hard to find. Because of the interest in expanding the canon of literature, an emphasis was also
x i
I n t r o d u c t i o n
placed on including works by international, multicultural, and women poets. Our advisory board
members—educational professionals—helped pare
down the list for each volume. If a work was not
selected for the present volume, it was often noted
as a possibility for a future volume. As always, the
editor welcomes suggestions for titles to be included
in future volumes.
How Each Entry Is Organized
Each entry, or chapter, in PfS focuses on one
poem. Each entry heading lists the full name of the
poem, the author’s name, and the date of the
poem’s publication. The following elements are
contained in each entry:
• Introduction: a brief overview of the poem
which provides information about its first appearance, its literary standing, any controversies
surrounding the work, and major conflicts or
themes within the work.
• Author Biography: this section includes basic
facts about the poet’s life, and focuses on events
and times in the author’s life that inspired the
poem in question.
• Poem Text: when permission has been granted,
the poem is reprinted, allowing for quick reference when reading the explication of the following section.
• Poem Summary: a description of the major
events in the poem. Summaries are broken down
with subheads that indicate the lines being discussed.
• Themes: a thorough overview of how the major topics, themes, and issues are addressed
within the poem. Each theme discussed appears
in a separate subhead and is easily accessed
through the boldface entries in the Subject/
Theme Index.
• Style: this section addresses important style elements of the poem, such as form, meter, and
rhyme scheme; important literary devices used,
such as imagery, foreshadowing, and symbolism; and, if applicable, genres to which the work
might have belonged, such as Gothicism or Romanticism. Literary terms are explained within
the entry, but can also be found in the Glossary.
• Historical Context: this section outlines the social, political, and cultural climate in which the
author lived and the poem was created. This section may include descriptions of related historical events, pertinent aspects of daily life in the
culture, and the artistic and literary sensibilities
x i i
of the time in which the work was written. If the
poem is a historical work, information regarding the time in which the poem is set is also included. Each section is broken down with
helpful subheads.
• Critical Overview: this section provides background on the critical reputation of the poem,
including bannings or any other public controversies surrounding the work. For older works,
this section includes a history of how the poem
was first received and how perceptions of it may
have changed over the years; for more recent
poems, direct quotes from early reviews may
also be included.
• Criticism: an essay commissioned by PfS which
specifically deals with the poem and is written
specifically for the student audience, as well as
excerpts from previously published criticism on
the work (if available).
• Sources: an alphabetical list of critical material
used in compiling the entry, with full bibliographical information.
• Further Reading: an alphabetical list of other
critical sources which may prove useful for the
student. It includes full bibliographical information and a brief annotation.
In addition, each entry contains the following highlighted sections, set apart from the main text as
sidebars:
• Media Adaptations: if available, a list of audio
recordings as well as any film or television adaptations of the poem, including source information.
• Topics for Further Study: a list of potential
study questions or research topics dealing with
the poem. This section includes questions related to other disciplines the student may be
studying, such as American history, world history, science, math, government, business, geography, economics, psychology, etc.
• Compare and Contrast: an “at-a-glance” comparison of the cultural and historical differences
between the author’s time and culture and late
twentieth century or early twenty-first century
Western culture. This box includes pertinent
parallels between the major scientific, political,
and cultural movements of the time or place the
poem was written, the time or place the poem
was set (if a historical work), and modern Western culture. Works written after 1990 may not
have this box.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
I n t r o d u c t i o n
• What Do I Read Next?: a list of works that
might complement the featured poem or serve
as a contrast to it. This includes works by the
same author and others, works of fiction and
nonfiction, and works from various genres, cultures, and eras.
When citing text from PfS that is not attributed
to a particular author (i.e., the Themes, Style, Historical Context sections, etc.), the following format
should be used in the bibliography section:
Other Features
When quoting the specially commissioned essay from PfS (usually the first piece under the “Criticism” subhead), the following format should be
used:
PfS includes “Just a Few Lines on a Page,” a
foreword by David J. Kelly, an adjunct professor
of English, College of Lake County, Illinois. This
essay provides a straightforward, unpretentious explanation of why poetry should be marveled at and
how Poetry for Students can help teachers show
students how to enrich their own reading experiences.
A Cumulative Author/Title Index lists the authors and titles covered in each volume of the PfS
series.
A Cumulative Nationality/Ethnicity Index
breaks down the authors and titles covered in each
volume of the PfS series by nationality and ethnicity.
A Subject/Theme Index, specific to each volume, provides easy reference for users who may be
studying a particular subject or theme rather than
a single work. Significant subjects from events to
broad themes are included, and the entries pointing to the specific theme discussions in each entry
are indicated in boldface.
A Cumulative Index of First Lines (beginning
in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who
may be familiar with the first line of a poem but
may not remember the actual title.
A Cumulative Index of Last Lines (beginning
in Vol. 10) provides easy reference for users who
may be familiar with the last line of a poem but
may not remember the actual title.
Each entry may include illustrations, including
a photo of the author and other graphics related to
the poem.
Citing Poetry for Students
When writing papers, students who quote directly from any volume of Poetry for Students may
use the following general forms. These examples
are based on MLA style; teachers may request that
students adhere to a different style, so the following examples may be adapted as needed.
V o l u m e
2 2
“Angle of Geese.” Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie
Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale,
1998. 5–7.
Velie, Alan. Critical Essay on “Angle of Geese.”
Poetry for Students. Eds. Marie Napierkowski and
Mary Ruby. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 7–10.
When quoting a journal or newspaper essay
that is reprinted in a volume of PfS, the following
form may be used:
Luscher, Robert M. “An Emersonian Context of
Dickinson’s ‘The Soul Selects Her Own Society.’”
ESQ: A Journal of American Renaissance Vol. 30,
No. 2 (Second Quarter, 1984), 111–16; excerpted and
reprinted in Poetry for Students, Vol. 1, eds. Marie
Napierkowski and Mary Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1998),
pp. 266–69.
When quoting material reprinted from a book
that appears in a volume of PfS, the following form
may be used:
Mootry, Maria K. “‘Tell It Slant’: Disguise and Discovery as Revisionist Poetic Discourse in ‘The Bean
Eaters,’” in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her
Poetry and Fiction. Edited by Maria K. Mootry and
Gary Smith. University of Illinois Press, 1987.
177–80, 191; excerpted and reprinted in Poetry for
Students, Vol. 2, eds. Marie Napierkowski and Mary
Ruby (Detroit: Gale, 1998), pp. 22–24.
We Welcome Your Suggestions
The editor of Poetry for Students welcomes
your comments and ideas. Readers who wish to
suggest poems to appear in future volumes, or who
have other suggestions, are cordially invited to contact the editor. You may contact the editor via
E-mail at: [email protected]. Or
write to the editor at:
Editor, Poetry for Students
Thomson Gale
27500 Drake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48331–3535
x i i i
Literary Chronology
43BC: Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) is born on
March 20 in Sulmo, Italy.
8AD: Ovid’s Metamorphoses is published.
17AD: Ovid dies in exile in Tomi on the Black Sea.
1564: Christopher Marlowe is born on February 6
just a few months before Shakespeare is born.
1593: Christopher Marlowe dies in a brawl, supposedly over an unpaid dinner bill, on May 30
in Deptford, England. Marlowe’s death, from a
stab wound to his forehead, remains controversial, since some scholars argue that his death was
not really the result of a dispute but was more
likely an assassination.
1599: Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is published posthumously.
1819: Walt Whitman is born on Long Island, New
York.
1865: Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer” is published.
1865: Rudyard Kipling is born on December 30
in Bombay, India.
1892: Walt Whitman dies of tuberculosis.
1896: Eugenio Montale is born on October 12 in
Genoa, Italy.
1907: Rudyard Kipling receives the Nobel Prize
in Literature “in consideration of the power of
observation, originality of imagination, virility
of ideas and remarkable talent for narration
which characterize the creations of this worldfamous author.”
1910: Rudyard Kipling’s “If” is published.
1924: Zbigniew Herbert is born on October 29 in
Lwów (or Lvov), a city that is located in Eastern Poland and that later becomes a part of the
Ukraine.
1925: Eugenio Montale’s “On the Threshold” is
published.
1936: Rudyard Kipling dies on January 18 in London, following an intestinal hemorrhage.
1936: Marge Piercy is born on March 31 in Detroit, Michigan.
1944: Eavan Boland is born on September 24 in
Dublin, Ireland.
1949: Radmila Lazić is born in the central Serbian
city of Krusevac, which is on the Morava tributary of the Danube River, at a time when it is
part of Yugoslavia.
1950: Edward Hirsch is born on January 20 in
Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.
1951: Paul Muldoon is born on June 20 in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland.
1951: Brigit Pegeen Kelly is born in Palo Alto,
California.
1952: Susan Stewart is born on March 15 in York,
Pennsylvania.
1953: Sharon Hashimoto is born on October 23 in
Seattle, Washington.
1954: Mary Jo Salter is born on August 15 in
Grand Rapids, Michigan.
x v
L i t e r a r y
C h r o n o l o g y
1962: Elizabeth Alexander is born on May 30 in
New York City and grows up in Washington, D.C.
1968: Zbigniew Herbert’s “Why The Classics” is
published.
1975: Eugenio Montale receives the Nobel Prize
in Literature for “for his distinctive poetry which,
with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life
with no illusions.”
1981: Eugenio Montale dies of heart failure in Milan on September 12.
1982: Eavan Boland’s “It’s a Woman’s World” is
published.
1985: Edward Hirsch’s “Omen” is published.
1995: Susan Stewart’s “The Forest” is published.
1998: Marge Piercy’s “Apple sauce for Eve” is
published.
x v i
1998: Zbigniew Herbert dies on July 28 in Warsaw, Poland.
2001: Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Toni Morrison
Dreams” is published.
2002: Paul Muldoon’s “Pineapples and Pomegranates” is published.
2003: Radmila Lazić’s “Death Sentences” is published.
2003: Mary Jo Salter’s “Trompe l’Oeil” is published.
2003: Sharon Hashimoto’s “What I Would Ask
My Husband’s Dead Father” is published.
2003: Paul Muldoon receives the Pulitzer Prize for
Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel.
2004: Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “The Satyr’s Heart”
is published.
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
Acknowledgments
The editors wish to thank the copyright holders of the excerpted criticism included in this volume and the permissions managers of many book
and magazine publishing companies for assisting
us in securing reproduction rights. We are also
grateful to the staffs of the Detroit Public Library,
the Library of Congress, the University of Detroit
Mercy Library, Wayne State University Purdy/
Kresge Library Complex, and the University of
Michigan Libraries for making their resources
available to us. Following is a list of the copyright
holders who have granted us permission to reproduce material in this volume of Poetry for Students
(PfS). Every effort has been made to trace copyright, but if omissions have been made, please let
us know.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS,
VOLUME 22, WERE REPRODUCED FROM
THE FOLLOWING PERIODICALS:
The American Book Review, v. 18, April,
1996. Reproduced by permission.—Antioch Review, v. 62, winter, 2004; v. 62, winter, 2004; v. 62,
summer, 2004. All reproduced by permission of the
editors.—Book Magazine, March–April, 1999 for
an interview with Mary Jo Salter by Stephen R.
Whited. Copyright © 1999 Mary Jo Salter and
Stephen R. Whited. Reproduced by permission of
the authors.—Booklist, v. 100, November 1, 2003.
Copyright © 2003 by the American Library Association. Reproduced by permission.—Classical
and Modern Literature, v. 6, winter, 1986. Copy-
right © 1986 CML Inc.. Reproduced by permission.—College English, v. 27, March, 1966. Copyright © 1966 by the National Council of Teachers
of English. Reproduced by permission.—Cross
Currents, v. 3, 1984. Copyright © 1984 Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Reproduced by
permission.—Huntington Library Quarterly, v. 34,
1970 for “‘The Passionate Sheepheard’ and
‘The Nimphs Reply’: A Study in Transmission,”
by Susanne Woods. Copyright © 1970 by The
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.
All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and the author.—International
Examiner, February 3, 2004. Copyright © 2004 International Examiner. Reproduced by permission.—
Jewish News Weekly, November 3, 2000.
Copyright © 2000 San Francisco Jewish Community Publications, Inc., and the Jewish News
Weekly of Northern California. All rights reserved.
Reproduced by permission.—Kenyon Review,
v. 22, 2000 in “The Question of Affirmation and
Despair,” by Edward Hirsch and Tod Marshall.
Copyright © 2000 by Kenyon College. All rights
reserved. Reproduced by permission of the authors.—Library Journal, January, 2002; August,
2002; v. 128, December 15, 2003. All reprinted by
permission of the publisher.—Polish Review, v. 30,
1985. Copyright © 1985 The Polish Institute of
Arts and Sciences. Reproduced by permission.—
Publishers Weekly, June 26, 1995. Copyright ©
1995 by Reed Publishing USA. Reproduced from
x v i i
A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
Publishers Weekly, published by the Bowker Magazine Group of Cahners Publishing Co., a division
of Reed Publishing USA, by permission.—Tulsa
Studies in Women’s Literature, v. 20, fall, 2001
for “Beautiful Labors: Lyricism and Feminist Revisions in Eavan Boland’s Poetry,” by Christy
Burns. Copyright © 2001 The University of Tulsa.
All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of
the publisher and the author.—The Yale Review,
v. 90, July, 2002. Copyright © 2002 Basil Blackwell Ltd. Reproduced by permission of Blackwell
Publishers.
COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS IN PfS,
VOLUME 22, WERE REPRODUCED FROM
THE FOLLOWING BOOKS:
Alexander, Elizabeth. From Antebellum
Dream Book. Graywolf Press, 2001. Copyright ©
2001 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted with the
permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.—Gale, “Brigit Pegeen Kelly,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission
of The Gale Group.—Gale, “Eavan Boland,”
Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by
permission of The Gale Group.—Gale, “Edward
Hirsch,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Gale,
“Eugenio Montale,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission of The Gale
Group.—Gale, “Marge Piercy,” Contemporary
Authors Online, Reproduced by permission of The
Gale Group.—Gale, “Mary Jo Salter,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission
of The Gale Group.—Gale, “Paul Muldoon,”
Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by
permission of The Gale Group.—Gale, “Susan A.
Stewart,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission of The Gale Group.—Gale,
“Zbigniew Herbert,” Contemporary Authors Online. Reproduced by permission of The Gale
Group.—Hester, M. Thomas. From “‘Like a Spyed
Spie’: Donne’s Baiting of Marlowe,” in Literary
Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance
England. Edited by Claude J. Summers and
Ted-Larry Pebworth. University of Missouri Press,
2000. Copyright © 2000 by the Curators of the
University of Missouri. Reproduced by permission
of the University of Missouri Press.—Hirsch, Edward. From Wild Gratitude. Alfred A. Knopf,
1996. Copyright © 1985 by Edward Hirsch. Used
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of
Random House, Inc.—Kelly, Brigit Pegeen. From
The Orchard. BOA Editions, 2004. Copyright ©
2004 by Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Reprinted with the
x v i i i
permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.BOA
Editions.org.—Lazić, Radmila. From A Wake for
the Living. Graywolf Press, 2003. English translation from the Serbian copyright 2003 by Charles
Simic. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf
Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.—Montale, Eugenio.
From “On the Threshold,” in Collected Poems:
1920–1954. Translated and edited by Jonathan
Galassi. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Translation copyright © 1998 by Jonathan Galassi.
Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, LLC, in the UK by Carcanet Press Limited.—Salter, Mary Jo. From Open Shutters:
Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Copyright © 2003
by Mary Jo Salter. Used by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.—
Stewart, Susan A. From The Forest. The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by
Susan A. Stewart. All rights reserved. Reproduced
by permission of the author.—West, Rebecca J.
From Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge. Harvard University Press, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by
the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
PHOTOGRAPHS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
APPEARING IN PfS, VOLUME 22, WERE
RECEIVED FROM THE FOLLOWING
SOURCES:
Alexander, Elizabeth, photograph by Firce
Ghebreyesus. Courtesy of Graywolf Press.—Boland,
Eavan, photograph by Kevin Casey. Reproduced
by permission of Kevin Casey.—Frescos showing
trompe l’oeil by Giovanni Battista Crosato, photograph. The Art Archive/Dagli Orti. Reproduced by
permission.—Herbert, Zbigniew, photograph. ©
Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Kelly,
Brigit Pegeen, photography by Mack Madonick.
Boa Editions, Ltd.—Kipling, Rudyard, circa
1910–1920, photograph. © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—
Lazić, Radmila, photograph by Nenad Milosevic.
Courtesy of Graywolf Press.—Marlowe, Christopher, engraving circa 1585, photograph. Hulton
Archive/Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Montale, Eugenio, circa 1975, photograph.
Keystone/Getty Images. Reproduced by permission.—Muldoon, Paul, photograph. © Jerry Bauer.
Reproduced by permission.—Ophelia by John
William Waterhouse, photograph. © Christie’s
Images/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Ovid,
drawing. Source unknown.—Piercy, Marge, photograph. © Jerry Bauer. Reproduced by permission.—Satyr, ancient European statue, photograph.
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© Araldo de Luca/Corbis. Reproduced by permission.—Seagulls fly over Puget Sound, photograph.
Richard Olsenius/Getty Images. Reproduced by
permission.—Tree in lowland rainforest, photograph. © Kevin Schafer/Corbis. Reproduced by
permission.—Whitman, Walt, photograph. The Library of Congress.
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Contributors
Bryan Aubrey: Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English
and has published many articles on twentiethcentury poetry. Entries on The Forest, On the
Threshold, and What I Would Ask My Husband’s
Dead Father. Original essays on The Forest, On
the Threshold, and What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father.
Adrian Blevins: Blevins’s first book of poems,
The Brass Girl Brouhaha, was published by
Ausable Press in 2003 and won the Kate Tufts
Discovery Award. She is Assistant Professor of
English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Original essay on The Saytr’s Heart.
Laura Carter: Carter is currently working as a
freelance writer. Original essay on Death Sentences.
Patrick Donnelly: Donnelly is a poet, editor,
and teacher. His first book of poems is The
Charge. Original essays on Omen and The
Satyr’s Heart.
Joyce Hart: Hart is a published writer who focuses on literary themes. Original essay on
Trompe l’Oeil.
Pamela Steed Hill: Hill is the author of a poetry
collection, has published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. Entry on Apple sauce for Eve.
Original essays on Apple sauce for Eve and The
Forest.
Catherine Holm: Holm is a short story and novel
author, and a freelance writer. Original essays
on The Toni Morrison Dreams and What I
Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father.
Anna Maria Hong: Hong earned her master of fine
arts in creative writing at the University of Texas
Michener Center for Writers and is a writer-inresidence at Richard Hugo House. Entries on It’s
a Woman’s World and Pineapples and Pomegranates. Original essays on It’s a Woman’s
World and Pineapples and Pomegranates.
David Kelly: Kelly is an instructor of creative
writing and literature. Entry on Trompe l’Oeil.
Original essay on Trompe l’Oeil.
Melodie Monahan: Melodie Monahan has a Ph.D.
in English. She teaches at Wayne State University
and also operates an editing service, The Inkwell
Works. Entry on The Toni Morrison Dreams.
Original essay on The Toni Morrison Dreams.
Sheri E. Metzger: Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama at the University of New Mexico,
where she is a lecturer in the University Honors
Program. Entries on The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love and Why the Classics. Original essays on The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
and Why the Classics.
Wendy Perkins: Perkins is a professor of American literature and film. Original essays on Apple sauce for Eve and If.
Tamara Fernando: Tamara Fernando is a writer
and editor based in Seattle, Washington. Entry
on If. Original essay on If.
x x i
C o n t r i b u t o r s
Scott Trudell: Trudell is an independent scholar
with a bachelor’s degree in English literature.
Entries on Death Sentences, Omen, The Satyr’s
Heart, and When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. Original essays on Death Sentences,
x x i i
Omen, The Satyr’s Heart, and When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer.
Mark White: White is the publisher of the Seattlebased press Scala House Press. Entry on Metamorphoses. Original essay on Metamorphoses.
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Apple sauce
for Eve
“Apple sauce for Eve” appears in Marge Piercy’s
The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish
Theme, published in 1998. As the title of the collection suggests, one source of inspiration for this
work was the poet’s connection to Judaism, but it
is hardly a typical religious poem. Perhaps an even
greater motivating factor was her unwavering belief in feminist causes and a determination to
reevaluate the traditional concepts found in biblical stories.
Marge Piercy
1998
Piercy applauds Eve, the biblical first
woman, for her quest for knowledge and her disregard of any divine retribution for eating the infamous apple. To enhance the effort to promote
logic, rationale, and intellectual pursuit over superstition and fear, Piercy uses scientific metaphors
to describe Eve’s desire and her decision to commit the “original sin.” Eve and Satan are likened
to “lab partners,” and Eve is deemed “the first
scientist.”
In spite of any apparent sacrilege a synopsis
of this poem implies, readers should not condemn
and cast it off as such. In fact, its inclusion
in a book dedicated to exploring Jewish belief,
doctrine, and history points to just the opposite.
The Art of Blessing the Day celebrates the poet’s
Jewish heritage—sometimes with pious reflection,
sometimes with humor, and sometimes with
candid attacks on established and questionable
protocol.
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Marge Piercy
Author Biography
Marge Piercy was born on March 31, 1936, in Detroit, Michigan. She grew up in a racially diverse
working-class neighborhood. Her father was in and
out of work for several years, and the two never
developed a strong father-daughter bond. Her
mother was a high-strung but imaginative woman
who Piercy credits with inspiring her to be a writer.
Piercy’s mother told her daughter odd tales and
folklore and encouraged her to read voraciously.
Although their relationship became strained as
Piercy grew into young adulthood, she and her
mother reunited later in life and were close until
the older woman’s death in 1985.
One of the most influential people in Piercy’s
life was her maternal grandmother, who was born
in Lithuania, the daughter of a rabbi. Grandmother
Hannah preserved a strict Jewish heritage regardless of some of her descendents’ marriages to
Christians. Piercy was raised Jewish by her mother
and grandmother, even though her father was from
a Presbyterian family. The combination of strong
women in her life, working-class values, and a rich
Jewish tradition served to influence not only the
person Piercy would become but also the writer she
would develop into.
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Piercy was the first person in her family to go
to college. In 1957, she earned a bachelor’s degree
from the University of Michigan; in 1958, she received a master’s degree from Northwestern University. In school, she was a bit of an aberration with
her unconventional attitude about gender roles and
her radical views toward authority and government
policies. As a result, she had trouble publishing her
work—mostly fiction—throughout the 1950s.
In 1958, Piercy married her first husband, a Jewish French scientist, but she divorced him a year later
because he did not accept her feminism nor take her
writing seriously. In 1962, she married a computer
scientist, and this marriage lasted fourteen years,
ending in divorce in 1980. In 1982, she married for
the third time, to Ira Wood, a writer and publisher.
During the 1960s, Piercy became active in the
antiwar movement, the Civil Rights movement, and
the women’s movement. Her fiction and poetry began to receive recognition. Piercy has published prolifically, beginning with her first collection of poetry,
Breaking Camp (1968) and her first novel, Going
Down Fast (1969). Piercy’s publications include
over a dozen novels and fifteen volumes of poetry.
Piercy is considered one of the strongest, most
profound voices for feminist causes. While her
work has been labeled controversial, radical, and
opinionated, it is also considered vital and honest.
In 2000, she was awarded the Paterson Poetry Prize
for The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1999), the collection in which “Apple
sauce for Eve” appears.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–3
An analysis of “Apple sauce for Eve” should
actually begin with the title. The accepted spelling
of “applesauce” is as one word, so there must be a
reason that Piercy chose to separate it into two. The
subject and themes of the poem suggest that the
word “apple” needs to stand alone for its significant allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve.
The word “sauce” becomes significant for its indication that the Eve in this poem is doing something
more with a piece of fruit than the Eve of religious
lore was given credit for.
In the first line, “Those old daddies” refers to
the writers of the first books of the Old Testament
and of other religious doctrine that relates the
story of humankind’s original sin, perpetrated by a
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woman. Note that the word “daddies” is chosen instead of “fathers,” perhaps because it connotes a
slightly wry, less respectful attitude on the part of
the speaker, an attitude she maintains throughout
the poem. The daddies cursed not only Eve but “us
in you,” meaning all women in general. In lines 2
and 3, the reason for Eve’s damnation is revealed:
“curiosity,” or the “sin” of “wanting knowledge.”
Lines 4–5
These lines describe some of the ways in which
Eve approaches her quest to learn, beginning with
the last few words in line 3: “To try, to taste, / to
take into the body, into the brain.” There is a correlation between the body and the mind, because
both are necessary for examining new knowledge
and not just in passive ways. Instead, Eve will “turn
each thing, each sign, each factoid” in various directions to see how it changes. In other words,
Eve’s approach is scientific; she gains her knowledge through objective experimentation.
Lines 6–9
The final lines of the first stanza use scientific
imagery to show the seriousness and insatiable
quality of Eve’s longing for knowledge. The notion that “white / fractures into colors” refers to the
fact that white reflects nearly all the rays of sunlight and is actually made up of all the colors of
the rainbow. As a result, the “image breaks / into
crystal fragments that pierce the nerves / while the
brain casts the chips into patterns.” These last two
descriptions suggest that science may have a stinging, yet stimulating, effect on the physical being,
but the informed mind can take the fragments and
chips and crystals and shape them into definable
patterns. This statement is a clear assertion of the
human—and particularly the woman’s—will to use
intellect over physicality to discover new truths.
Lines 10–14
These lines allude to the nursery rhymes “Little Jack Horner” and “Little Boy Blue.” Little Boy
Blue is summoned to “come blow your horn” in
order to herd his farm animals, but he neglects his
duties for a nap under a haystack. In Piercy’s poem,
it is “Each experiment” that “sticks a finger deep
in the pie” and that “blows a horn in the ear / of
belief.” It is science that “lets the nasty and difficult brats”—referring to the naughty boys in the
nursery rhymes—loose on a complacent and motionless world. Here, though, the “brats” are “real
questions,” and the world is likened to a “desiccated parlor of stasis.”
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These lines are arguably some of the most
poignant in the poem, and it is important to understand what they are saying. Eve’s decision to gain
knowledge by experimenting on her own, as opposed to just absorbing what she has been told and
accepting her role as a docile, submissive female,
shakes up the male-dominated status quo. She knows
that having the guts to speak up and ask “real questions” is shocking to those who adhere to tradition
and established customs of behavior along gender
lines. But, she does not care. The “desiccated” (dried
out, lifeless) world, she decides, needs a swift kick.
Lines 15–16
Here, the speaker continues defending the need
for testing, trying, and experimenting with current
knowledge because the things “we all know to be
true, constant” right now may be incomplete, if not
altogether false. She uses an effective metaphor to
make the point, as one can easily picture how
quickly frost on a window melts when a jet of warm
steam hits it. Current beliefs will also melt away
when science provides new knowledge.
Lines 17–19
The final lines of the second stanza pose a rhetorical question regarding what may have happened
if the quest for knowledge had been encouraged
and celebrated in ancient times instead of being
squelched, at least in the case of curious women. The
reference to “dead languages” means those languages
no longer in popular use, such as ancient Egyptian,
Latin, or biblical Hebrew. The phrase “But what happens if I” suggests an attempt to try something different or to experiment with something to see what
results. Following this phrase with “Whoops!” is
whimsical, but it also implies a mishap or a less than
desirable result. The suggestion that these words are
translations of the “last words” of dead languages insinuates “too little, too late” on the part of old customs making way for new possibilities.
Lines 20–21
In line 20, the biblical first man is diminished
to the status of a simple-minded, happy puppy.
While Eve and Satan “shimmy up the tree” of
knowledge to tempt fate and learn something,
Adam stays on the ground, “wagging his tail” like
a “good dog.”
Lines 22–23
These lines describe Eve and Satan as “lab partners” whose pursuit of the tree’s forbidden apple appears as a “dance of will and hunger.” The speaker
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points out that their desire is not sexual but a yearning that is “of the brain.” The contrast between Adam
and Eve is obviously exaggerated in the first lines
of the third stanza—he the doltish, acquiescent pet,
and she the daring, unstoppable champion of learning. The speaker makes no apology for such labeling, perhaps because she feels the tables have been
too long turned in the other direction.
Lines 24–25
The speaker continues her assault of men, accusing men of “always think[ing] women are wanting sex.” She abruptly throws in allusions to male
genitals, “cock, snake,” to show her disgust with
such shallow thinking and possibly to tout her readiness to use words long considered impolite and
inappropriate for females. She chastises men for believing a woman can be satisfied with romance and
passion “when it is the world she’s after.” Eve cannot accept that the tree of knowledge is off limits,
so she willingly goes after that knowledge.
Lines 26–29
In these four lines, Piercy turns the poem toward a secular, or worldly, philosophical viewpoint.
In his classic Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the
Sciences (1637), mathematician and philosopher
René Descartes states, “I think; therefore, I am.” This
famous line summed up his belief that he had proven
his own existence through mathematical and scientific reasoning as opposed to through theological or
traditional philosophical thought. The speaker in
“Apple sauce for Eve” refers either to Descartes or
to Eve herself as the “first conceived kid / of the
ego,” which may seem derogatory but which reflects
her concept of defining the self by use of the mind
more than the heart or soul. Taking Descartes’s theory a few steps further, the speaker says, “I / kick
the tree” (meaning the tree of knowledge). The
speaker then asks the age-old philosophical question,
“who am I,” followed by “why am I.” Note that the
latter three words play a dual role. The question
“Why am I?” can stand on its own to suggest an individual pondering the reason for his or her existence, but the question actually continues into line
29: “why am I, / going, going to die, die, die.” In
essence, Eve wants to know the answer to the larger
question, not of why she exists but of why she is going to be condemned for wanting knowledge.
stanzas. The familiar phrase “necessity is the mother
of invention” (meaning when a human need arises
for something, somebody will create a solution for
it) takes on new power when it is Eve who is “indeed the mother of invention.” She is also credited
as “the first scientist,” a bestowal that supersedes
even being the first woman. These descriptions herald Eve not for her meek obedience to a master or
acceptance of her position in the Garden of Eden
but for her higher, more logical aspirations.
Lines 32–34
The name “Eve” is said to be derivative of the
Hebrew chavah, to breathe, or chayah, to live. The
speaker states bluntly, “Your name means / life.” She
then refers back to images from the first stanza in describing Eve’s determination to learn and to see the
world from an intellectual, logical viewpoint. Experimentation requires “tasting” and “testing” and often
“swimming against / the current” instead of going
along with the flow of one’s own time and place.
Knowledge, for Eve, is as necessary and nutritious as
food and water—all the things one needs to stay alive.
Lines 35–36
The “We” in these lines could refer to all of humankind, male and female, but more likely it specifies women. Eve’s “bright hunger” and her “first
experiment” gave birth to succeeding generations of
women who followed in her path of defiance, determination, and unyielding quest for knowledge.
Lines 37–38
The metaphor that ends this poem is perhaps
the most jubilant image in the entire poem. The
speaker concedes that the forbidden apple may
have contained the “worm” of “death,” a worm that
Eve set loose on humankind, but the apple also contained seeds. Seeds connote new beginnings, new
life, and growth. They are the beginnings of “freedom” for women and the eventual “flowering of
choice,” a chance for women to make their own decisions and pursue whatever goals they desire.
These lines ultimately champion the feminist voice,
and they credit Eve with having paved the way for
all her descendants.
Themes
Midrash
The final stanza of this poem is more upbeat,
hopeful, and celebratory than the previous three
In Hebrew, the word darash means to seek out
or to look further, and it provides the root for the
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word midrash, which is the premise for Piercy’s
writing “Apple sauce for Eve.” Midrash is commonly a creative attempt to answer questions or fill
in the blanks left vacant by traditional, stark biblical text that goes only so far in explaining a historical event. Originally, midrash referred to a
specific body of work written before and during the
Middle Ages by rabbis who made commentaries on
the five books of the Torah. Today, midrash means
any imaginative work—such as stories, poems, artwork, or even dance—that tries to round out or give
substance to vague or missing explanations in biblical text.
Examples of historical accounts that may elicit
midrash are Abraham’s journey with his son Isaac
up Mount Moriah to where the boy is to be sacrificed, and the story of Lot who offers his daughters as appeasement to an angry group of men
surrounding their home. Someone interested in
these events for the sake of midrash may create a
work that attempts to address critical issues that are
not explored within the histories: Where was
Isaac’s mother when his father took Isaac to be
killed? How may she have felt about this act? What
did Lot’s daughters really think about their father’s
offering them up to a mob? Midrash is often subversive, daring to question the highest authority and
to suggest controversial answers, as Piercy’s poem
demonstrates.
In this work, the question is perhaps more
rhetorical than precise: What if Eve’s surrender to
temptation was viewed positively instead of negatively? In the first two lines, the speaker acknowledges the commonly held belief about the Bible’s
first woman, that she was a sinner who deserved to
be “cursed” for centuries to come by the “old daddies.” The remainder of the poem examines Eve’s
defiant act in a different light: she is praised for her
“curiosity” and cheered for “wanting knowledge.”
She rises above the presumed desire for physical
pleasure to show that “it is the world she’s after,”
not sex with a man. The speaker calls attention to
Eve’s name itself; her name “means / life.” The
irony is that the original writers of Eve’s story concluded that she introduced death and condemnation
to humanity.
The point of Piercy’s midrash on the story of
Adam and Eve is not to simply ruffle feathers
among the Jewish status quo but to stimulate discussion on established doctrine and to encourage a
rethinking of the story’s message. Why condemn
Eve to an eternity of blame and disgrace when all
she wanted was to be smart? How would the
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Research the traditional place of women in Judaism and in one other organized religion. How
does the place of women in the two religions
compare and contrast? Would the sentiments
in “Apple sauce for Eve” be relevant if looked
at in the context of the other religion you
researched?
• Some readers may consider “Apple sauce for
Eve” an “accusatory” feminist poem, and others
may find it a humorous feminist poem. What elements make you think its point is simply to accuse men of sexism, and what elements suggest
humor or fun?
• How would this poem be weaker or stronger if
it used religious imagery throughout instead of
scientific imagery? What is the advantage or disadvantage of relying on metaphors that come
from a field so different from the main subject?
• What does Descartes’s famous line, “I think;
therefore, I am,” have to do with a feminist poem?
Research the life of Descartes, and write an essay on what he meant by his comment and how
it is or is not relevant to “Apple sauce for Eve.”
history of women’s roles in the world be different
if Eve had been called a heroine instead of a heretic?
Questions such as these are at the heart of contemporary midrash, particularly feminist midrash,
and feminism is clearly another important theme in
this poem.
Celebrating Feminism “Scientifically”
Readers need not be familiar with Piercy’s devotion to feminist causes to recognize “Apple sauce
for Eve” as a feminist poem. From the mocking
opening lines to the jubilant finish, this work speaks
to the strength, willingness, intelligence, and ultimate victory of women in a world hostile to their
goals. As such, it is not particularly rare or shocking, since the women’s movement established itself as a vibrant social and political force more than
three decades ago and has produced countless
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feminist writers since. What makes this poem memorable is the methodical and consistent use of science metaphors (metaphors are figures of speech
that express ideas through comparison to other
things, implying a likeness between them) to relay
the theme. In this case, Eve’s daring to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge is compared to a
scientist’s quest for exploration and discovery.
The metaphor is introduced subtly in the first
stanza, where Eve is described as a woman who
wants “To try, to taste, / to take into the body, into
the brain,” implying her desire for something different, something new. The science imagery strengthens in the following lines; Eve does not simply want
to be a passive recipient of whatever her body and
brain take in, but to “turn each thing . . . round and
round” and to observe “white / fractur[ing] into colors” while her “brain casts the chips into patterns.”
In essence, she prefers a scientific approach.
The metaphor defines Eve’s desire for logical,
rational thinking. Readers need only note the language to see it in action: “Each experiment,” “real
questions,” “lab partners,” “mother of invention,”
“first scientist,” “finite, dynamic,” “testing,” “products of that first experiment.” These descriptors
characterize Eve’s quest to gain knowledge by relying on intellect instead of emotion. But why is
this metaphor significant to a feminist cause? Because women were not traditionally viewed as being scientific. Piercy’s use of science metaphors
flies in the face of what centuries of strict gender
roles have taught. Science is bold and dares to question established thought. Science is frequently at
odds with religion. Science is likely the last thing
that the biblical Eve would have had in mind when
she took her first bite of the apple. For all these
reasons, science is an appropriate metaphor with
which to celebrate feminism. Comparing Eve to a
scientist affords her a place in the world of inquiry,
innovation, and discovery, a place where only men
traditionally have been allowed.
Style
Contemporary Free Verse
First established by noted French poets during
the late nineteenth century, free verse has been a
popular form of poetry for over a hundred years.
Rimbaud, Laforgue, Viele-Griffin, and other French
poets began a literary revolt against the strict rules
of their culture’s verse, which dictated specific
patterns of rhyme and meter. Free verse has no
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“rules” per se, although many poets who use it may
create their own patterns within poems, usually
in regard to controlled rhythm as opposed to rhyme
or meter.
Contemporary free verse is a label that addresses content more than style. By the midtwentieth century, poets, fiction writers, and other
artists started expressing themselves through language and subject matter previously considered
taboo—most notably, references to sexual activity,
violence, and personal emotions, as well as the use
of slang words to describe them. In sum, free verse
is more liberal than traditional verse forms, and
contemporary free verse is yet more liberal than the
free verse of old.
In “Apple sauce for Eve,” Piercy does not restrict her lines with any guided rhythm. Instead, she
lets the text flow as continuous units of thought,
just as sentences in a prose piece do. Like most free
verse poems, this one could be put into paragraph
form and read just as well.
Like many contemporary writers, Piercy is free
with her use of graphic language, undisguised subject matter, and vivid metaphors—or, figures of
speech that express ideas by comparing an object
or image to a different object or image. For example, she calls Eve and the snake “lab partners” to
suggest their shared goals, as well as to reinforce
the science imagery in the poem. Piercy also uses
the word “snake” as a reference to male genitalia,
a metaphor demonstrating that she does not shy
away from controversial statements nor candid descriptions, and, most likely, feels that the poem is
all the more effective for it.
Historical Context
During the latter part of the twentieth century, Jewish women in America confronted the same challenges that many women, regardless of religion,
confronted: how to find harmony between the desire for personal growth, freedom, and, for many, a
career and the more “traditional” expectations of being a wife, mother, and homemaker. This issue has
presented a conundrum for women in great numbers at least since the beginnings of the women’s
movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But,
it has been especially problematic for those whose
religions and cultural histories dictate traditional
gender roles. While some age-old restrictions began
to ease for Jewish women during this time—such
as having greater opportunities to work outside the
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home and having a stronger voice in religious
services—many were still expected to put family
duties ahead of any personal aspirations and to accept the fundamental patriarchal nature of Judaism.
The main rift over the issue of gender roles in
Judaism is between the Orthodox and Reform factions of the faith. According to Jewish orthodoxy,
the original Holy Scriptures prescribed the roles of
men and women, and, therefore, to stray from their
instructions would be the same as rejecting them.
Orthodox Jews do not feel that their beliefs are
based on a desire to oppress the female gender but
simply to carry out the word of God. Followers of
this most conservative sect of Judaism have endured the greatest struggle between Old World tradition and New World culture, and one of the most
controversial issues they have encountered is the
possible ordination of women as rabbis. For many,
the question is not considered even debatable by
humans because it is the law of a higher authority
that forbids women to be rabbis.
Members of the Reform faction, however,
have seen the greatest increase in women’s rights
and privileges within the Jewish faith. In this more
liberal denomination, women have been earning the
title of rabbi for more than three decades—the first,
Sally Priesand, was ordained in 1972. Aside from
gaining acceptance in positions of religious authority, women in Reform Judaism have also enjoyed a greater sense of personal freedom and
independence, much the same as their non-Jewish
counterparts. In essence, they have found a way to
blend their respect for conservative Jewish cultural
values—such as family, children, and religious
ritual—into a liberal, contemporary environment
without compromising either.
It is likely the stricter Orthodox denomination
of her faith that provided the impetus behind
Piercy’s writing “Apple sauce for Eve.” The arguments regarding feminism for this most conservative sect of Judaism are obviously more theological
than philosophical, and, therefore, more difficult to
reinterpret or reform. In 1998, however, some Orthodox Jewish congregations began to employ female “congregational interns” who are permitted to
perform some tasks usually reserved for rabbis,
such as preaching, teaching, and consulting on Jewish legal matters. Still, the interns are not allowed
to lead worship services, so the feminist idea of
“equality” is left unsatisfied. Some, though, would
argue that the gap between conservative historical
practice and contemporary cultural change has been
narrowed, at least a bit.
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Critical Overview
For decades, Piercy’s work has fascinated, flabbergasted, intrigued, angered, and shocked readers,
but it is rarely overlooked. As a young writer,
Piercy had trouble publishing her fiction and poetry because of its controversial nature—1950s
America was not ready for it. However, the 1960s
ushered in a new American era. Suddenly, Piercy’s
views on feminism, racism, and politics were
shared by a great number of people. Critics began
taking her work seriously and, for over thirty years
since, have lauded her work for its powerful voice,
striking metaphors, and direct address of contentious subjects that some writers avoid.
In Judaism, critic Steven P. Schneider writes:
Piercy displays the full range of her voice and poetic
imagination in The Art of Blessing the Day. Although
she claims that being a woman and a Jew is “sometimes more / of a contradiction than I can sweat
out,” she shows in this volume that she is adroit
enough to walk the tightrope between those identities that intersect in surprising and unusual ways in
these poems.
In a review in Poetry of Piercy’s What Are Big
Girls Made Of, which was published two years before The Art of Blessing the Day, critic John Taylor
asserts, “These feminist poems may stir listeners who
hear them read aloud . . . yet their language resembles that of rallying cries. It is a language confident
in its power to designate and deplore.” If any one
word may be used to sum up the general character
of Piercy’s poetry, it is “confident.” Despite her dubious beginnings in the publishing world, she is today a strong voice in contemporary American poetry.
Criticism
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill examines the various comparisons of women to children in Piercy’s poem
and contends that these associations make up the
core of the poem’s celebratory spirit.
Claiming a link between women and children
is as old as motherhood itself and usually entails
the natural physical bond between mother and
child, as well as centuries of social mores that have
assigned child care to the female gender. Poems addressing the ties between women and children are
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A p p l e
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But like a little girl
who knows her daddy will
punish her for eating the
extra cookie, Eve takes a
bite of the forbidden treat
anyway, relishes its taste,
and waits for the penalty
to come.”
also commonplace and often sentimental and tender, not contentious and controversial. Piercy’s
“Apple sauce for Eve” is not a typical mother-andchild poem; there is not even a typical “mother” or
typical “child” in it. Instead, the link here lies in
the childlike innocence, curiosity, and determination that Piercy applies to Eve’s quest for knowledge. Eve is not only all women, but the mother of
all women; ironically, her exuberance and resolve
are that of a “difficult brat,” “kid / of the ego,” and
bouncing baby all wrapped up into one.
The first line of the poem establishes the flippant attitude of the narrator with her reference to
the biblical Jewish forefathers as “old daddies.” But
“daddy” is also an endearing term, especially when
used by a child to call her father. While the most
likely intent of the word here is to mock the writers of the Old Testament who condemned Eve in
the Garden of Eden tale, it also sets the tone for
succeeding metaphors in the poem that use child
imagery to praise Eve.
The allusion to nursery rhyme characters in the
second stanza enhances the association between
childlike enthusiasm and Eve’s excitement over
learning new things. She is as persistent and
naughty in her pursuit as mischievous little boys
who shirk their duties in order to do whatever they
want to do. Here, Eve wants to eat the apple. She
wants to see what comes of it, what knowledge she
will gain, what new truths will be revealed to her.
In essence, she is one of the “difficult brats” who
dares to buck the system. She is as defiant and determined as a child who screams to get her way until she gets it.
Eve’s attributes thus far may not seem like
something to be proud of, much less praiseworthy,
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yet there is an air of jubilant vigor in her resolve
to experiment, to “turn each thing . . . / round and
round” until “white / fractures into colors,” until
“the image breaks” and the “chips” fall where they
may “into patterns.” She does not claim to know
any answers, only that the ones she has been handed
so far by Adam and by a God considered male in
the annals of Jewish doctrine fall far short of what
she believes may be out there. Like a rebellious kid
who will not take “because I said so” for an answer
or like an inquisitive scientist who is not satisfied
with only one result, Eve forges ahead with her decision to try something new. If she ends up saying,
“Whoops!” in the end, so be it.
Even the famed thinker René Descartes has
nothing on Eve in her pursuit of knowledge. After
all, the world’s first woman is not content to sit
around and think about her existence; she needs to
get up and “kick the tree” to see what falls from it.
She does not stop at discovering why she lives; she
wants to know why she is “going, going to die, die,
die.” In the hard-hitting third stanza, in which the
speaker levels blatant accusations against men and
calls her God-given mate a “good dog,” the child
imagery is still present. Whether it is Eve or
Descartes who is the “first conceived kid / of the
ego,” the allusion supports the notion that youth
and innocence lay the groundwork for many relentless endeavors.
The reality of the question Why am I going to
die because of my desire to become knowledgeable? is ominous at best. The fact that the question
must be asked by Eve, or by the speaker in the
poem, drives home her frustration in having simple human curiosity in a world that dictates curiosity is for men only. She possesses the same
intellect, skills, inquisitiveness, and determination
as any male counterpart and yet her gender requires
a separate path. Eve may be “the first conceived
kid” to recognize a desire for something more than
life has allotted her, but she also is well aware that
acting upon that desire may mean doom. But like
a little girl who knows her daddy will punish her
for eating the extra cookie, Eve takes a bite of
the forbidden treat anyway, relishes its taste, and
waits for the penalty to come.
The final stanza of “Apple sauce for Eve” is
the most celebratory of the poem and the one in
which the speaker plainly states, “We are all the
children of your bright hunger.” Metaphorically,
women are the “products of that first experiment,”
and the retribution Eve suffers for her daring is
worth it because it brings “freedom and the
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Piercy’s poetry collection Colors Passing through
Us (2003) concentrates on what is valuable in
her life: love, feminism, Judaism, politics, and
sensual pleasure. She uses both humor and sorrow in writing about the transition into the
twenty-first century, and she includes a moving
piece on loved-ones who suddenly disappear,
such as the victims of September 11, 2001.
• Like Piercy, Alicia Ostriker is a contemporary
feminist poet from a Jewish background who
does not shy away from addressing matters
of womanhood, sexuality, and Judaism in her
poems. Her fairly comprehensive collection
The Little Space: Poems Selected and New,
1968–1998 (1998) provides a thorough look at
thirty years of her work, showing both the natural maturity of a poet as well as deep-seated
convictions that withstand the test of time.
ment, government, and more. Edited by Prudence
Wright Holmes and Doris B. Gold, this collection
of diverse thought and perspective covers topics
as wide-ranging as the Holocaust, Zionism, sexism, war, civil rights, and financial matters.
• Piercy maintains a personal Web site at http://
archer-books.com/Piercy/ with more than thirty
links to book reviews, critical essays, interviews, and excerpts of her work, as well as personal pages, including her resume, biography,
and an up-to-date schedule of readings and
workshops. For a general introduction to the
poet and her work, this is a good place to start.
• Voices of Thinking Jewish Women (2003) includes intriguing essays from forty-two successful women in the fields of science, politics,
literature, history, finance, feminism, entertain-
• Editor Joyce Antler collected the works of four
generations of women authors in America and
I: Short Stories by American Jewish Women
Writers (1990). The twenty-three stories, including works by Tillie Olsen, Cynthia Ozick,
and Edna Ferber, depict what it means to be both
a woman and a Jew, with topics ranging from
the Holocaust to emerging sexual and emotional
freedom.
flowering of choice” to succeeding generations of
females. In spite of the obvious odds against Eve’s
success (odds meted out by the status quo) the initial and final tone of the poem is one of ovation
and victory. The speaker is energetic and passionate in affirming Eve’s achievement: “You are indeed the mother of invention,” “Your name means
/ life,” “We are all the children,” “We are all products,” “the seeds were freedom.” It appears that the
bitterness and sarcasm of the speaker’s earlier details are diminished in the sheer joy of celebration.
Not surprisingly, some readers of Piercy’s
work are uncomfortable with both the subject matter and the poet’s seemingly irreverent handling of
it. Is this not blasphemy? Can a Jewish poet ridicule
Jewish teachings and still be a devout Jew? The
opinion here is yes. The practice, or art, of midrash
has been around for centuries. Its intent has always
been to enhance standard, traditional writings,
to fill in the blanks left open by official doctrine,
and that is Piercy’s intent as well with “Apple sauce
for Eve.” (The section of The Art of Blessing the
Day that includes this poem is called “Toldot,
Midrashism [Of History and Interpretation].”) If
the poem seems crude and ribald, or just humorous, its tone is simply a reflection of the period in
which it was written. Contemporary midrash takes
on contemporary issues in a contemporary manner.
In praising Eve and in allotting her a playful innocence and childlike determination to show her resolve, the speaker is not mean-spirited or hateful.
She pokes fun at some of the fundamentals of religious teachings but she never steps over the line.
In essence, Piercy does not defy God in this poem,
only the men who interpret God’s word.
Perhaps the use of child imagery to portray both
the naughty and the innocent nature of Eve serves
to soften the blunt language that some readers find
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distasteful. Though she is described as a “lab partner” of Satan’s, she is also a curious kid filled with
awe and excitement at all the possibilities the world
holds. Though she takes a shot at the “old daddies”
who condemned her, she also paves the way for centuries of women and men to come who, like her,
would dare to question and experiment and discover
rather than remain static and void of imagination.
If Eve is not wholly innocent here, she is allowed
just enough “sin” to prove her devotion to a cause
she believes is just. She is strong-willed and steadfast but not blasphemous or profane.
Any reader still uncomfortable with Piercy’s
poetic midrash on the story of Adam and Eve may
want to read the entire collection in which this work
appears before passing final judgment on it. There,
one will find serious, somber poems on faith and
Judaism; tender yet candid accounts of family and
love and passion; and, wry, no-holds-barred examinations of Jewish tradition set against contemporary culture with a bit of humor thrown in to lighten
the load. Perhaps after placing “Apple sauce for
Eve” within the context of the complete volume,
one may understand why Piercy’s biblical first
woman could never be content with a simple, ordinary apple. She is bound to make sauce of it.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “Apple sauce
for Eve,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Wendy Perkins
Perkins is a professor of American literature
and film. In this essay, Perkins explores the poem’s
focus on the hunger for knowledge.
In her review of The Art of Blessing the Day:
Poems with a Jewish Theme, Judy Clarence writes
that in this collection, “in many ways [her] best yet,”
Marge Piercy “brings together poems written to celebrate [her] Jewishness, reflecting and expressing
the joy, pain, passion, and elegance of this rich culture.” Donna Seaman and Jack Helbig, in their review of the collection for Booklist, note that Piercy
dedicated these works to the Grrrl movement, “a
feisty form of feminist expression found in zines
and music and on the Web—because Piercy had
been Grrrl long before Grrrl got its name.”
One of the finest poems in this collection, “Apple sauce for Eve” reflects Piercy’s Jewish heritage
as well as her dedication to feminist expression. The
poem centers on the story of Eve eating the apple
from the tree of knowledge and the consequences
this action had on Jewish women. Yet, the statements the poem makes about oppression of women
and the desire for freedom are universal. Felicia
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Mitchell, in her article on Piercy for the Dictionary
of Literary Biography, insists that “Piercy’s liturgical poems follow the Jewish mystical tradition for
some readers and appeal to others on a different
level, [which] affirms her appeal to an audience as
diverse as her poems.” “Apple sauce for Eve” becomes a call to all women to break the bonds of tradition and satisfy their hunger for knowledge.
Piercy’s voice becomes personal and universal in “Apple sauce for Eve” as she encourages
women to recognize their ancestral link to Eve. She
addresses, much like Langston Hughes does in
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” an entire community, tracing its continuity over the centuries. While
Hughes speaks of the black race’s strength and endurance, reaching back to the beginning of time,
Piercy maps out Jewish women’s desire for knowledge, a need first expressed by Eve as she eats the
forbidden apple. The struggle against the restraints
of Jewish orthodoxy becomes a universal one for
all women living under patriarchal systems who
share the dream of self actualization and freedom.
“Apple sauce for Eve” presents alternatives to oppressive traditions and celebrates communal solidarity and significant change.
Piercy announces this theme in the poem’s title, which, along with the title of the collection, becomes an ironic statement of Eve’s independence.
Applesauce, made with honey and apples, is served
on Jewish holy days to sweeten the year. The apple, however, was forbidden to Eve. God denied
her knowledge much like Judaism denies women
the highly esteemed position of scholar in its community. Jewish orthodoxy promotes scholarship as
one of the highest callings, but this role is reserved
for men, not women. Piercy celebrates Eve’s challenge of this doctrine by rewarding her with the celebratory applesauce. The collection’s title, The Art
of Blessing the Day, which derives from the Jewish custom of reciting daily blessings, reinforces
the praise for Eve’s courageous actions.
The poem chronicles and honors Eve’s challenge throughout its free-verse stanzas, an appropriate form for a poem that centers on individual
and collective freedom. In the first, the speaker addresses the curse suffered by Eve and her descendents after she disobeyed God’s law by eating the
apple, which granted her knowledge. Piercy insists
that Eve was “damned for [her] curiosity.” She was
punished not only for her disobedience but also for
“wanting knowledge,” which the “old daddies,”
God and the male rulers of the entrenched patriarchies that have ruled women for centuries, forbid
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her and all women—“the us” in Eve. This is the paradise that she and her descendents have been denied.
This stanza also begins to outline the innate
desire for knowledge, which Piercy likens here to
a crystal of many facets that fracture into fragments
as each “factoid” is taken into the brain. The
speaker notes Eve’s need “to try, to taste, / to take
into the body” this life-sustaining knowledge. The
result of this activity is also chronicled. Alliteration in these lines forecasts the harmonious relationship that will emerge during this process
between self and world. As the mind engages in
the act of understanding and interpreting, as it casts
“the chips into patterns,” the white facets of each
piece of information break into colors. Here Piercy
suggests that one’s world will gain depth and color
through the process of gaining knowledge.
Revealing the
strength of the female
spirit, she refuses to allow
her will, in this case her
hunger for knowledge, to be
suppressed and so joins the
snake in a quest for
freedom.”
The second stanza reinforces the lure of knowledge acquisition, recognizing the power of this
process to blow “a horn in the ear / of belief.”
Knowledge can challenge the personal, the “dead
languages” of Jewish orthodoxy, as well as the universal, as it helps pose “real questions into the still
air / of the desiccated parlor of stasis.” Tradition
regards these questions as “nasty and difficult
brats” challenging “what we all know to be true,
constant.” Yet the speaker argues that consistencies
are desiccated or frozen, “like frost landscapes on
a window.” Each experiment, like Eve’s biting into
the apple, that “dares existence” by posing real
questions brings steam to melt the frost. Questions
like those that examine instincts and behavioral patterns, the speaker suggests, can debunk old myths
that impose conventional notions of a woman’s
place or of her abilities. Consistency leads to death;
the active mind’s persistent examination and interpretation of the world leads to life.
hunger for knowledge, to be suppressed and so
joins the snake in a quest for freedom.
The speaker notes that this act in itself involves
a double challenge to tradition. Eve challenges
God’s control over her as well as conventional notions of what women want. In a clever play on the
symbolism of the serpent, the speaker scoffs at the
established conviction that women are interested in
the body, the phallic “snake,” and not the mind,
“when it is the world she’s after.” Here, Piercy debunks the myth of Eve as temptress, insisting that
her “thirst” is “not of the flesh but of the brain.”
Eve suffered the consequences of her challenge to authority when God banished her from
paradise and decreed that she and her female descendents must endure the pain of childbirth. The
speaker insists that this suffering would lead to an
ultimate state of freedom. By eating the apple and
facing the consequences of her actions, Eve experienced “the birth trauma for the first conceived
kid / of the ego”—the brain engaged in the active
pursuit of knowledge. Piercy insists that women
cannot exist without this dynamic engagement with
the world, without the constant “kick[ing] of the
tree” of knowledge to make the apples fall to the
ground, without the participation in the quest to discover “who am I.” She argues that women have the
right to ask why the punishment for a woman’s pursuit of knowledge was a death decree for her and
all of her descendents.
In the final stanza, Piercy elevates Eve to the
highest position in Jewish orthodoxy and celebrates
her ancestral link to all women as the “mother of
invention, / the first scientist.” Eve becomes a “dynamic” symbol of life as a result of her experiment,
“tasting, testing” experience. She ate the apple of
Piercy illuminates the dehumanizing consequences of stasis in her third stanza in which she
juxtaposes Adam’s actions in Eden with those of
Eve. Adam, initially the obedient servant to God’s
decrees, wags his tail like a “good dog,” expecting
praise and reward for shying away from the forbidden fruit while Eve and the serpent “shimmy up
the tree,” ready to face the penalty of their rebelliousness. Piercy extends the metaphor of the experiment here, the questioning that must occur if
understanding is to be gained, as Eve and the snake
become “lab partners in a dance of will and
hunger.” Eve questions God’s decree that the
knowledge obtained by eating the apple should be
denied her. Revealing the strength of the female
spirit, she refuses to allow her will, in this case her
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knowledge, “like any other nutrient,” rebelling
against God’s decree, which forced her to swim
“against / the current of time.” The speaker notes
that this desire for knowledge, this “bright hunger,”
is shared by all women through their common
ancestor.
Eve’s heroic rebelliousness has survived
throughout generations of women, “products of that
first experiment.” Piercy acknowledges that God
punished Eve for eating the apple by banishing her
from Eden and denying her and her descendents the
gift of eternal life, which became “the worm in that
apple.” Yet she champions Eve for her independent
spirit, which provided women with a greater gift—
“freedom and the flowering of choice.”
In “Apple sauce for Eve,” Piercy acknowledges the bleak decree Eve and her descendents
have suffered under as a result of her eating the apple of knowledge. Yet, the poem becomes a celebration of this inherited rebellious spirit that has
inspired women to throw off the bonds of oppression. Jean Rosenbaum writes in her essay on
Piercy’s poetry in Modern Poetry Studies that
“Piercy strikes out at the attitudes, institutions, and
structures which impede natural growth and development and thus destroy wholeness.” Piercy
infuses “Apple sauce for Eve” with a hopeful perspective, of the spiritual renewal gained through the
life-sustaining pursuit of knowledge.
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “Apple sauce for
Eve,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the critic discusses
Piercy’s career.
Feminist poet/novelist Marge Piercy writes
about the oppression of individuals she sees in society, infusing her works with political statements,
autobiographical elements, and realist and utopian
perspectives. “Almost alone among her American
contemporaries, Marge Piercy is radical and writer
simultaneously, her literary identity so indivisible
that it is difficult to say where one leaves off and
the other begins,” wrote Elinor Langer in the New
York Times Book Review. A prominent and sometimes controversial writer, Piercy first became politically active in the 1960s, when she joined the
civil rights movement and became an organizer for
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). After a
few years, she concluded that the male power structure associated with the mainstream capitalist society was also operating in the anti-war movement
and that women were being relegated to subservient
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work. In 1969 Piercy shifted her allegiance to the
fledgling women’s movement, where her sympathies have remained.
Piercy openly acknowledges that she wants her
writing—particularly some of her poems—to be
“useful.” “What I mean by useful,” she explained in
the introduction to Circles on the Water, “is simply
that readers will find poems that speak to and for
them, will take those poems into their lives and say
them to each other and put them up on the bathroom
wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice
to something in the experience of a life has been my
intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives
dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses.
We can hear what we hope for and what we most
fear in the small release of cadenced utterance.”
Piercy’s moralistic stance, more typical of
nineteenth-than twentieth-century writers, has
alienated some critics, producing charges that she
is more committed to her politics than to her craft.
The notion makes Piercy bristle. “As a known feminist I find critics often naively imagine I am
putting my politics directly into the mouth of my
protagonist,” she told Michael Luzzi in an interview collected in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt.
“That I could not possibly be amused, ironic, interested in the consonances and dissonances. . . .
They notice what I have created and assume I have
done so blindly, instead of artfully, and I ask again
and again, why? I think reviewers and academics
have the fond and foolish notion that they are
smarter than writers. They also assume if you are
political, you are simpler in your mental apparatus
than they are; whereas you may well have the same
background in English and American literature they
have, but add to it a better grounding in other European and Asian and South American literatures,
and a reasonable degree of study of philosophy and
political theory.”
Fellow feminist and poet Erica Jong sympathized with Piercy’s dilemma, writing in the New
York Times Book Review that Piercy is “an immensely gifted poet and novelist whose range and
versatility have made it hard for her talents to be adequately appreciated critically. “Piercy’s sense of
politics is deep-rooted. She grew up poor and white
in a predominantly black section of Detroit. Her
mother was a housewife with a tenth-grade education and her father a millwright who repaired and installed machinery. From her surroundings, Piercy
learned about the inequities of the capitalist system:
“You see class so clearly there,” she told Celia
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Betsky in the New York Times Book Review. “The
indifference of the rich, racism, the strength of different groups, the working-class pitted against itself.”
Piercy wrote candidly about those early years
in her 2002 memoir, Sleeping with Cats. One of the
title felines is Fluffy, the author’s childhood pet,
and the two would spend hours curled up together
on the creaking porch swing. While inquisitive and
intelligent, Piercy found that school was no haven
from her hardscrabble home life; she recounts “the
stench of urine and the yellow dirty halls” of her
elementary school, the “old books, old desks, and
the contempt of the teachers for us and themselves.” Her parents, taking a disinterested stand in
the girl’s education, made it clear that they would
have preferred their daughter to be a “healthy flirtatious little girl, a sort of minor-league Shirley
Temple,” as Pierce wrote in Sleeping with Cats. Rebelling, Piercy became a shoplifter and sexual adventurist instead. But the young girl’s academic
success overshadowed the negative images; she
went on to win a scholarship to the University of
Michigan and became the first in her family to attend college.
An enthusiastic undergraduate, Piercy was encouraged in her writing by winning several Hopwood awards. Still, professional success did not
come easily. Ten years elapsed before Piercy was
able to give up a series of odd jobs and support herself by writing. Her first six novels were rejected,
and she suspects that Going down Fast found a publisher largely because of its lack of women’s consciousness and its male protagonist. The narrative
features a Jewish teacher, Anna Levinowitz, who
sees issues of class and sexual politics while watching her childhood home being razed: “The outer
wall and circle of windows were gone to dust. The
pale blue walls were nude to the passerby. She felt
a dart of shame.” In an essay for Dictionary of
Literary Biography, Sue Walker saw Going down
Fast as a book that “confronts the questions, ‘what
have I done with my life? where am I going?’”
Anna’s role as a sexual object for her lover is depicted in a kitchen scene, where the man pinches
Anna as she prepares his meal. “Piercy finds that
men often see their relations to women as taming
and dominating,” noted Walker.
Piercy kept writing political novels featuring
female characters, often with backgrounds similar
to her own. In 1973, she published Small Changes,
a novel that New Republic contributing critic Diane Schulder labeled “one of the first to explore the
variety of life-styles that women . . . are adopting
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Piercy’s moralistic
stance, more typical of
nineteenth-than twentiethcentury writers, has
alienated some critics,
producing charges that she
is more committed to her
politics than to her craft.”
in order to give meaning to their personal and political lives.” Addressing women’s issues head on,
this book conveys what New York Times Book Review contributing critic Sara Blackburn called “that
particular quality of lost identity and desperation,
which, once recognized as common experience, has
sparked the rage and solidarity of the women’s liberation movement.” In an essay she wrote for
Women’s Culture: The Women’s Renaissance of
the Seventies, Piercy describes the book as “an attempt to produce in fiction the equivalent of a full
experience in a consciousness-raising group for
many women who would never go through that
experience.”
To demonstrate the way female subjugation
cuts across social strata, Piercy includes both a
working-class woman, Beth, and a middle-class intellectual, Miriam, as main characters in Small
Changes. In her depiction of these women, Piercy
concentrates on what Catharine R. Stimpson of Nation called “the creation of a new sexuality and a
new psychology, which will permeate and bind a
broad genuine equality. So doing, [Piercy] shifts
the meaning of small change.” Stimpson continued:
“The phrase no longer refers to something petty and
cheap but to the way in which a New Woman, a
New Man, will be generated: one halting step after another. The process of transformation will be
as painstaking as the dismantling of electrified
barbed wire.”
Widely reviewed, Small Changes received
qualified praise. No critics dismissed the novel as
unimportant, and most commended Piercy’s energy
and intelligence, but many objected to the rhetoric
of the book. “There is not a good, even tolerable
man in the whole lot of characters,” observed
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Margaret Ferrari in her America review. “While the
women in the novel are in search of themselves, the
men are mostly out to destroy themselves and anyone who crosses their paths. The three main ones
in the novel are, without exception, stereotyped
monsters.” For this reason, Ferrari described her reaction to the novel as “ambivalent. The realistic
Boston and New York locales are enjoyable. The
poetry is alluring and the characters’ lives are orchestrated so that shrillness is always relieved. . . .
In short, the novel is absorbing despite its political
rhetoric.” After praising Piercy’s “acute” social reportage and her compelling story line, Richard Todd
raised a similar objection. “What is absent in this
novel is an adequate sense of the oppressor,” he
wrote in Atlantic. “And beyond that a recognition
that there are limits to a world view that is organized around sexual warfare. It’s hard not to think
that Piercy feels this, knows that much of the multiplicity and mystery of life is getting squeezed out
of her prose, but her polemical urge wins out.”
Piercy challenges the validity of such criticisms. “People tend to define ‘political’ or ‘polemical’ in terms of what is not congruent with their
ideas,” she told Karla Hammond in an interview
collected in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt. “In
other words, your typical white affluent male reviewer does not review a novel by Norman Mailer
as if it were political the same way he would review a novel by Kate Millet. Yet both are equally
political. The defense of the status quo is as political as an attack on it. A novel which makes assumptions about men and women is just as political
if they’re patriarchal assumptions as if they’re feminist assumptions. Both have a political dimension.” And a few reviewers conceded their biases.
William Archer, for instance, speculated in his Best
Sellers review that “the special dimension of this
book becomes apparent only through a determined
suspension of one’s preconceptions and a reexamination of their validity.”
If Small Changes delineates the oppression of
women, Woman on the Edge of Time affords a
glimpse of a better world. The story of a woman
committed to a mental hospital and her periodic
time travels into the future, the novel juxtaposes
the flawed present against a utopian future. “My
first intent was to create an image of a good society,” notes Piercy in Women’s Culture: The
Women’s Renaissance of the Seventies, “one that
was not sexist, racist, or imperialist: one that was
cooperative, respectful of all living beings, gentle,
responsible, loving, and playful. The result of a full
feminist revolution.” Despite a cool reception by
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critics, Woman on the Edge of Time remains one
of Piercy’s personal favorites. “It’s the best I’ve
done so far,” she wrote in 1981.
With Vida, her sixth novel, Piercy returned to
the real world of the sixties and seventies, cataloging the breakdown of the anti-war movement
and focusing on a political fugitive who will not
give up the cause. Named for its main character,
Davida Asch, the novel cuts back and forth from
past to present, tracing Vida’s evolution from liberal to activist to a member of a radical group called
the Network. Still on the run for her participation
in a ten-year-old bombing, Vida must contend with
a splintered group that has lost its popular appeal
as well as the nagging temptation to slip back into
society and resume normal life. “The main action
is set in the autumn of 1979,” explained Jennifer
Uglow in Times Literary Supplement, “as Vida
faces divorce from her husband (turned media liberal and family man), her mother’s final illness, her
sister’s imprisonment and the capture of an old colleague and lover. The pain of these separations is
balanced against the hope offered by a new lover,
Joel.” At the story’s close, Joel, a draft dodger, is
captured by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
Vida, for whom the loss is acute, is not certain she
can continue. But she does. “What swept through
us and cast us forward is a force that will gather
and rise again,” she reflects, hunching her shoulders and disappearing into the night.
A former political organizer, Piercy writes
from an insider’s point of view, and critics contend
that this affects the novel. “There is no perspective,
there are not even any explanations,” said Langer
in New York Times Book Review. “Why we are
against the war, who the enemy is, what measures
are justified against the state—all these are simply
taken for granted.” And while a state of “war” may
well exist between American capitalists and American radicals, the 1960s revolutionaries are not of
the same caliber as the French Resistance workers
or the Yugoslav partisans, according to Village
Voice contributing reviewer Vivian Gornick. “Vida
Asch and her comrades are a parody of the Old Left
when the Old Left was already a parody of itself,”
she stated.
Politics aside, reviewers find much that is
praiseworthy in the novel. “The real strength of the
book lies not in its historical analysis but in the
power with which the loneliness and desolation of
the central characters are portrayed,” noted Uglow.
Lore Dickstein calls it “an extraordinarily poignant
statement on what has happened to some of the
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middle-class children of the Sixties,” in Saturday
Review. And Langer commended Vida as “a fully
controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of
such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at
almost every page.”
In Piercy’s following novel, Braided Lives, she
“reminds us, growing up female in the 1950s hurt,”
wrote Brina Caplan in a review for Nation. Jill Stuart, the protagonist, relates how difficult it was for
women to survive this time period with esteem and
independence intact. Jill describes the obstacles and
events that challenged young girls coming of age
in the 1950s, including attitudes toward sex, career,
marriage, rape, abortion, lesbianism, verbal and
physical abuse, sexual harassment, and women in
general. “Braided Lives affects us by contrast—by
distinctions made between then and now, between
those who have and have not survived and, most
important, between the subtleties of individual development and the more general movement of history,” stated Caplan.
In the novel, Jill finds life at home almost unbearable; her father is indifferent and her mother is
manipulative. Her parents expect that she will follow traditional ways and get married after high
school, have children, and be a homemaker. Jill
manages to escape this prescribed female role when
she receives a scholarship to college. At college she
and her friends vow never to end up as their mothers. “I don’t know a girl who does not say, ‘I don’t
want to live like my mother,’” Jill asserts in
Braided Lives. Jill and her female friends enjoy
their initial independence at college; they discuss
philosophy and politics and engage in sexual experimentation. But these women are ambivalent
and unsure of what they really want out of life.
“One moment they are declaiming the need for total honesty with men and vowing that they will
never end up possessive and dependent like their
mothers. The next, they will do something ‘castrating’ to their boyfriends, in whom they wouldn’t
dream of confiding their frequent pregnancy scares,”
pointed out New York Time’s Katha Pollitt.
“Is it our mothers, ourselves, or our men who
mold us?” Jill wonders as she watches some of her
friends succumb to cultural pressures and follow the
path of their mothers. Many of Jill’s friends fare
poorly under traditional female roles. Donna, her
best friend and cousin, is “haunted by a despair that
she believes only marriage can alleviate,” according to Caplan. She marries a man who later secretly
punctures her diaphragm because he thinks she
should get pregnant; when Donna does become
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pregnant, she gets an illegal abortion and bleeds to
death. Another friend, Julie, marries and exists discontentedly in domesticity, while Theo is committed to an institution, first by her psychiatrist who
raped her and, again, when she is expelled from college for sleeping with another girl. Out of her circle of friends, Jill alone survives with independence
and esteem intact, despite the cultural pressures.
Piercy considers Braided Lives one of her best
and most original works. In general, critics liked
the writing too, but some note that the novel deals
too excessively with the problems of women. Caplan pointed out that Braided Lives seems “to accommodate almost every humiliation to which
women are liable.” Similarly, Pollitt found that
Piercy “makes Jill & Company victims of every
possible social cruelty and male treachery, usually
more than once.” Pollitt commended, however,
Piercy’s representation of female characters as
fighters by noting that even those who did not survive the cultural oppression fought against the attitudes of the day. Pollitt concluded that the book
“is a tribute to Piercy’s strengths” and “by virtue
of her sheer force of conviction, plus a flair for
scene writing, she writes thought-provoking, persuasive novels, fiction that is both political and
aimed at a popular audience but that is never just
a polemic or just a potboiler.”
A strong protagonist and an engaging plot are
also the components of Fly Away Home, Piercy’s
eighth novel. Thanks to these strengths, this ofttold tale of a woman’s coming to awareness because of divorce becomes “something new and
appealing: a romance with a vision of domestic life
that only a feminist could imagine,” said Ms. reviewer Ellen Sweet. Though Daria Walker, the
main heroine, is a traditional wife in a conventional
role, Alane Rollings deems her “a true heroine. Not
a liberated woman in the current terms of careeraggressiveness,” Rollins continued in Chicago Tribune Books, “she is a person of ‘daily strengths’
and big feelings. When we first meet her, she is a
success almost in spite of herself, a Julia Child-type
TV chef and food writer, but more important to her,
a loving wife and mother in a lovely home.” Sweet
concurred, calling Daria a “Piercy masterpiece.”
Not everyone agreed with this assessment. Because Daria’s self-awakening is tied to her growing
awareness of her husband’s villainy, and because
Ross, the husband, is a sexist profiteer who exemplifies the inequities of the capitalist system,
some critics suggested that “politics sometimes
takes precedence over characterization,” as Jeanne
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McManus put it in the Washington Post Book
World. “Daria’s not only got to get her own life together but also take on a city full of white-collar
real estate criminals who are undermining Boston’s
ethnic minorities. And she’s not just a full-figured
woman in a society of lean wolfhounds, but also a
bleeding heart liberal, a ’60s softy, in an age of
Reaganomics. It’s a pleasure when Piercy lets Daria
sit back and just be herself, frustrated, angry or confused.” Piercy contends, however, that she does not
try to control characters like Daria; the characters
write themselves. In an interview with Luzzi, Piercy
asserted that her “characters do have their own momentum and I can’t force them to do things they
won’t do. Sometimes in the first draft, they disturb
the neat outlines of the previously arranged plot, but
mostly I try to understand them well enough before
I start to have the plot issue directly out of the characters.” And in the eyes of some critics, Piercy succeeds at this task in Fly Away Home. As Sweet
observed in Ms.: “The real plot is in Daria’s growing awareness of herself and her social context.”
Piercy’s 1991 novel, He, She & It, again deals
with women’s roles and participation in society at
large. Rather than dealing with contemporary time
periods, however, Piercy has events take place in
the twenty-first century, also weaving in a myth
from the sixteenth century. In the novel, the author
creates a Jewish community of the future called
Tikva where the scientist Shira has come to stay
with her grandmother, Malkah, after losing a custody battle for her son. Malkah has recently helped
develop a cyborg named Yod to protect their community from outside warring forces. While working with Yod, Malkah is reminded of an old
Yiddish myth about a rabbi who creates a man of
clay, a golem, and gives it life and socialization so
that it will protect a Jewish enclave from their enemy. The golem saves the city and the Jews, and
then is destroyed when he becomes uncontrollable.
Like the rabbi, Malkah has given life to Yod and
designates Shira the task of socializing him; eventually Shira falls in love with Yod. Yod saves
Tikva, assists Shira in rescuing her son, and in the
end, destroys himself and the workshop he was produced in so that his prototypes can not be used as
weapons against their will. Shira considers recreating a new lover from the remaining data but concludes that, for the importance of free will, all the
information should be destroyed.
Piercy’s innovative technique in He, She & It
was hailed by some critics. “Her approach is so
lively and imaginative, her people so energetic, her
two worlds realized in such stimulating detail that
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the novel is never a typical sci-fi adventure or a depressing account of disasters,” commented Diana
O’Hehir in her review for Belles Lettres. The
distinguishing feature of the novel, according to
London Times Literary Supplement’s Anne-Marie
Conway, “is the way Marge Piercy combines the
story of Shira and Yod with the Yiddish myth of
the Golem.”
He, She & It received mixed reviews overall.
Admiring Piercy’s creativity, O’Hehir commented,
“I was amazed at the fertility of Piercy’s imaginings,” but then pointed out that “what is lacking is
an examination of the questions about creativity,
science, and destruction that Piercy appears to be
raising at the beginning of her book.” “Marge
Piercy confronts large issues in this novel: the social consequences of creating anthropomorphic cyborgs, the dynamics of programming both humans
and machines, the ethical question of our control
of machines that might feel as well as think,” wrote
Malcome Bosse in his review for New York Times
Book Review. He then noted that Piercy’s “ambitious new novel is not likely to enhance her reputation.” Bosse finds Piercy’s futuristic account
beyond belief and contends the book “reads more
like an extended essay on freedom of conscience
than a full-rigged work of fiction.” Conway found,
however, that once the novel moves past the heavily detailed opening chapters, “Piercy relaxes and
begins to enjoy telling her story.”
In The Longings of Women Piercy returns to
contemporary times in offering the stories of three
women. Mary, at sixty-one, finds herself homeless
following a divorce from her first husband and
abandonment by a more recent lover. She stays
alive by cleaning houses, typically sleeping at the
airport or in churches. One of her clients, Leila, is
the novel’s second main character. A college professor, Leila is unhappily married to a philandering husband. The third protagonist, Becky, is a
twenty-five-year-old woman accused of conspiring
to murder her husband. Despite their different circumstances, all three women long for a place of
their own—a place in which they can find privacy
and from which they can seek love.
Critics once again noted Piercy’s strongly feminist stance. Terming the novel “lively, densely textured” and “a feminist cautionary tale,” Chicago
Tribune Books reviewer Judith Wynn remarked that
“Piercy is not an elegant writer. Interesting, swiftmoving plots and careful social observation are her
main strengths.” Other critics found it more difficult to overlook Piercy’s craft in favor of her
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message. Washington Post Book World contributor
Constance Casey, for instance, called Piercy’s writing “artless and humorless.” And Pauli Carnes in
Los Angeles Times Book Review focused on the author’s creation of another “sorry lot” of men: “murderous; alcoholic; self-indulgent; irresponsible;
immature; emotionally stunted.” Still, Casey
praised Piercy’s “militant sympathy and her eye for
concrete detail.”
Piercy’s 1998 Storm Tide, penned with her
husband, Ira Wood, was described by Library Journal’s Andrea Lee Shuey as “a well-written novel,
where imperfect people do foolish things with unfortunate results.” The novel focuses on David
Greene, a former small-town baseball hero who
years later returns to Cape Cod and begins an affair with a married lawyer, Judith Silver. David, at
the request of both Judith and her husband (who
doesn’t mind the affair), decides to run for a position as town selectman. David’s opponent is supported by one of the leading men in the town,
Johnny Lynch, and David begins an affair with one
of Lynch’s employees, Crystal Sinclair, all of
which contribute to disaster for David. “Sex is
played like a weapon in [Storm Tide], and David’s
[the] perfect target,” remarked Los Angeles Times
contributor Thomas Curwen.
A reviewer for Publishers Weekly called Storm
Tide a “clunky, bloodless collaborative effort from
two authors who have each produced better solo
work,” but added that “the novel does succeed on
a lesser scale in its perceptive, stinging depiction
of a parochial seaside resort.” In Library Journal
Andrea Lynn Shuey praised the work, explaining
that Storm Tide contains a “well-constructed plot”
with “characters [who] are real.”
Three Women, Piercy’s 1999 novel, tells the
story of independent women covering three generations in a family. The main characters are Beverly
Blume, a seventy-two-year-old civil rights activist
and feminist who recently suffered a stroke; Beverly’s daughter, Suzanne, a forty-nine-year-old
attorney and mother of two daughters who is beginning a new relationship; and Suzanne’s oldest
daughter, Elena, who has returned home after facing several personal troubles, including drug use.
The novel, showing the growing bond that develops between the three women, is told from each of
the main characters’ perspectives, though focusing
on Suzanne. Francine Fialkoff in Library Journal
deemed Three Women “a somewhat disappointing
effort from an old stalwart [that] may nevertheless
be in demand among her fans.” A Publishers
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Weekly reviewer observed that “Piercy keeps the
plot humming with issues of motherhood, Judaism,
generational tensions, sexuality, and independence,” doing so in a pacing that is “confident.”
The same reviewer concluded: “Piercy’s insight
into her characters’ emotional lives is an accurate
reflection of intergenerational tensions.”
In addition to her novels, Piercy has published
books of poetry, each of which reflects her political sympathies and feminist point of view. “I am
not a poet who writes primarily for the approval or
attention of other poets,” she explained in her introduction to Circles on the Water. “Usually the
voice of the poems is mine. Rarely do I speak
through a mask or persona,” she once told CA. “The
experiences, however, are not always mine, and although my major impulse to autobiography has
played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have
never made a distinction in working up my own
experience and other people’s. I imagine I speak
for a constituency, living and dead, and that I give
utterance to energy, experience, insight, words
flowing from many lives. I have always desired that
my poems work for others. ‘To Be of Use’ is the
title of one of my favorite poems and one of my
best-known books.”
Piercy’s poetry recounts not only the injustices
of sexism, but also such pleasures of daily life as
making love or gardening. “There is always a danger that poems about little occurrences will become
poems of little consequence, that poems which deal
with current issues and topics will become mere
polemic and propaganda, that poems of the everyday will become pedestrian,” observed Jean Rosenbaum in Modern Poetry Studies. “To a very large
extent, however, Marge Piercy avoids these dangers because most of her poetry contributes to and
extends a coherent vision of the world as it is now
and as it should be.” Writing in New York Times
Book Review, Margaret Atwood referred to Piercy’s
perception as “the double vision of the utopian: a
view of human possibility—harmony between the
sexes, among races and between humankind and
nature—that makes the present state of affairs
clearly unacceptable by comparison.”
In her poems, Piercy’s outrage often explodes.
“You exiled the Female into blacks and women and
colonies,” she writes in To Be of Use, lashing out
at the mechanistic men who rule society. “You became the armed brain and the barbed penis and the
club. / You invented agribusiness, leaching the soil
to dust, / and pissed mercury in the rivers and shat
slag on the plains.”
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Some critics claim that Piercy at her angriest is
Piercy at her best, but the poet does not limit herself
to negativism. She also writes of sensuality, humor,
playfulness, and the strength that lies buried in all
women and the ways it can be tapped. In Hard Loving, Piercy describes the energy in women’s bodies
as it moves through their hands and their fingers to
direct the world, while a verse from The Moon Is
Always Female contains advice about writing.
In addition to social problems, Piercy’s poetry
focuses “on her own personal problems,” Victor
Contoski explained in Modern Poetry Studies, “so
that tension exists not only between ‘us’ and
‘them,’ but between ‘us’ and ‘me.’” Her poetry is
both personal—that is, addressed from a particular
woman to a particular man—and public, meaning
that it is concerned with issues that pertain to all
of society. “Doing It Differently,” published in To
Be of Use, stresses that the legal system still maintains laws that treat women as property, demonstrates that even private relationships are tinged by
social institutions, and questions the equality between men and women.
Available Light and Mars and Her Children,
Piercy’s subsequent books of poetry, cover a diverse range of topics, including nature, eating fruit,
kitchen remodeling, love, and death. In an interview with Los Angeles Times’s Jocelyn McClurg,
Piercy explained her range and diversity by stating,
“I think I’m somebody who believes there are no
poetic subjects, that anything you pay attention to,
if you truly pay attention, there’s a poem in it.
Because poetry is a kind of constant response to
being alive.” Booklist’s Donna Seaman viewed
Available Light overall as expressing the confused
feelings of growing older but described Mars and
Her Children as a “spectrum of moods” dealing
with Piercy’s love for life.
What Are Big Girls Made Of?, Piercy’s 1997
poetry collection, “invokes several public and private issues that have long haunted or angered her,”
according to John Taylor in Poetry. Several issues
and subjects are examined in this collection, including marriage, Piercy’s deceased older half-brother,
dysfunctional families, sex, animals, society and politics, and feminism. Lara Merlin in World Literature
Today commented of What Are Big Girls Made Of?:
“The volume as a whole can be seen as Piercy’s attempt to come to terms with the damage and waste
she feels characterizes gender relations, and perhaps
relations in general, in this country and then to begin to change them.” Merlin also called the collection “a series of angry, often humorous, sometimes
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striking poems in an unabashedly feminist vein.”
Some critics appear to find Piercy’s poems of a political nature in this work not as strong as those of
other subject matter. For instance, a Publishers
Weekly reviewer, though commenting that “less fully
felt are poems with a social conscience,” praised
Piercy’s use of “more transcendent subject matter.”
The same reviewer claimed that the collection is “as
accessible and as crammed with experience as a
novel.” Judy Clarence in Library Journal stated,
“Most of these poems are very effective, and magical moments abound.” Clarence called the work a
“strong collection” that she “highly recommend[s]
for all libraries.”
Piercy is also the author of two 1999 poetry
collections: Early Grrrl: The Early Poems of
Marge Piercy and The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. Of the first of these
works, Ellen Kaufman in Library Journal commented, “This selection may not include her
strongest work, but will be important to those who
follow her closely.” Early Grrrl collects various
pieces of Piercy’s from the mid-1970s and earlier
on, including pieces from works currently out of
print. The Art of Blessing the Day “is in many ways
the best [of her poetry collections] yet,” according
to Judy Clarence in Library Journal, who further
added that the work “brings together poems written to celebrate Piercy’s Jewishness.”
In a Judaism review, Steven Schneider elaborated on that theme, pointing to one entry, “The
Chuppah,” concerning the hand-held canopy under
which Jewish marriages are performed. In Piercy’s
view, the chuppah is a metaphor “for all the activity that takes place between Piercy and her third
husband. . . . Just as the chuppah creates an open
space beneath its canopy, so too does Piercy envision her marriage as an open space, where she and
her partner live, eat, sleep, celebrate, and struggle
together.” These poems, said Schneider, “draw
upon traditional Jewish symbols like the chuppah
and the mezuzah [a portion of the Talmud, sealed
to the front door of a Jewish home], and Piercy will
use these as a springboard for lyrics that represent
her own distinctive relationship to Judaism. She
consciously makes such ritual objects her own by
integrating them into her life and poetry.”
In an essay for Guardian, Piercy compares fiction to poetry, and finds that each genre can inspire
the other. When working on a novel, for instance,
she explains that if stuck in a difficult passage, “I
may jump ahead to smoother ground, or I may
pause and work on poems exclusively for a time.
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If I lack ideas for one genre, usually I have them
simmering for the other.” The mind “wraps itself
around a poem,” Piercy continues. “It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You
can turn the poem round and about and upside
down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two
snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has
found its right and proper shape.” Her fiction, she
adds, “comes from the same party of my psyche
that cannot resist eavesdropping on strangers’ conversations. I am a nosy person. I have learned to
control that part of myself, but I am still a good interviewer and a good listener because I am madly
curious about what people’s lives are like.”
Source: “Marge Piercy,” in Contemporary Authors Online,
Thomson Gale, 2004.
Rahel Musleah
In the following essay, Musleah traces Piercy’s
life and works.
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Source: Rahel Musleah, “Portrait of a Jewish Poet, Writer,
Feminist: Marge Piercy,” in Jewish News Weekly, November 3, 2000, http://www.jewishsf.com/bk001103/supmargie
.shtml (last accessed January 13, 2005).
Sources
Clarence, Judy, Review of The Art of Blessing the Day:
Poems with a Jewish Theme, in Library Journal, Vol. 124,
No. 10, 1999, p. 120.
Mitchell, Felicia, “Marge Piercy,” in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vol. 120, American Poets Since World War II,
Third Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn, Gale Research, 1992,
pp. 248–53.
Piercy, Marge, The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a
Jewish Theme, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, pp. 99–100.
Rosenbaum, Jean, “You Are Your Own Magician: A Vision
of Integrity in the Poetry of Marge Piercy,” in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 8, Winter 1977, pp. 193–205.
Schneider, Steven P., “Contemporary Jewish-American
Women’s Poetry: Marge Piercy and Jacqueline Osherow,”
in Judaism, Vol. 50, No. 2, Spring 2001, pp. 199–210.
Seaman, Donna, and Jack Helbig, Review of The Art of
Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, in Booklist,
Vol. 95, No. 11, 1999, p. 959.
Taylor, John, Review of What Are Big Girls Made Of?, in
Poetry, Vol. 171, No. 3, January 1998, pp. 221–24.
Further Reading
Piercy, Marge, Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of
Marge Piercy, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Published more than twenty years ago, this book has
never been out of print. It is arguably the best overall introduction to Piercy’s poetry, including some of
her best-known work on heartfelt, often controversial topics. Titles include “Barbie Doll,” “Rape
Poem,” “Right to Life,” and “For Strong Women.”
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—, Sleeping with Cats, William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2002.
This is Piercy’s memoir in which she openly and honestly reflects on many aspects of her life, from love
and marriage to creativity and death. A lover of cats,
she uses them here to help divulge her innermost feelings. In the book, she notes, “Cats continue to teach
me a lot of what is important in my life, and also,
how short it is, how we need to express our love to
those for whom we feel it.”
Rodden, John, “A Harsh Day’s Light: An Interview with
Marge Piercy,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. XX, No. 2, Spring
1998, pp. 132–43.
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In this lengthy interview, Piercy discusses her political beliefs, her thoughts on Judaism, her involvement in the radical movement of the 1960s, and
several other personal opinions. She relates most of
the topics to an overall feminist agenda, both personal and political.
Walker, Sue, and Eugenie Hamner, eds., Ways of Knowing:
Essays on Marge Piercy, Negative Capability Press,
1991.
This is a well-rounded collection of writings on
Piercy’s work by critics from wide-ranging perspectives, but most critics applaud the poet’s strong feminist voice.
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Death Sentences
Radmila Lazić
2003
In the war-torn country of Serbia, few writers, feminists, political activists, or editors have been as influential as Radmila Lazić. One of her country’s
most prominent poets, Lazić has published six
books of forthright, bold, and moving poetry. She
has also founded and edited a magazine of feminism, edited two anthologies, and founded a civil
resistance movement to protest Serbia’s infamous
militant leader, Slobodan Milosevic. It was not until 2003 that the first translation of her work into
English, A Wake for the Living, was published.
This poetry collection opens with a striking poem
titled “Smaknuća” (“Death Sentences”), in which
a woman tells her lover that she will not be like
Ophelia, the love interest of William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. Instead of Ophelia’s death sentence of
drowning, she says, she wants the death sentence
of her lover taking off her dress and putting his
arms around her neck.
“Death Sentences” is a poem with implications
about feminism and sex, and it uses Ophelia—a key
symbol of traditional, passive femininity—to
demonstrate some of the problems with an outdated
and repressed idea of femininity. The poem implies
that the speaker will enjoy a liberated and open sexuality without the traditional, overly romantic, and
idealized constraints of love. Lazić also presents a
deep ambiguity in the poem, since this new, free
love is also a “death sentence,” thus establishing a
key theme throughout A Wake for the Living, that
joy coexists with hopelessness and death. Translated by eminent Serbian-American poet Charles
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Simic, “Death Sentences” is available in the 2003
Graywolf Press edition of A Wake for the Living.
Author Biography
Radmila Lazić was born in 1949 in the central Serbian city of Krusevac, which is on the Morava tributary of the Danube River, at a time when it was
part of Yugoslavia. When Lazić grew older, she
moved to the Serbian capitol of Belgrade to pursue
a career as a poet, editor, and activist. She has since
become a prominent Serbian figure in all three of
these areas.
The poetry collection A Wake for the Living
(2003), which includes “Death Sentences,” is
Lazić’s first work to be translated into English. She
has five previously published successful collections
of poetry in Serbian and has received a number of
literary prizes. Lazić is also a respected editor and
critic. She has published many essays on literature
and has edited two anthologies—a volume of
women’s poetry and a volume of antiwar letters. A
celebrated feminist, Lazić is the founder and managing editor of a Serbian journal of women’s studies, ProFemina: International Journal for Women,
Writing, and Culture, which is published in Belgrade. She is also a key political activist, credited
with founding the civil resistance movement during the 1990s, while an infamous Serbian president,
Slobodan Milosevic, was in power.
Poem Text
I was born too late and I am much too old,
My dear Hamlet,
To be your pimply Ophelia,
To let my hair like flattened wheat
Spread over the dark waters
And upset the floating water lilies
With my floating eyes,
To glide fishlike between fishes,
Sink to the bottom like a dead seashell,
Burrow in sand next to shipwrecks of love,
I, the amphora, entangled in seaweeds.
I’d rather you take off my dress,
Let it fall at my feet like aspen leaves
The wind shakes without permission
As if there’s nothing to it.
I’d rather have that death sentence:
Eternity of your arms around my neck.
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Radmila Lazić
Poem Summary
Stanza 1
“Death Sentences” begins with what seems to
be a paradox: the speaker was born both too late
and too early for something. The meaning becomes
clearer in the second and third lines, as the speaker
reveals that she is addressing the fictional character of Hamlet, a reference to Shakespeare’s protagonist. Although she is actually addressing her
own lover, she calls this lover by the name of
Shakespeare’s hero, thereby comparing her relationship with her lover to Hamlet and Ophelia’s relationship. When the speaker says she was born too
late to be his Ophelia, she means she was born
too late to be a woman of Shakespeare’s time,
which implies not just that she was not alive during this period but that women have changed since
the early seventeenth century and, perhaps, are less
likely to drown for their lovers. The speaker also
says she is too old to be Ophelia, who is probably
quite young in Hamlet and who the speaker describes as “pimply,” like an adolescent girl.
Stanza 2
In the second stanza, the speaker imagines herself drowning—as Ophelia does in Shakespeare’s
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play after Hamlet has abandoned her and killed her
father, and she has gone mad. The speaker describes this drowning in the first person, but
throughout stanzas 1 and 2 she is imagining the
event as if she were Ophelia. Therefore, she is commenting on the significance of the drowning in
Hamlet. It becomes clear as the poem progresses
that this drowning is a symbol for Hamlet and
Ophelia’s relationship, a kind of relationship the
speaker does not want to have with her lover.
The speaker uses the verb “let” to begin the
second stanza, implying she is allowing or even
willing herself to drown. She describes her hair as
“flattened wheat,” as though it will be made into
bread. The second line describes her hair spreading
over the “dark” water, and the next lines imagine
her eyes floating beside the water lilies, disturbing
them. Lilies are associated with purity and virginity, which implies the speaker’s eyes are pure, but
since they “upset” the water lilies, there is also the
implication that there is something disturbing and
unsettling about this kind of purity and virginity. It
seems as though her lily-white eyes are somehow
floating disconnected from her head, which suggests
that the drowning is quite gruesome.
Stanza 3
The third stanza continues to describe the
speaker’s imagined drowning. The first line makes
use of the poetic device of repetition, using the Serbian word for fishes, ribi, twice in a row to describe
the speaker gliding “fishlike between fishes.” The
Serbian phrase is medju ribe ribi nalik, literally
“between fish like fishes,” and it underscores the
speaker’s underwater motion, making it seem as
though she actually is a fish and not a person. In
its first three lines, this stanza also repeats Da, the
word for “that” and “yes,” which is another example of the device of repetition that Lazić uses to
emphasize that the speaker is sinking deeper and
deeper in the water.
In the second line of this stanza, the speaker
compares herself to a “dead seashell,” which suggests she will eventually wash up on shore, perhaps
implying that Ophelia will come back to haunt the
land or that Ophelia’s death will become a lesson
for people who walk along the beach. The speaker
then imagines herself at the bottom of the water,
burrowing into the “sand next to shipwrecks of
love.” This phrase raises the question of whether
Ophelia’s relationship with Hamlet was like a shipwreck of love, or whether it is “next to” a shipwreck of love—not itself a shipwreck because the
couple were not really in love at all.
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The final image of the speaker drowning like
Ophelia is an “amphora,” which is a large vase of
the kind used in ancient Greece, with an egg-shaped
body and a narrow cylindrical neck. Since amphorae are associated with classical civilization,
this image makes the idea of a drowned woman
like Ophelia seem as though she is a relic of the
ancient past. Also, the fact that the speaker imagines herself as an amphora “entangled in seaweeds”
reinforces the idea that there is something disturbing and undesirable about Ophelia’s relationship
with Hamlet.
Stanza 4
This stanza marks the turning point in the
poem, when the speaker shifts from a description
of the kind of relationship she does not want to
have, to one that she prefers. Instead of a romanticized but nonphysical relationship like that of Hamlet and Ophelia, the speaker would like her lover
to take off her dress. It is important to note that in
Shakespeare’s play it is Ophelia’s dress that drags
her down into the water and drowns her. The
poem’s speaker wishes to be free of this burden,
and she compares the dress to “aspen leaves” tossed
about in the wind. Aspen leaves would normally
float in the water, which implies that the speaker
has no wish to drown for her lover.
In the third and fourth lines of the stanza, the
speaker continues her description of the aspen
leaves that represent her dress. When she states that
the wind shakes these leaves “without permission
/ As if there’s nothing to it,” she implies that she
is like the aspen tree and her lover is like the wind,
effortlessly taking off her dress. This is significant
because he does it “without permission,” either because there is no need for permission or because
he does not wait for it. Because the wind is normally associated with inconstancy, this also seems
to suggest that their relationship is in some way
fleeting, or perhaps that physical intimacy comes
easily to them and is not a big deal.
Stanza 5
The last two lines of the poem cast doubt on
the idea that the speaker’s relationship with her
lover is fleeting or inconsequential, calling the kind
of relationship in which the speaker’s lover takes
off her dress a “death sentence,” just as the kind of
love that ends with a woman drowning is a death
sentence. The speaker says she would prefer this
death sentence, in which her lover’s arms are
around her neck for “eternity” over a death sentence by drowning, but the fact remains that they
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Topics
For Further
Study
• The themes of “Death Sentences” are explored
throughout Lazić’s collection. Read the rest of
A Wake for the Living, and discuss how the other
poems relate to the opener. How does a further
knowledge of Lazić’s work affect your view of
the poem? Choose one or two of the poems that
you feel bear an important relationship to “Death
Sentences,” and then compare and contrast
them, discussing how themes such as feminism,
sexuality, death, and love are treated similarly
and/or differently.
• Research and write an essay discussing the history of Serbia since 1990, including Lazić’s role
in the civil resistance movement and her work
as an activist. How do you think the country’s
conflicts have affected her poetry? Describe any
traces of the Serbian political climate that you
both end in her death. The image of the lovers arms
around the speaker’s neck evokes the image of an
execution, as though a noose is around her neck or
she is being strangled.
Themes
Feminism
Lazić is a celebrated feminist, so it is no surprise that her work comments on a variety of
themes related to women’s issues. Ophelia is one
of literature’s classic examples of an oppressed and
inhibited woman, and “Death Sentences” points out
the sexism involved in the way that Hamlet and the
rest of society treat her. Since long tentacles such
as seaweeds often symbolize the instruments of
male power, it is even possible that the seaweeds
that “entangle” the speaker represent some dark,
male force holding her underwater. This would imply that Ophelia is part of a patriarchal, or maledominated, system that keeps her under control,
drives her mad, and is responsible for her death.
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notice in “Death Sentences” or other poems
from A Wake for the Living.
• Read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and discuss the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia. How would
you describe Ophelia’s character? How does her
relationship with Hamlet relate to the main themes
of the play? What does Hamlet’s interaction with
Ophelia reveal about Hamlet’s character? Why
does Ophelia go mad? Explain your responses.
• Research how Ophelia has been used as a symbol in works of literature, psychology, sociology,
philosophy, or history in the centuries since
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. How do various authors approach her character? How does she tend
to be referenced and in what major contexts? How
has she been represented and what function does
she serve in women’s studies and feminism?
Lazić does not imply that Ophelia is a defiant
victim of Hamlet. The verbs that the speaker uses
to describe the drowning imply that Ophelia may
believe in the patriarchal values that lead to her
death. For example, the verb “let,” which begins
the description of Ophelia’s, suggests that Ophelia
is allowing herself to drown. Similarly, the fact that
Ophelia “burrow[s]” into the sand makes it sound
as though she is burying herself on purpose. This
may imply that Ophelia is trying to kill herself, or
it may suggest that it is as though a woman in a relationship like Ophelia’s is steering herself toward
tragedy. The idea that Ophelia is an active force in
her own death sentence does not necessarily shift
any blame on her, but it does suggest that patriarchal values are powerful enough to seem natural
and right to those suffering under them.
Lazić leaves these questions open, and the final couplet stresses that she treats the theme of feminism ambiguously. This couplet implies that the
scenario of being sexually intimate with Hamlet is
like a death sentence, with the man’s arms around
the speaker’s neck like a noose. A modern, sexually free relationship is therefore like Ophelia’s
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romanticized, dependent, repressed relationship in
the sense that both of them lead to an “eternity”
that is like being condemned to death. This does
not stop the speaker from recognizing that she
would vastly prefer sexual liberation to an oppressive, inhibited relationship like Ophelia’s. Lazić
appears to be implying that contemporary relationships have significant, harmful inequalities, but that
some progress has been made from a world in
which women could not derive pleasure from their
male oppressors.
Romantic and Sexual Love
Lazić’s commentary on love and sex in “Death
Sentences” is related to her theme of feminism. She
presents two very different kinds of heterosexual
relationships in order to consider the true nature of
intimacy. The first type of relationship she depicts
is that between Ophelia and Hamlet. The historical
context section, below, provides a description of
this tragic couple’s story, but from Lazić’s poem
alone it should be clear that their relationship is
caught up in naive, dependent, and romantic conventions of the past. Ophelia is in no way independent or free; she idealizes Hamlet and is so
crushed when he abandons her and kills her father
that she goes mad and drowns. Their relationship
is not physical; it is based on Ophelia’s youthful
infatuation with Hamlet. In Lazić’s view of this traditional form of romance, therefore, the woman is
inhibited and victimized by her devotion to the
man, whom she idealizes and on whom she is entirely dependent.
The second type of love Lazić portrays is characterized by mature, middle-aged physical intimacy and sex. The speaker says in the first line that
she is “too old”—unlike the “pimply” and therefore youthful Ophelia—and the speaker’s statement
that taking off her dress is like the wind shaking
an aspen tree “without permission / As if there’s
nothing to it” suggests the free and open sexuality
of someone whose romantic illusions have been
lost. Lazić can be a humorous poet, and in one sense
these lines are both funny and joyful, celebrating
the pleasure of sexual love despite its difficulties.
Both types of romance have their problems,
and the idea of free love is partly undermined by
the fact that like traditional, idealistic love it is a
“death sentence” that hangs around the speaker’s
neck. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the
speaker vastly prefers a free, sexual, mature type
of relationship. In fact, it is possible to read the
poem in an entirely lighthearted manner, in which
it is actually an ironic celebration of free love
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without obligations. This simply requires taking the
poem’s final couplet as an ironic statement, or a
joke, in which Lazić implies that a relationship of
free love is not an eternal death sentence at all but
exactly the opposite: a temporary joy.
Style
Conceit
In poetry, a “conceit” refers to an elaborate and
extended metaphor. A metaphor is a word or phrase
that is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or comparison between them, and a conceit
can carry one metaphor across many stanzas and
through many different situations. Conceits are not
as common as they were in seventeenth-century
England, for example, but Lazić uses one when she
employs Shakespeare’s character of Ophelia as a
metaphor for the speaker of “Death Sentences.”
The speaker begins by saying she is not like Ophelia, but then she spends the next two stanzas imagining herself as Hamlet’s abandoned lover, sinking
in the water and drowning. This entire comparison
is a conceit.
Poets often use conceits to shed light on the object or event being replaced by the metaphor, and
conceits allow the reader to picture something in a
new and different way. Lazić’s conceit in “Death
Sentences” is the chief means by which she conveys
the type of relationship the speaker does not want.
It also allows Lazić to comment effectively on the
themes of feminism and love, because Ophelia’s situation is an apt way to symbolize the poet’s ideas
about a traditional and idealized view of love in an
oppressive, patriarchal society. In fact, the conceit
provides the basis for the entire structure of the poem
because the concept of “Death Sentences”—that is,
the poet’s commentary on female oppression—as
well as the speaker’s idea of free sexual love are both
derived from this poetic device.
Apostrophe
Apostrophe is a word and concept that comes
from ancient Greek drama; it refers to a poet or
speaker turning from the audience as a whole to
address a single person or thing. “Death Sentences”
is an example of apostrophe because the speaker
addresses the entire poem to “Hamlet,” her lover.
Apostrophe is a useful poetic device because it immediately places the text into a particular context;
it gives the language a specific function and reminds the reader that writing and speaking are
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means of communication between people. This
context is important in Lazić’s poem because it develops the speaker’s character by showing how she
interacts with her lover, and it allows the reader the
pleasure and interest of feeling a part of the situation, as if s/he were reading a private letter.
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assassinated in Belgrade two years later. Shortly
before Djindjic’s assassination, Yugoslavia was officially replaced by a loose union of Serbia and
Montenegro, the only remaining republics of the
Yugoslav Federation.
Hamlet and Ophelia
Historical Context
Serbia and the Former Yugoslavia
Serbia had been part of the communist Yugoslav Federation since the end of World War II
when, in the late 1980s, Yugoslavia began to dissolve into various republics with nationalistic aspirations. Slovenia and Croatia were the first to
break away. Because of a territorial dispute with
Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian nationalist politician and leader of Yugoslavia at this time, a civil
war began in Croatia. By 1992, a further conflict
had broken out in Bosnia, which had also declared
independence. Serbs drove Bosnian Muslims from
their homes and killed many, a course of action
later described as “ethnic cleansing.” By 1993, the
Bosnian Muslim government was besieged in the
capitol, Sarajevo, while Serbian forces controlled
70 percent of the republic. Bosnian Muslim forces
were also fighting with Bosnian Croats, who
wanted to be part of a greater Croatia. United Nations peacekeepers were ineffective in controlling
the situation. However, by 1995, a peace agreement
had been reached.
In 1998, another conflict began, in the
republic of Kosovo, where an army supported by
its majority, ethnic Albanians, rebelled against Serbian rule. The international community supported
greater autonomy for ethnic Albanians but opposed
their bid for independence. The powers of the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
warned Milosevic, still the Serbian leader, to bring
an end to violence in the region. When this diplomacy failed, NATO began to launch air strikes
against Yugoslavia in March 1999. Kosovar Albanian refugees then began pouring out of the region with accounts of ethnically motivated violence
against them, and United Nations peacekeepers
took control of the region.
Milosevic fell from power as a result of the
2000 elections; he refused to accept the electoral
results, but a popular uprising forced him to leave
office. In June 2001, Milosevic was extradited to
the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague
by Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who was
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Hamlet and Ophelia are central characters
from Shakespeare’s famous play Hamlet, which focuses on the period after Hamlet’s father, the king
of Denmark, has died, and his father’s brother,
Claudius, has married Hamlet’s mother, Queen
Gertrude. The slain king appears to Hamlet as a
ghost and reveals that his brother, Hamlet’s uncle,
poisoned him in order to usurp the throne. Hamlet
vows revenge but is torn over how to respond, and
the other characters begin to wonder whether he
has gone mad. Ophelia, the daughter of a foolish
but loyal lord called Polonius, has by this point revealed that Hamlet has lately expressed his love for
her, but Polonius has forbidden her to talk to him
because he believes that Hamlet’s affections for his
daughter are trifling and unserious. Ophelia therefore rejects Hamlet’s letters and refuses to see him.
When Polonius sees Hamlet acting as though
he is mad, he decides the cause of this must be
Hamlet’s love for Ophelia. Polonius therefore regrets that he has forbidden his daughter to speak
with Hamlet and arranges with King Claudius to
hide and watch Hamlet interact with Ophelia so that
Polonius and Claudius may know whether Hamlet
is actually in love with Ophelia. When Hamlet
meets Ophelia, he rejects her entirely and tells her,
“Get thee to a nunnery.” During the course of
events that follow, Hamlet hears someone hiding
in his mother’s bedchamber and stabs him from behind a curtain, discovering afterwards that it was
Polonius. Hamlet departs for England and avoids
Claudius’s plot to have him murdered, but meanwhile Ophelia learns of her father’s death and goes
insane. Ophelia’s brother Laertes returns from
France when he hears of his father’s death and, seeing his sister insane, vows revenge on Hamlet.
While Laertes is plotting with Claudius to poison Hamlet, Queen Gertrude enters to announce
that Ophelia has drowned. In a famous, romantic
passage, Gertrude describes how Ophelia was
hanging in the boughs of a willow tree with many
garlands of flowers when the branch broke and she
fell into the water. Her clothes first held her up,
and she sang “snatches of old tunes, / As one incapable of her own distress” as she floated along,
but then her garments became soaked and dragged
her to her “muddy death.” Laertes and Hamlet both
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impression in the English-speaking critical community. For example, in her review of the book for
Library Journal, Heather Wright praises Lazić’s
“honest and straightforward style” and calls Lazić’s
work “illuminating.” Similarly, in a review for
Booklist, Patricia Monaghan characterizes A Wake
for the Living as a “startling, bold, assertively sexual work” filled with “stunningly unsentimental poetry” that may for some readers “be unsettling” but
for others will offer “a welcome breath of truth.”
In the Washington Post, Edward Hirsch calls
A Wake for the Living “utterly convincing” and
notes, “Lazić writes as a feminist with a dark sense
of humor and a surreal imagination.” Hirsch goes
on to discuss what he calls a “dialectic operating
in Lazić’s work,” an ambivalence also discussed by
other critics of Lazić’s work.
Criticism
Scott Trudell
Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses Lazić’s commentary on
love, sex, and desire, arguing that the opening
poem of A Wake for the Living establishes the
paradoxical view of love that the poet will explore
throughout the collection.
Ophelia by John William Waterhouse
leap into Ophelia’s grave during her funeral, before
the final climactic tragedy, during which Claudius,
Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet all die.
Critical Overview
Although “Death Sentences” has received little individual attention, A Wake for the Living received
favorable reviews upon its publication in 2003.
Lazić has long been a respected and influential poet
in Serbia, but this collection was her first book
translated into English, and it has made a positive
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“Death Sentences,” the first poem in A Wake
for the Living, is an extremely effective opener. It
draws in the reader with the exciting and joyous moment of the speaker finding the “eternity” of her
lover’s “arms around [her] neck.” Since this moment
is also a “death sentence,” however, it establishes a
complex paradox about sex, desire, death, and life
that leads readers, intrigued, to follow these themes
throughout Lazić’s collection. The book is full of
such paradoxes; it juxtaposes images of death and
despair with those of life and joy until they become
profoundly confused, and the poems consistently
view these contradictions in terms of sex and desire.
This essay will argue that the central paradox of
“Death Sentences,” that death and despair coexist
with sexual and romantic joy, is a crucial revelation
that reappears throughout A Wake for the Living.
Critics such as Edward Hirsch recognize this
“dialectic,” as Hirsch calls it in his December 2003
Washington Post column, as one of Lazić’s central
themes:
There is a kind of dialectic operating in Lazić’s work
between irony and ecstasy, between the wisdom of
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long experience, which teaches her that “the time of
miracles is behind us,” and the innocence of fresh
desire, which keeps surprising her with its bright
insistence.
In “Death Sentences,” this dialectic at first appears to be a debate between old and new ideas of
sex, love, desire, and intimate relationships. Thus,
Ophelia is associated with drowning in old conventions while the speaker and her ideas about free
love are associated with feminism and contemporary relationships. During the course of the poem,
Ophelia’s traditional, oppressed, outmoded idea of
romantic love seems to give way to the new possibilities of a liberated female spirit.
Indeed, Lazić makes it clear, here and in poems such as “Evergreen,” that she is a proponent of
feminism and free love with no desire to return to
the oppressive conditions of the past. “Evergreen”
attacks the many varieties of women like Ophelia
who Lazić disdains: “I’ve had enough of lonely
women. / Sad. Miserable. Abandoned women.” The
speaker of this poem stresses that she wants nothing to do with “faithful wives with their eyes lowered” and their lovers, who are “Loved to death till
death do us part.” Instead of this inhibited romanticism, Lazić imagines a kind of love after death “do
us part,” in which she jumps “Into everyone’s throat
or heart, / So I can be born again in labor pains.”
It is interesting that this liberated idea of love
is so closely associated with violence and death; its
final image is the decapitated head of the speaker’s
lover on her belly, like the biblical image of the
severed head of John the Baptist that Salome requests to be brought to her on a plate. This is a startling and somewhat confusing image, introduced
by the paradox “I’d do everything the same way
and everything differently,” as though the speaker
would like to act out the traditional and historical
attitudes toward love after all, both as they have
been acted out in the past and in new, different
ways. Unsure how to interpret these lines, the
reader is left contemplating a paradox in which two
kinds of love that initially seemed nothing alike are
revealed to be quite similar. Although a modern
view of love seems more joyful and desirable, both
types are closely tied to death and hopelessness.
“Death Sentences” reveals a similarly difficult
and troubling paradox in its final stanza. It is true
that Ophelia’s idea of sexual desire—a classic example of the idealized, romanticized, oppressed,
and inhibited love that, in times past, a woman was
meant to feel for a man—is presented as something
outdated and undesirable. Yet the fact remains that
the speaker’s idea of love is also a “death sentence”
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The poem, therefore,
is not a dialectic between
two different ideas of love,
one of them associated with
death and the other with
life, as much as one vision
of love in which death and
life are varying, coexisting
forces.”
in which her lover’s arms are around her neck like
the noose of a hanging rope. Lazić envisions this
mature idea of love, in which the speaker’s dress
falls from her body like leaves fall from the trees,
as an “eternity” of winter.
The poem, therefore, is not a dialectic between
two different ideas of love, one of them associated
with death and the other with life, as much as one
vision of love in which death and life are varying,
coexisting forces. Ophelia and the speaker are both
faced with hopeless death sentences, and the main
distinction is that the speaker prefers to enjoy life
while it lasts. The speaker also wishes to be free of
the oppressive, male-dominated conventions of the
past, but Lazić implies that this may not be possible. If the speaker were truly free from these conventions, Lazić would be unlikely to portray the
man taking off her dress like the wind shaking off
the leaves “without permission,” as though the
wind were the same kind of overwhelming natural
force as the water that drowns Ophelia. Indeed,
the image of Ophelia “entangled in seaweeds” is
similar to the speaker entangled in her lovers
arms; both of these tentacle-like objects seem to
be instruments carrying out the women’s death
sentences.
“Come and Lie Next to Me” is another poem
that brings up problems that Lazić recognizes in socalled free love, and it emphasizes perhaps more explicitly, but with some of the same imagery as that
of “Death Sentences,” that all types of love involve
paradoxical extremes of life, death, joy, and despair.
The reader knows that the type of love in “Come
and Lie Next to Me” is liberated, mature love
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1601) is one of the most
important plays of all time and one of literature’s
most profound meditations on meaning, existence, and numerous other themes. It tells the
story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and his
struggle to avenge his father’s murder.
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1995), by clinical psychologist Mary
Pipher, describes the difficult and oppressive
world that young girls face in contemporary
American society and offers suggestions about
how to support them.
• Contemporary Yugoslav Poetry (1977), translated by Charles Simic and edited by Vasa D.
Mihailovich, is a good source for exploring
some of the best post–World War II Yugoslavian poets, such as Matija Beckovic and Milos
Crnjanski.
• Charles Simic’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The
World Doesn’t End (1989) is an innovative collection of untitled prose poems that refer to
numerous historical, religious, and philosophical figures.
because the speaker says, “I need your love muscle
only,” stressing that she has no romantic illusions.
Yet this type of love is like Ophelia’s in the sense
that it is self-sacrificial and demeaning: “I give you
my body on credit, / My soul on the layaway plan.”
Although this implies that the speaker will regain
her body and soul, it is nevertheless an image of
subservience, and the poem’s final couplet reinforces this sense of inequality: “Outside the leaves
are falling / Like meat from the bone.”
However much Lazić’s speaker is a carnivore
who desires to take advantage of her lover as much
as he takes advantage of her, the fact remains that
love is consistently outside the realm of “Truth and
justice, the higher pursuits,” which in “Come and
Lie Next to Me” were “invented / So they can
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separate us.” Whenever Lazić condemns traditional
conventions of love, as she does with marriage in
“Conjugal Bed,” she also recognizes that all love is
in some way conventional, and all relationships contain an element of violent and oppressive deadliness.
This is why the Shakespearean reference in “Conjugal Bed,” like the reference to Hamlet and Ophelia in “Death Sentence,” is a confusing paradox:
This bed is not a grave for us to lie in.
Neither are we Romeo and Juliet
For tears to be shed over our corpses,
And giving a wake for the living is intolerable.
Although Lazić is sincere in her condemnation
of Romeo and Juliet’s naive, idealistic, deadly love,
she is somewhat ironic about the speaker’s statement that a wake for the living is “intolerable.” Her
collection implies by its title that its poems will be
like “A Wake for the Living,” and the title does, in
fact, turn out to be an apt description of Lazić’s
paradoxical themes, particularly those of sex and
love. Throughout the book, love is like a wake for
the living in the sense that it brings a ritual of death
into the experience of life. Lazić also implies, however, that love brings life into death, since a wake
is a final moment to experience the semblance of
life in a dead body. While she continually portrays
the middle-aged female desire for sex as something
that brings joy and life into a woman’s world, Lazić
simultaneously stresses that middle-aged sex is like
acting out a despairing and hopeless “funeral
march,” as it is called in “Evergreen.”
The remarkable thing about “Death Sentences”
is that within five short stanzas it so effectively establishes this complex and paradoxical notion of
love, sex, and desire, which will recur throughout
A Wake for the Living. Lazić is able to accomplish
this partly by repeatedly introducing paradoxes into
the poem, beginning with the contradictory idea she
was born too late and yet is too old to be like Ophelia. The paradoxes continue in stanzas 2 and 3,
where the imagery is carefully balanced between
romanticized metaphor and gruesome reality, with
juxtaposed phrases like “floating water lilies” and
“floating eyes.” The imagery of Ophelia floating
like an amphora entangled in the seaweeds continues to emphasize this sense of contradiction, since
it is unclear whether this ancient, precious object
is submerged and drowned or simply floating
within the weedy tentacles.
In stanza 4, Lazić introduces the image of the
speaker naked like a barren willow tree that the
wind has stripped of its leaves. There seems to be
a contradiction because the speaker prefers that her
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lover take off her dress, but the wind seems to purposefully shake the tree and make it bare “without
permission,” suggesting that the wind/lover has
taken advantage or used force even though to the
wind/lover it seems “As if there’s nothing to it.”
Finally, Lazić presents the key contradiction
of the poem: that this new, free love is joyous and
filled with pleasure at the same time as it is an eternal “death sentence,” with the lover’s arms around
the speaker’s neck both as a noose and as a passionate embrace. All of this imagery suggests that
love is not a straightforward struggle between joy
and cynicism, life and death, good and evil, but an
expression of wonderment that all of these ideas
coexist in a paradoxical manner. After she has established this paradox of love, sex, and desire,
Lazić is free to explore these themes throughout
the rest of the collection, using “Death Sentences”
as a keynote for the true nature of love.
Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on “Death Sentences,”
in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Laura Carter
Carter is currently working as freelance
writer. In this essay, Carter considers the author’s
powerful use of imagery and language to transcend
her own perceptions of death.
A simple reading of Radmila Lazić’s “Death
Sentences” reveals an interesting, often surreal look
into the realm of death. But to simply view the work
as a juxtaposition or side-by-side comparison of
death to that of a Shakespearean tragedy is a careless underestimation of the emotive and spiritual
power that lies beneath the work’s surface. Upon
closer examination of what appear to be innocuous
or bland symbols, the poem takes on a psychological, emotional, and spiritual depth in its exploration of death, hitting a nerve that taps into the
very pulse of human experience.
Lazić’s poem begins with a paradox. The
speaker cannot go back in time; her dilemma, that
she “was born too late” yet she is “much too old,”
presents the reader with a riddle to solve. The answer lies in the Elizabethan references appearing
in the two lines immediately following in stanza 1.
Addressing Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” the speaker
wryly acknowledges that she could never fit the
role of a “pimply Ophelia.” These three lines mirror the complexities of the Shakespearean tragedy.
Like the speaker, Hamlet often spoke in riddles. In
fact, one of the major themes of the play involves
the idea of appearances versus reality. There is an
underlying madness to the play and as the audience
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Through the eyes
of the speaker, death in
the poem comes to the
reader much like an old
photograph, a collection of
dull hues, of browns,
silvers, and dark greens,
of flattened wheat,
glimmering fish and
floating lily pads.”
discovers, the truth is often elusive. Hamlet’s father’s death, for example, is made to look like an
accident but is really a well-planned murder. Likewise, Prince Hamlet’s ascent to the throne is on the
surface logical, but the audience soon learns that
he is a murderer. Finally, it is Hamlet’s feigned or
contrived madness that serves to drive Ophelia to
insanity and eventually death.
To begin a contemplation of death with this particular Shakespearean reference is fitting to the
topic. It is in Hamlet that the question of existence
and death is raised in act 3, scene 1: “To be, or not
to be; that is the question.” Throughout the play,
Shakespeare challenges notions of death. In act 1,
scene 2, Shakespeare asserts, “All that lives must
die, Passing through nature to eternity.” Death is explored not only in the brutal murders of several people but in the tragic death of Ophelia, who, it could
be argued, was murdered by Hamlet’s deceptions.
For instance, it is in her madness that Ophelia passes
out flowers. Particularly significant is the rosemary
she gives to Laertes, a symbol of remembrance used
in funerals, foreshadowing her own death in asking
her brother not to forget her. It is in this state of
madness that Ophelia dies. The tragedy of death, including Ophelia’s, pervades much of the play, leaving the audience to sort out, and make sense of, not
only a series of brutal murders but the death of a
young, innocent, lovesick girl.
In stanzas 2 and 3 of Lazić’s poem, the speaker’s
contemplation of death continues in a series of images of her body eerily floating in dark waters, from
its fishlike glide amongst shimmering fish bodies,
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to its final submergence in the water, like a dead
seashell or a shipwreck. The references in stanza 2
again stir up memories of the play for the reader.
The speaker’s body is described as a ghostly apparition suspended in the water, alluding to the
ghosts that haunt Prince Hamlet. Like the speaker’s
body, Ophelia’s also found its watery grave. In act
4, scene 7 of Shakespeare’s play, Ophelia, attempting to hang floral wreaths from a tree overlooking
a pond, falls in and sinks into its muddy depths,
eventually pulled down by the weight of her watersoaked clothing. The speaker of the poem recalls
the death of Ophelia, her lifeless body submerged
in the pond, likening it to “shipwrecks of love.”
The speaker visits the Shakespearean tragedy,
not to identify with the drowning victim, but to emphasize her own relationship with death. Ophelia
died a young, beautiful, innocent woman who was
tragically in love. In the end, it was Ophelia’s love
for Hamlet that literally drove her mad. In consideration of Ophelia’s tragedy, the speaker of the
poem, on speaking of her own death, is quick to
suggest that she is no “pimply Ophelia.” The reference betrays Ophelia’s immaturity and is used by
the speaker to contrast or compare herself to the
young tragic figure. It serves to emphasize the
speaker’s age and wisdom, suggesting that perhaps
because of her age not only would she not suffer
death in the same manner but that her death would
not be a tragedy. She acknowledges that her death
will not be an untimely event, like Ophelia’s, but
a logical consequence of age.
The speaker’s meaning in this clever yet powerful juxtaposition (or side-by-side comparison) of
her impending death with Shakespeare’s tragedy is
also asserted in stanza 3, line 4, when the speaker
identifies herself as “I, the amphora,” which “Burrow[s] in sand next to shipwrecks of love.” Amphora, often mentioned in ancient Greek literature,
were tall, slender vessels used by the Greeks for
the preservation of wine, oil, honey, and fruits that
required special keeping. They were also used for
cinerary urns, or vessels housing cremated remains
of the dead. Their pointed bases were purposely designed as a foothold to position them upright in the
sand or soil. This image serves to contrast the
“shipwreck of love” or tragic accident that characterized Ophelia’s death. The speaker identifies herself not with the shipwreck but with the dual image
of the amphora, one of a stately vessel housing a
delicate wine or “treasure” that only gets finer with
age; the other, a ceremonial vessel housing her own
remains. The amphora was created for a specific
intent or use and, by extension, the speaker’s
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identification with the Greek object solidifies the
assertion that her death is to be expected.
In drawing a parallel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet
with respect to Lazić’s work, the initial interpretation would be to view “Death Sentences” as one
poet’s morbid resignation to the inevitability of
death. Certainly, on the surface, the speaker paints
a bleak picture. The speaker’s lamentation in the
opening lines of the poem, particularly the first line
of stanza 1, is a paradox out of time, out of sync,
mimicking the timelessness of death and the incomprehensible interruption this event can create.
Through the eyes of the speaker, death in the poem
comes to the reader much like an old photograph, a
collection of dull hues, of browns, silvers, and dark
greens, of flattened wheat, glimmering fish and floating lily pads. Redemption does come for the speaker
in stanzas 4 and 5. She welcomes death as if it were
a lover holding her in a sensual embrace, preferring
death to come “take off my dress,” imagining it
falling at her “feet like aspen leaves,” her death sentence an “Eternity of your arms around my neck.”
Returning to stanza 2 of the poem illuminates
the speaker’s ecstatic experience with death at the
end of the work. Significantly, her body is described
as having “upset the floating water lilies.” The image of the water lily, or the lotus, is a powerful religious symbol. In its natural state, the lotus flower
is rooted in the depths of muddy ponds or swamps,
its dark green leaves floating on the surface. The lotus emerges from its muddy depths to the surface
where it blossoms into a pure white flower. It has
been said to symbolize the manifestation of the universal Buddha nature or Christ Consciousness inherent equally in all life, universal images of
immortality and resurrection. It is a symbol of spiritual evolvement. Particularly, Buddhist and Hindu
deities are often portrayed holding a lotus blossom
or are seated on a lotus; therefore, it is associated
with achieving one’s highest potential in the spiritual world. Amanda F. Rooke says in “The Lotus,”
Lotus relate to creation, regeneration, and the state
of the initiative and higher beings, all of whom travel
through life’s vicissitudes and trials to become at one
with the creative source of life in order to return and
spread its light to other receptive souls.
The “aspen leaves” mentioned in stanza 4 are
an equally important mystical symbol in the work.
Universally the aspen leaf is traditionally associated
with an excess of sensibility and fear. According to
Christian folklore, for example, all of the trees
bowed in sorrow when Christ was crucified, with
the exception of the aspen, whose pride and arrogance doomed its leaves to eternal trembling.
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Considering the powerful symbolism behind the
lotus and the aspen leaves leads the reader to another
conclusion. Reexamining the poem, the reader experiences a marked shift between the first three stanzas and the last two. The work begins in resignation
as the speaker laments certain death. By the end of
the work, the redemptive powers of the dark waters
in which she was submerged have taken effect, her
view of death moving from one of sorrow to great
elation. At this point, the speaker reaches her own
enlightenment; she is, in a sense, reborn. A religious
reading of the poem reveals a woman who in the end
is welcoming her death as if she were recalling the
Rapture, or Christ’s return, with the open arms of an
eager lover. The poem abruptly shifts as she willingly sheds her fear, symbolized in the effortless
shedding of her dress “like aspen leaves.” Her death
sentence is no sentence at all but the promise of an
eternity of bliss in the loving arms of Christ.
Radmila Lazić’s “Death Sentences” fittingly
ends in mimicking the very words of Shakespeare
in Measure for Measure who states “If I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in
mine arms.” This quote mirrors a determination on
Shakespeare’s part to welcome death as a new and
exciting experience. So, too, does Lazić’s work.
The poem beautifully moves through the speaker’s
own fear and grief concerning her impending death,
past acceptance to a state of excitement and bliss
as she contemplates her adventure into a new realm.
The complexities and economies of language and
of imagery illuminate the psychological, emotional,
and spiritual depths to which the poet so artfully
submerges herself to explain a realm beyond human comprehension, encouraging readers to join
her with open arms.
Source: Laura Carter, Critical Essay on “Death Sentences,”
in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
John Taylor
In the following review, Taylor notes Lazić’s
“unexpected perspectives” and the sense of individuality in her poetry.
Lazic (b. 1949) is a Serbian feminist and was
the founder of the Civil Resistance Movement during the Milosevic years. Yet it would be a mistake
to confine these 36 poems, which have been vividly
translated by Charles Simic, to the specific realms
of political poetry or women’s literature.
Above all, Lazic writes about sensing and accepting one’s body as perishable matter nonetheless capable of giving and receiving exalted sexual
pleasure; and thus about boldly asserting one’s
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individuality—in the face of inevitable death—
through such pleasure. In her forthright evocations,
she often rejects all concomitant aspirations for
lasting relationships. “Many times I fell in love forever,” she admits in “Sorry, My Lord,” “My heart
was a hot stove. / Now the jug is broken. / Let there
be sex unsustained by love / Is my slogan now.”
Such lines build on the lucid eroticism of any
number of European folksongs, not to mention the
lyrics of our own (uncensored) Blues. In her
“Dorothy Parker Blues,” Lazic notably avows:
“I’m putting on my black panties, / Covering my
still-hairy crotch. / I paint my lips, fluff my hair, /
Climb on a pair of heels. / I’m ready for you.” Yet
after several like assertions, this telltale confession
suddenly appears in italics: “I’m writing my life
hour by hour.”
By means of such phrases, Lazic often adds
unexpected perspectives to her funny, ribald lyricism. “The history of solitude is long,” she more
quietly notes elsewhere, “It’s made up of a string
of individuals / That resemble one another like
blades of grass . . . / Each speaks one of the dead
languages / The way a lake speaks with its silence.”
A vigorous antidote to prudery and moral correctness (“goodness is boring,” she quips), A Wake for
the Living simultaneously explores existential loneliness and hopelessness. The title perfectly sums up
this deeper ambivalence.
Source: John Taylor, Review of A Wake for the Living, in
Antioch Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, Summer 2004, p. 584.
Heather Wright
In the following review, Wright praises Lazić
for being “honest and straightforward” and for her
sense of humor.
Poetry readers will welcome this bilingual collection, the first English translation of works by Serbian poet and activist Lazic, who founded the Civil
Resistance Movement against Milosevic’s tyranny.
Lazic is honest and straightforward, whether she’s
commenting on crumbling relationships (“In my
eyes you’re a wet matchstick / I’m a package of
meat in the freezer of your chest”), detailing the
ways in which war has affected daily life (“He was
on his way home / To a country / Whose citizens
return / Like blind travelers / Without daydreams,
without tears”), or describing the approach of old
age (“I’ll be a wicked old woman / Thin as a rail”).
Her poetry is often sexually open, with strong images and language often centering on her sharp
sense of humor (“I don’t want to follow the leaden
movement of the watchbands, / Nor see falling
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stars / For him to gore me drunkenly like an elephant”, realizing “Alleluia! Alleluia! / I don’t want
a bridegroom”). Effectively translated by Pulitzer
Prize–winning poet Simic, this illuminating work is
recommended for contemporary poetry collections.
Lazić, Radmila, “Death Sentences,” in A Wake for the Living, translated by Charles Simic, Graywolf Press, 2003, pp.
2–3, 31, 83, 89–91.
Source: Heather Wright, Review of A Wake for the Living, in
Library Journal, Vol. 128, No. 20, December 15, 2003, p. 1.
Rooke, Amanda, “The Lotus,” in Sunrise, Theosophical
University Press, 2002.
Patricia Monaghan
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, in The Complete Works,
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 653–90.
In the following review, Monaghan calls the collection “startling, bold, assertively sexual work.”
This collection of the startling, bold, assertively
sexual work of one of Serbia’s most prominent
poets voices a theme rarely explored in literature,
the desires of women in mid-life. Lazic typically
relies on imagery from nature to express her explosive passion: “Every flattened rose / Is dearer to
me than the erection of buds / Or the whoring bee
and flower,” she says in “Autumn Ode.” But there
is nothing romantic or bucolic about her; her language is contemporary, casual, occasionally coarse,
as when she calls a younger rival “that ass-wiggling
bitch.” She isn’t interested in marriage, only sex:
“I won’t share my solitude with anyone. / I came
to know the bliss of departure,” she says in one
poem, then lists her life’s pleasures: “A few lines
about poetry, / My head next to someone’s navel.
Yes!” Lazić’s stunningly unsentimental poetry will
probably be unsettling to some, a welcome breath
of truth to others.
Source: Patricia Monaghan, Review of A Wake for the Living, in Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 5, November 1, 2003, p. 473.
Sources
Hirsch, Edward, “Poet’s Choice,” in Washington Post,
December 21, 2003, p. BW12.
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Monaghan, Patricia, Review of A Wake for the Living, in
Booklist, Vol. 100, No. 5, November 1, 2003, p. 473.
Wright, Heather, Review of A Wake for the Living, in Library Journal, Vol. 128, No. 20, December 15, 2003, p. 125.
Further Reading
Holton, Milne, Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the
Present, edited by Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich,
translated by Charles Simic and Momcilo Selic, Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1988.
This lengthy and authoritative anthology of Serbian
poetry is useful for understanding Lazić’s literary
context.
McQuade, Molly, and Charles Simic, “Real America: An
Interview with Charles Simic,” in Chicago Review, Vol. 41,
Nos. 2–3, 1995, pp. 13–18.
This interview provides a brief but interesting biography of Lazić’s translator, including his experience
immigrating to Chicago from Yugoslavia.
Meier, Viktor, Yugoslavia: A History of Its Demise,
Routledge, 1999.
Meier’s historical analysis focuses on Yugoslavia
during the 1980s and 1990s to tell the tale of its devastating wars and ethnic conflicts.
Simic, Charles, Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs,
University of Michigan Press, 1997.
In addition to a variety of fascinating autobiographical stories, this book includes essays and reviews
that reveal Simic’s unique perspective on literary criticism and appreciation.
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The Forest
“The Forest” is the first poem in the collection The
Forest (1995) by American poet Susan Stewart; it
is her fourth book of poems. The premise of “The
Forest” is that there are no longer any forests in the
world, but the forest itself is also a metaphor
(the use of one object or idea in place of another
to suggest a likeness between the two) for the loss
of the human connection to nature, which the
speaker of the poem tries to recover by remembering what a forest is like.
Susan Stewart
1995
Like much of Stewart’s poetry, “The Forest”
presents a challenge to the reader. The poem is
intricately structured, with a pattern of repeated
lines, like recurring images in a dream. It travels
back and forth between the conscious and the unconscious mind; it does not present a straightforward, linear narrative. Its meaning cannot be fully
grasped at first reading but must be teased out
through repeated encounters with the poem. Stewart writes for an active rather than a passive reader,
a reader who must make the effort to delve
deeply into the poem to discern the poet’s intent
and meaning.
In her choice of a forest as her central
metaphor, Stewart touches a deep vein in the Western cultural imagination, since forests have over the
ages carried a range of associations in society and
literature. The poem also has startling contemporary relevance, since, due to the ever-increasing demands of the global economy, the world’s forests
are vanishing at an alarming rate.
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T h e
F o r e s t
Author Biography
Susan Stewart was born March 15, 1952, in York,
Pennsylvania. She graduated from Dickinson College with a bachelor’s degree in English and anthropology in 1973, received a master’s degree in
poetry from Johns Hopkins University in 1975, and
earned a Ph.D. in folklore and folk life studies from
the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. In 1978,
Stewart also joined the faculty of Temple University as an assistant professor of English, becoming
associate professor in 1981 and full professor in
1985. Since 1997, she has been the Regan Professor in English at the University of Pennsylvania,
where she teaches the history of lyric poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature.
Stewart’s first collection of poetry was Yellow
Stars and Ice (1981). As of 2004, she had published
three more collections: The Hive: Poems (1987),
which won the Georgia Press Second Book award;
The Forest (1995), in which “The Forest” appears;
and Columbarium (2003), which won a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award.
In addition to poetry, Stewart has also published
a number of books of literary and aesthetic theory.
Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and
Literature (1989) examines the uses of “nonsense”
in the work of Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges,
Samuel Beckett, and others. On Longing: Narratives
of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984) studies large and small objects and
discusses souvenir collecting in the West. Crimes of
Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (1991) is an examination of so-called criminal forms of writing, such as graffiti, forgery,
plagiarism, and pornography. Poetry and the Fate of
the Senses (2002) is a general theory of poetic forms;
it won the Christian Gauss Award for literary criticism from Phi Beta Kappa and the Truman Capote
Award in literary criticism. Stewart’s collected essays on art titled The Open Studio: Essays on Art
and Aesthetics were published in January 2005.
Stewart is the recipient of a Lila Wallace Individual Writer’s Award; three grants in poetry from
the National Endowment for the Arts; a 1995 Pew
Fellowship in the arts; a 1995 Lila Wallace/Reader’s
Digest Writer’s Award for poetry; and fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation (1986–1987)
and the MacArthur Foundation (1997). According
to the Pew Fellowships in the Arts Web site, the
MacArthur Foundation said of Stewart upon bestowal of her MacArthur fellowship: “Investigating themes such as miniaturization, giganticism,
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plagiarism, forgery, the souvenir, the collection,
Stewart often makes strange and disorienting that
which we usually take to be familiar and of common sense.”
Poem Text
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing—
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
Not the one you had hoped for, but a life
—you should lie down now and remember the
forest—
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
no the truth is, it is gone now,
starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge,
Or instead the first layer, the place you remember
(not the one you had hoped for, but a life)
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
nonetheless, you might call it “in the forest,”
which we can never drift above, we were there or
we were not,
No surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
or instead the first layer, the place you remember,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea,
like a light left hand descending, always on the
same keys.
The flecked birds of the forest sing behind and
before
no surface, skimming. And blank in life, too,
sing without a music where there cannot be an
order,
as layers fold in time, black humus there,
where wide swatches of light slice between gray
trunks,
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
the flecked birds of the forest sing behind and
before:
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.
They sing without a music where there cannot be
an order,
though high in the dry leaves something does fall,
Nothing comes down to us here.
Where the air has a texture of drying moss,
(in that place where I was raised) the forest was
tangled,
a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds,
tangled with brambles, soft-starred and moving,
ferns
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
And the marred twines of cinquefoil, false
strawberry, sumac—
nothing comes down to us here,
stained. A low branch swinging above a brook
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in that place where I was raised, the forest was
tangled,
and a cave just the width of shoulder blades.
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You can understand what I am doing when I think
of the entry—
and the marred twines of cinquefoil, false
strawberry, sumac—
as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking
there
(. . . pokeberry, stained. A low branch swinging
above a brook)
in a place that is something like a forest.
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But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is
covered
(you can understand what I am doing when I think
of the entry)
by pliant green needles, there below the piney
fronds,
a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking
there.
And quickening below lie the sharp brown blades,
The disfiguring blackness, then the bulbed
phosphorescence of the roots
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is
covered,
so strangely alike and yet singular, too, below
the pliant green needles, the piney fronds.
Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike
and yet singular, too,
but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.
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Stanzas 1–4
In the first stanza of “The Forest,” the speaker
addresses an unnamed interlocutor (“you”), advising
him or her to lie down and remember the forest because it is disappearing. In line 3, that statement is
amended. The forest has already gone, but whatever
details the person can recall will help to bring at least
some aspect of it back. However, this will only be
“a kind of life,” not the life itself and not the kind
of life for which the person had hoped. The speaker
says in stanza 2, it might be called “‘in the forest,’”
the quotation marks suggesting it is not an immediate experience but one reconstructed, so to speak,
from something else, perhaps from memory and language. The speaker emphasizes again, this time in
italics, that the forest is gone, that it no longer exists, and then goes on to suggest that the interlocutor start to remember the beginning, the edge, or the
first layer of the forest, as if it were “firm” and “underfoot,” even though everything seems to be a blank
(“blank in life, too”).
In stanza 4, forest imagery begins to creep in
(“black humus there”) as the process of memory
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starts to work, although the parallel imagery of the
sea seems to work against the formulation of any
concrete, earthy images. In the last line of stanza
4, music imagery enters the poem (“like a light left
hand descending, always on the same keys”), which
suggests a pianist playing the same chord over and
over again. This image of repetition implies that
melody has been lost; no development is possible,
which relates to the struggle to recall an experience
now departed. Memory moves in the same repetitive grooves as the music, unable to get to the heart
of the remembered experience of the forest.
Stanzas 5–8
Poem Summary
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The music image is continued in stanza 5, with
birds singing in the forest, but it is a ghostly kind
of singing. It does not take place in the present moment (“behind and before”); it is singing “without
a music” that appears to be formless (“there cannot
be an order”). It is a long way from hearing actual
birds singing in a real forest. The forest imagery,
begun in stanza 4, is taken up and strengthened in
the final line of stanza 5 and in the first line of stanza
6: “wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks,
// Where the air has a texture of drying moss.” The
forest imagery continues in line 3 of stanza 6,
switching from a visual to an olfactory image: “a
musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.”
The repetition of two lines about the insubstantial,
unmusical singing birds seems to undercut any
progress made, an impression which is confirmed
in the last line of stanza 6 and the first line of stanza
7: “though high in the dry leaves something does
fall, / Nothing comes down to us here.”
In stanza 7, the effort of memory begins to produce fruit. Instead of urging her interlocutor to remember, the speaker herself does the remembering.
She seems to be returning to her childhood “(in that
place where I was raised),” recalling the brambles,
the ferns, and (in stanza 8) the “cinquefoil” (a plant
that belongs to the rose family), “false strawberry”
(groundcover sometimes also known as mock
strawberry), and “sumac” of a real forest. This is
shown to be a false promise because line 2 of stanza
8 repeats the earlier line, with a forceful additional
word: “nothing comes down to us here, / stained.”
The last word suggests that even memories of the
forest do not have the stamp of the real thing, the
word “stained” suggesting the mere imprint of real
sensory experience.
The speaker is not deterred by all the barriers
to recalling and summoning real experience from the
past. She produces another concrete image from the
forest in stanza 8: “A low branch swinging above a
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brook.” The suggestion of personal experience is
heightened in the last line of this stanza—“and a cave
just the width of shoulder blades”—which suggests
not just any forest but a particular place in a particular forest, perhaps recalled from the speaker’s
childhood.
Stanzas 9–11
In stanza 9, the speaker returns to addressing
her interlocutor directly, assuming that he or she understands the reference to the entry to the cave as
“a kind of limit.” Perhaps by this the speaker means
that the cave suggests another more primal level of
experience of the forest, but one that is not open to
them, thus representing a boundary that cannot be
crossed. Or, it is a reference to childhood, a small
secret cave (either literal or metaphoric) that was
accessible to the child but not to the adult.
The speaker then imagines the two of them
walking in the forest together. This time, in contrast to stanza 8, the memory of a plant (“pokeberry”) is “stained,” as if it now has a fuller sensual
reality. The experience of the forest seems to be
becoming more real, an implication confirmed by
the last line, that they are walking “in a place that
is something like a forest.” Although it is still only
“something like” a forest, not the thing itself, it is
a tribute to the power of language to evoke a resemblance of the tangible world.
The speaker then moves on in stanzas 10 and
11 to another line of thought, imagining an aspect
of the forest that is less benign and more threatening than the images have so far conveyed. She
imagines, or tries to remember, what is below the
“pliant green needles,” “the sharp brown blades, /
The disfiguring blackness,” which suggests the
power of the forest to inflict pain on unprepared
feet and to create illusions, perhaps frightening
ones, by distorting objects seen in the dark of the
night. The darkness is then broken by the “bulbed
phosphorescence of the roots.” Phosphorescence is
light given off without heat or combustion, as in
decayed wood. Taken together, the images convey
a disorienting picture of darkness interspersed with
eerie light. Line 3 in stanza 11, “so strangely alike
and yet singular, too,” may refer back to these
bulbed roots. They all appear very similar but each
one is in fact unique.
In line 5 of the final stanza, the speaker, having previously built up a tapestry of rich forest imagery, states, “Once we were lost in the forest,”
which may refer to an actual memory of childhood,
or it may have a more universal reference, perhaps
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to the prehistory of human beings, before civilization. The repetition of “so strangely alike and yet
singular, too” gains in significance because on this
second mention it is italicized. Its meaning has
shifted, since it now seems to refer to some kind
of unspecified connection between the subject “we”
and the forest, a relationship perhaps of unexpected
kinship (“so strangely alike”) even while a separateness is also maintained (“yet singular, too”).
Whatever relationship might once have existed between humans and the forest is emphatically contrasted with the present reality in the last line of the
poem, which states that the forest is “lost to us
now.” This is a restatement in almost identical
words of stanza 1, line 3, thus bringing the poem
back to where it began.
Themes
Loss of Connection to Nature
In an interview with Jon Thompson in Free
Verse, Stewart remarks, “Little could be more devastating to our lives and to the life of poetry than
a forgetting or denial of our place in nature.” This
is one of the themes of the poem. The forest is a
symbol of the connection between humans and all
of nature. The rich images with which the forest is
evoked are presented as something from the past
that cannot be recaptured. The speaker realizes that
the connection has been lost, and she struggles to
reclaim at least a flavor of it through memory and
language. However forcefully this is attempted
through the medium of poetry, the result is far removed from the original living experience. It is
only “a kind of life,” something that can only be
referred to in quotation marks as “‘in the forest,’”
suggesting its status as a literary construct.
The poem also suggests that there is a loss of
an inner connection with the self. In other words,
the speaker (who is representative of all humans)
has lost touch with the deeper aspects of the psyche. The poem becomes a kind of journey to rediscover the psychic life that exists beyond the
surface of the mind. Seen in this light, the first line,
“You should lie down now and remember the forest” becomes like an instruction from a therapist or
psychiatrist to a patient at the beginning of a session. The session then proceeds through successive
layers of the mind (“starting somewhere near the
beginning, that edge, / Or instead the first layer, the
place you remember”) to the uncovering of deeper
realities.
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Write a short poem describing a walk in the
woods. Describe how the woods make you feel.
Do you feel different in the woods than in the
city? What language or techniques do you use
in your poem to describe the difference?
• Research the causes of deforestation. What are
some of the consequences of deforestation,
and what can be done to stop or slow down
the process?
• Research the political debate in the United States
regarding restrictions on commercial logging in
national forests. What are the arguments for and
Innocence and Experience
If the forest is taken to symbolize the human
psyche as well as nature, the poem can be interpreted in terms of what English Romantic poet
William Blake called innocence and experience.
The forest seems to contain both states of mind.
Innocence is usually associated with childhood. In Stewart’s poem, the line “in that place
where I was raised” implies that memories of childhood are being recalled. “A low branch swinging
above a brook” suggests an idyllic place where children might play. The images of “pliant green
needles, there below the piney fronds” are also
benevolent. The cave that is “just the width of
shoulder blades” conjures a secret place where children could go. All these images suggest a contrast
between a child’s world and the barren world of an
adult, in which “nothing comes down to us here.”
There are other forest images that are threatening. They suggest the forest can also be a perilous place: “Sometimes I imagine us walking
there. / And quickening below lie the sharp brown
blades, / The disfiguring blackness.” The threatening “sharp brown blades” are emphasized by the
meter and by the alliteration in the “b” sounds. The
description of them as “quickening” implies they
are alive and ready to strike and scratch. Add to
this the darkness of the forest, in which the shapes
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against loosening some of the restrictions?
Should business interests take precedence over
environmental concerns? Why or why not?
• The poet seems to be trying to remember experiences that lie just beyond the borders of consciousness, some of them perhaps going back to
childhood. Describe some of your earliest memories. Are you more conscious of what you remember or of what you have forgotten and
cannot quite recall? As you try to remember, do
you have, like the poet, a feeling of loss, or are
the memories warm and nourishing to you?
of objects are distorted, and the forest becomes a
place associated with fear and with the possibility
of harm. These images suggest Blake’s state of
“experience,” in which the cruelties of the world
are encountered and innocence is lost. The speaker
and her companion become rather like Hansel and
Gretel in the fairy tale, lost in a wood full of
dangers.
The forest seems to represent a range of human understanding, from innocence to experience,
from lightness to darkness. (Contrast, for example,
the “disfiguring blackness” with the earlier image,
“wide swatches of light slice between gray
trunks.”) In contrast to the rich possibilities of the
forest, the speaker seems to live in an anesthetized
world characterized by blankness, cut off from the
deeper springs of an authentic self.
Style
Repetitive Structure
Stewart comments in an interview with Jon
Thompson for the online magazine Free Verse that
her poetry collection The Forest “was concerned
with the relations between unconscious and conscious knowledge of the past.” The comment partly
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explains the unusual repetitive structure of the
poem. Lines appear and are then repeated in the
next stanza, according to the following pattern,
consistently applied throughout the poem: line 1 of
each stanza is repeated in line 2 of the next stanza,
and line 3 of each stanza is repeated in line 4 of
the next stanza. For example, stanza 1, line 1 (“You
should lie down now and remember the forest”) recurs in stanza 2, line 2. Stanza 1, line 3 (“no, the
truth is it is gone now”) recurs, with italics for emphasis, in stanza 2, line 4. There is only one place
where a significant change other than italicization
occurs in the repeated line and that is in stanza 9,
line 4, in which the line “(. . . pokeberry, stained.
A low branch swinging above a brook)” is not quite
the same as line 3 of the previous stanza (“stained.
A low branch swinging above a brook”). The alteration is perhaps a signal to the reader of the significance of the image of “pokeberry, stained,”
which acquires, when read in context, a connotation of a breakthrough moment in the quest to reexperience the forest that is unapparent in the
earlier line.
The repetitions disrupt the reader’s experience
of following the poem in a linear fashion, since the
repeated line is often an interpolation that interrupts
the narrative, flashing back to an earlier thought,
as for example:
But perhaps the other kind, where the ground is
covered
(you can understand what I am doing when I think
of the entry)
by pliant green needles, there below the piney
fronds,
The logic here runs from line 1 directly to line
3, with line 2 being a repetition from the previous
stanza. The repeated lines convey the sense of the
conscious mind repeatedly playing on the images
and concepts supplied by the unconscious mind.
The orderly way in which this occurs in each stanza
suggests a subtle counterpoint to the notion expressed in stanza 5 that “there cannot be an order,
/ as layers fold in time.” It seems as if the poem is
moving from a sense of blankness and emptiness
in the mind (“And blank in life, too”) to a stirringup process that utilizes both conscious and unconscious levels of the mind.
The last stanza has a heavier pattern of repetition than the others. Not only are lines 2 and 4 repeated from the previous stanza but there are two
extra repetitions. First, “so strangely alike and yet
singular, too” in line 3 is repeated, with italics
added, in line 5. The last line “But the truth is, it
is, lost to us now” is a repetition, with a slight
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alteration, of stanza 1, line 3, “no, the truth is it is
gone now.” The addition of the two commas in the
last line is significant, since it adds not only another repetition (the subject and verb in the statement “the truth is” are repeated in “it is”) but it also
subtly alters the meaning from stanza 1, line 3,
where what was lost or gone was clearly the forest. In the last line, although the fact that the
forest has been lost is obviously central to the
meaning, the line has a more serious meaning—not
only is the forest lost, but truth is lost too (the addition of the second comma makes “it” refer
to truth, rather than, or perhaps in addition to,
the forest).
Historical Context
Poetry in the 1990s
In a celebrated and notorious essay titled “Can
Poetry Matter?” which was first published in 1991
in the Atlantic Monthly and later published in book
format, poet and critic Dana Gioia argued that although there was an unprecedented amount of poetry being published each year, poetry had become
irrelevant to mainstream American life. He wrote,
“American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No
longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.” The
group Gioia identified was located almost entirely
within colleges and universities. It consisted of professors of English and teachers of creative writing
and their graduate students, as well as editors, publishers, and administrators. Poetry had become a
profession, Gioia argued, with its own career track
and system of recognition and rewards. Poets no
longer wrote for the general reader but for the other
members of their profession, their fellow poets. The
decline of the cultural importance of poetry could
be seen in the fact that daily newspapers no longer
reviewed poetry, observed Gioia. Few poets who
had renown within their own professional circles
were known to the general public, unlike, for example, leading novelists.
Gioia’s essay generated a number of heated responses, but few could deny that as far as the educated general public was concerned, poetry had
lost ground from, say, fifty years prior, when anthologies of modern poetry sold well and were read
by a wide and varied public.
During the 1990s, there was a new trend in poetry in the United States. It represented a populist
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approach and was disdainful of the academic poetry that otherwise dominated the genre. This new
approach was the phenomenon known as the “poetry slam.” The poetry slam originated in 1986 at
a Chicago jazz club. It treated poetry as a competitive performance art, with judges selected from the
audience and cash prizes for the winners. Poetry
slams quickly became popular, spreading throughout the late 1980s and 1990s into most large
cities in the nation. The annual National Poetry
Slam was established in 1990, in which four-person
teams from all over North America and Europe
gathered to compete against each other for the national title.
Although poetry slams attracted large audiences and showed the continuing vitality, at a grassroots level, of the desire to write, read aloud, and
listen to poetry, academic poets did not embrace
poetry slams. The nature of the poetry slam meant
that a poem had to have an immediate impact; it
had to be easily and quickly understood by a diverse audience. The intricacies and erudite subtleties of academic poetry would most likely be lost
in such a setting.
Deforestation
Stewart dedicated “The Forest” to a man
named Ryszard Kapuscinski, who suggested to
Stewart that a time may come when no one would
remember the experience of being in a forest. The
rapid rate at which global deforestation proceeded
during the 1990s and beyond is therefore of some
relevance to the poem.
During the 1990s, it was estimated that
214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) of forest worldwide were being destroyed every day—an area
larger than New York City. In the mid-1990s, the
World Resources Institute reported that more than
80 percent of the world’s natural forests had been
destroyed. Much of what remained was in the
Brazilian Amazon and in the boreal areas of Canada
and Russia.
Deforestation has a variety of causes. It is in
part driven by worldwide demand for wood products. Deforestation can also accommodate population growth and the desire to create new agricultural
land or grazing land for cattle. However, deforestation has serious consequences for the global environment and for the continued existence of
human life. It can lead to soil erosion, flooding, and
the loss of animal and plant habitats. The world’s
tropical rainforests, which occupy only 7 percent
of the dry surface of the earth, hold over half of the
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earth’s species. As these forests are cleared, species
become extinct at an estimated rate of up to 137
species per day. Deforestation also contributes to
global warming, since the burning of forests releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The
carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat and causes temperatures to rise.
Ecologists warn that if current rates of deforestation continue, rainforests will disappear from
the planet within 100 years, affecting global climate in unpredictable ways and eliminating a majority of the world’s animal and plant species.
Given this prediction, the opening lines of
“The Forest” might be attributed to a futuristic
speaker around the 2090s or 2100s: “You should
lie down now and remember the forest, / for it is
disappearing— / no, the truth is it is gone now.”
Critical Overview
Reviewers of Stewart’s poetry have sometimes
commented on the denseness and opacity of her poetic language. However, the reviewer for Publishers Weekly writes that The Forest is marked by “an
aura of mystery,” with narratives “reminiscent of
fairy tales.” Although the reviewer had reservations
about some of the poems in which Stewart becomes
“self-consciously literary,” his or her overall assessment was highly favorable, calling the book “a
rare phenomenon in recent poetry,” filled with poems that “require several readings” but that do not
lose intrigue upon rereading.
Carmine G. Simmons in American Book Review comments, “One can easily become disoriented within the dark, frightening recesses of . . .
The Forest.” Simmons notes specifically of the
poem “The Forest” that the “somber voice” heard
in the poem is similar to that found elsewhere in
the collection. The voice, notes Simmons, belongs
to “A kind of stunned, perhaps entranced speaker
. . . who is able to apprehend reasons for remembering the forest but who cannot quite muster up
the appropriate reaction to the memories stored
there.” However, he argues that the “urgency of the
. . . [poem] is not well served by the speaker’s
sleepy imperatives.” For Simmons, this muted
voice constitutes a flaw in the collection as a whole.
Stewart’s use of repetition, says Simmons, “works
well to reinforce the mystical nature of such a recollection of the past,” but sometimes interferes with
the clarity of meaning.
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A tree in a lowland rainforest
Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry.
In this essay, Aubrey discusses “The Forest” in
terms of the insulation of modern society from the
life of nature and the psychological and cultural
significance of the symbol of the forest.
In Theodore Roszak’s brilliant polemic Where
the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in
Postindustrial Society, which was written over
thirty years ago, Roszak sounded the alarm about
the spiritual emptiness at the heart of the scientific,
technological society of the West. Roszak laments
what he called the “artificial environment” that prevailed in urban areas. “City-dwellers,” he writes,
“have grown accustomed to an almost hermetically
sealed and sanitized pattern of living in which very
little of their experience ever impinges on nonhuman phenomena.” The result is that people forget their connection with and dependence on nature.
Roszak observes:
How easily we forget that behind the technical membrane that mediates our life-needs, there is ultimately
a world not of our making and upon which we must
draw for sustenance. The air conditioner must still
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rely upon a respirable atmosphere; the chlorinated,
fluoridated, piped-in water supply must still connect
with potable lakes and rivers; the neatly displayed
cans, jars, and cartons in the supermarket must still
be filled with the nutritive fruits of the earth and the
edible flesh of its animals.
He then tells a story of how his daughter was
eight and a half years old before she realized, on
her first visit to a butcher’s shop, where meat actually came from. Up to that point, she had known
it only as something that was wrapped in plastic
and cardboard in the frozen-food section of the supermarket and looked nothing like the remains of
a dead animal. This prompted Roszak to reflect,
“We live off land and forests, animals, plants, and
minerals; but what do we know of their ecological
necessities or the integrity of their being?”
Roszak’s message is similar to the message
Stewart seeks to convey in “The Forest.” Human
culture has developed to such a point that the forest, and all that it symbolizes of the entire world of
nature, is “lost to us now.” People have to ransack
their memories and their imaginations to even begin to understand the visual, tactile, auditory, and
olfactory reality of that mysterious domain—the
forest—in which nature, not a collection of artificial human constructs, is sovereign. Seen in this
light, humans are prisoners of their own success,
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utterly ignorant of what that success has cost them.
They have treated nature as a “thing” to be subdued, harnessed it to meet their needs, and then
pushed it into the background, to be regarded only
as pleasant “scenery,” cut off from and irrelevant
to the day-to-day reality of their lives.
In her book, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses,
Stewart makes essentially this same point. She argues that in industrialized nations, certain kinds of
sense experiences that up to now humans have
taken for granted are disappearing. Stewart says
that these include:
[A] tacit knowledge of tools and forms of dancing or
of carrying infants, the disappearance of ways of living with animals or cultivating plant life, along with
the smell and feel and sounds and even tastes that accompanied such practices; the sound of wind in uninhabited spaces; the weight of ripe things not yet
harvested.
She continues, in a passage that can serve as a
gloss on the meaning of “The Forest”: “These experiences are gone, and even their names will soon
be gone. The historical body of poetic forms is more
and more an archive of lost sensual experiences.”
This is certainly a high claim for the status and
power (and responsibility) of poetry and the poet.
It suggests that in “The Forest,” the struggle on the
part of the dreamy, alienated consciousness of the
speaker to construct the lost sensual experience of
walking in a forest is also an attempt to create a
poem that will act as a kind of storage device for
future generations to re-experience what a forest is
like when there is no other way of doing so.
When Stewart chose the forest as her central
symbol, it was part of her quest, as she told interviewer Jon Thompson in Free Verse, to explore
nature “as a reserve beyond the facts of history.”
She also commented that when she later came
across Robert Pogue Harrison’s book Forests: The
Shadow of Civilization, she learned “in a deeper
way how much of my thinking was connected to a
long tradition of the place of forests in the Western imagination.”
In his book, Harrison traces the complex and
sometimes contradictory Western attitudes to the
forest in society and in literature from ancient times
to the present. The term “forest” derives from the
Latin foris, meaning “outside.” In ancient and medieval times, forests lay outside civilization. They
were the homes of outcasts and misfits, the mad
and the persecuted, as well as saints and religious
hermits. The institutions of the West, such as religion, law, family, and city, originally established
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Stewart offers no
panacea for restoring
human life to a fuller
consciousness of itself and
its relations to nature. She
does not believe in
Wordsworthian-style
epiphanies.”
themselves in opposition to the forests, which literally covered most of the land.
Harrison points out how in literary history,
forests are often places of terror, fear, nightmare,
and enchantment. They sometimes represent the unconscious mind. (Stewart, in her interview with
Thompson, explained that her concept of the forest
was linked in her mind to the unconscious as a
“source of terror.” She added that it was also a
source of “consolation.”) Harrison gives an example from one of the stories in the Decameron by
Boccaccio (the third story of the Fifth Day), in
which two young lovers run away from home and
end up getting lost and separated in a forest. The
violence they encounter there symbolizes the
shadow side of sexual desire. Shakespeare’s wood
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a similar function: the four lovers who spend a night in the forest come face to face with their unconscious desires.
At the same time, there is also a tradition, beginning with Petrarch in the fourteenth century, in
which literary forests are transformed into places
of nostalgia. This is particularly apparent in the literature of the eighteenth century and beyond, into
the romantic era. In this period, forests were
conceived, writes Harrison, “in terms of some originary plenitude—of presence, innocence, community, or even perception.” According to Harrison,
in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, written in
Germany in the early nineteenth century, “The
forests . . . represent the ancient unity of nature—
the unity and kinship of the species.” In a comment
that seems especially relevant for “The Forest,”
Harrison says that in romantic and symbolist literature, “forests have the psychological effect of
evoking memories of the past; indeed, that they
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• In the Rainforest: Report from a Strange, Beautiful, Imperiled World (reprint ed., 1991), by
Catherine Caulfield, is a comprehensive study of
the rainforests of Latin America, Africa, and
Southeast Asia. Caulfield examines the forests
from historical, political, economic, and biological standpoints and analyzes why these irreplaceable resources are in such great danger today.
• Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to
Global Crisis (2002), by Michael Williams, surveys ten thousand years of history to explain
how deforesting the earth has affected human
societies and landscapes. He also discusses the
current crisis of deforestation—why it is happening and what its implications are for a rapidly
growing human population.
resulting book is a celebration of the restorative
powers of nature and of the human connection
to nature.
• Young Goodman Brown (1835), by Nathaniel
Hawthorne, is a story about a young Puritan man
in seventeenth-century America. One night,
Goodman Brown leaves his wife to go on a journey that takes him through a forest. He finds
himself involved in a nightmare experience in
which he observes many of his townspeople attending a Black Mass, and he is drawn into a
covenant with the devil.
become figures for memory itself. They are enveloped, as it were, in the aura of lost origins.”
It is those lost origins (“that place where I was
raised”) of which the speaker in “The Forest” goes
in search. The fact that the speaker appears to be
cut off from them suggests that modern life is an
impoverished, anemic thing, disconnected from the
richness suggested by the many-sided image of the
forest. Harrison claims the romantic poets had a
similar perception. William Wordsworth, for example, deplored city life and felt a deep connection to the life of nature. He could recover that
“originary plenitude” (to use Harrison’s phrase)
only in the presence of nature or in moments of
quiet introspection when he could recall such experiences. Wordsworth is also one of the poets cited
by Roszak, along with Shelley, Blake, and Goethe,
as being possessed of the vision of the unity of all
life that the modern West must recapture if it is to
save itself from sterility and despair.
Unlike Roszak and the poets he champions,
Stewart offers no panacea for restoring human life
to a fuller consciousness of itself and its relations
to nature. She does not believe in Wordsworthianstyle epiphanies. “The Forest” remains a rather
bleak poem that speaks more of loss than of recovery. “Slaughter,” Stewart’s poem that immediately follows “The Forest” in the first section of
The Forest, offers a small clue to Stewart’s thinking about how life might be perceived differently.
Like “The Forest,” “Slaughter” is a poem about
loss, and its mood is equally somber. The speaker,
whose tone is not dissimilar to that of the speaker
in “The Forest,” is reflecting on how “the breakdown in the fullness of the world” first took place.
S/he alludes to some knowledge about this that had
been hidden behind “the given- / ness of all things
to us now.” In other words, the way things appear
to people now are not necessarily the way they always were, even though it may seem that way. The
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• Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), by Henry
David Thoreau, is a classic of American literature. In 1845, Thoreau moved into the cabin he
had built on the shore of Walden Pond. The
• The Hive: Poems (1987) is Stewart’s second collection of poems. Although some of the poems
are opaque, like many of the poems in The Forest, reviews for the collection were positive. One
reviewer commented that Stewart draws the
reader into the poems with a quiet, steady voice;
another pointed out the skill with which Stewart
endows ordinary objects with a magical quality.
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bulk of the poem is then taken up with a detailed
description of the way an animal is killed in a
slaughterhouse. The killing seems to become symbolic of the rupture of a primal unity between man
and nature, and the speaker is a lone voice trying
to understand how this rupture happened. Even
though no one in the slaughterhouse is interested
in pursuing the speaker’s line of thought, s/he wants
to go back to the moment at which the doomed animal is stunned, which may symbolically represent
the moment “the fullness of the world” is sundered:
Now let us go back to the stunning,
to the meeting of a human and animal mind, let us
go back and begin again where the function
overwhelms all hesitation and seems like
an act of nature.
In other words, actions (and presumably perceptions too) that seem inevitable, part of the natural order of things, may not in fact be so. They may
merely be the result of the inability or unwillingness
of humans to be fully aware of what they are doing.
Stewart has commented in an interview for Free
Verse that “Slaughter” is “concerned with taking responsibility for habitual practices, and understanding their causes and consequences.” Seen in this
light, the speaker in “Slaughter,” like the speaker in
“The Forest,” is in search of the fresh moment when
all possibilities present themselves, as opposed to the
futility and emptiness of repetitive, habitual responses. Both speakers try to imagine their way back
into lost origins, lost states of being, as constituting
the only hope for the present. The speaker in
“Slaughter” comes to the realization that “the real
could not / be evoked except in a spell of longing
for / the past.” This note of nostalgia characterizes
“The Forest” also. It suggests that life is marooned
between the emptiness of the present and the imagined fullness of the past and that humans are like
lost travelers forever casting an eye back to the home
they once knew, but which is lost to them now.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “The Forest,” in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Pamela Steed Hill
Hill is the author of a poetry collection, has
published widely in literary journals, and is an editor for a university publications department. In the
following essay, Hill examines “The Forest” as
a poem whose effective content is based wholly on
its construction—essentially, the meaning derives
from the mode.
Occasionally, a poem comes along that is
so entwined, so interwoven within itself, that
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In turning, however,
she finds the woods are
thick behind her and the
path overgrown. Attempts
to find her way out only
lead her farther and farther
off the original path and
deeper into the dense flora.”
distinguishing content from construction is not an
easy task. And when the method works, distinction
is neither necessary nor desirable. “The Forest” is
one such poem; its language so layered and overlapping that the words call as much attention to
themselves as to the message they convey.
If one must whittle this multifaceted work
down to an overarching theme, it is this: history
gets lost if it is not continuously repeated. The definition of “history” is not as generic as it seems.
Here, it is specific to a physical, botanical entity
made up of trees, shrubs, vines, small plants, and
everything that lives among them—in short, a forest. This forest has a twofold representation—one,
the actual, visible existence of the flora, and, two,
the symbolic reference to things that fade from human memory if they are not carefully and intentionally preserved.
Twenty-one lines of the poem are repeated,
nearly all of them verbatim. The repetition is
painstakingly constructed, allowing for two lines
from each stanza to be echoed in the following
stanza, sometimes with greater emphasis or a twist
in meaning, but virtually always with the exact
words. The pattern begins with the first and third
lines of the first stanza: “You should lie down now
and remember the forest” and “no, the truth is it is
gone now.” These statements are repeated verbatim as the second and fourth lines of the second
stanza, but their connotation is slightly askew from
the original.
In the first stanza, “You should lie down now
. . .” appears to be a simple, though intriguing,
statement of instruction: one should take time out
to consider nature in its purest form because that
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form is quickly disappearing in a postmodern, technological, and artificial world. The abrupt and
seemingly contradictory admission “no, the truth
is,” suggests that the speaker is determined to be
honest about the forest’s peril. It is not just “disappearing” after all; in reality, “it is gone now.”
Consider how these lines are used in the second stanza. Presented between long dashes, “You
should lie down now” is, here, a disruption in
thought, a sudden reminder of the need not to forget. Its unexpected intrusion suggests an urgency
greater than that in its initial utterance, like someone interrupting a conversation to repeat a request
that has already been made moments before. The
line “no the truth is, it is gone now” is treated similarly in this stanza. The most evident difference is
that it is now italicized, indicating an obvious renewed emphasis on its message, but note the shift
in comma placement as well. In the first stanza, the
punctuation mark appears after “no,” following a
simple rule of proper grammar. But in the second,
the comma is placed between “is” and “it,” with no
break between the opening adverb (“no”) and the
words it modifies. Not only are the italics used to
call attention to the importance of the line’s meaning, but also the punctuation is manipulated to show
the rush of the first part of the phrase (“no the truth
is”) and the slow, compelling thought in the second: “it is gone now.”
If this detailed examination of only two lines
of a fifty-six-line poem seems overburdened, it is
not without intent. “The Forest” itself is laden with
intricacies and echoes and redefinition. It continuously circles back upon itself, folding and unfolding its language as well as its meaning. The
technique of presenting new and old information
side by side is carried on throughout the work and
serves to both muddle and mystify. Read only the
new lines in the second stanza to see how they stand
on their own as a cohesive set: “Not the one you
had hoped for, but a life / nonetheless, you might
call it ‘in the forest,’ / starting somewhere near the
beginning, that edge.” Now, add in the two old lines
from the first stanza and the effect is both to add a
layer of density to the language as well as to accent the need to remember. Again, construction and
meaning are interwoven.
The layers of the poem deepen with each successive stanza. In the third, the line “not the one
you had hoped for” is repeated, but this time it is
parenthetical, thrown back into the mix as yet another reminder of what has already been said. This
stanza, too, can be unfolded, with its three new lines
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standing alone as a complete thought: “Or instead
the first layer, the place you remember / as if it
were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea, / which
we can never drift above, we were there or we were
not.” In the real poem, of course, there are two repeated lines that separate these three. They echo
the need to recall the forest.
Toward the middle of the poem, the language
becomes more concrete in its description. There are
“gray trunks,” “drying moss,” “mushrooms and
scalloped molds,” “brambles,” “ferns,” and “twines
of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac.” But even
though the nouns have become more specific—
delightfully graphic, actually—they still add to the
poem’s density as they are reused and redefined.
Perhaps their exactness and nearly tangible quality
play another role as well. Note that as the language
that describes the forest becomes more concrete, the
speaker’s ability to remember the actual woods becomes more vague and unsure. The question, then,
is whether all the particular details are the product
of keen recollection or just desperate imagination.
One of the initial indications that the speaker
is losing her memory of the forest is that she admits, “Nothing comes down to us here.” The first
time this line appears, it follows “though high in
the dry leaves something does fall,” implying that,
although she is aware of actual, physical movement
in the trees, the certain fact of that movement is not
visible to her. The second time the line appears, it
plays the role of interrupter, falling between two
other lines in the next stanza that continue the description of the forest’s plants and brooks. The
ninth stanza, however, provides the greatest evidence of fading memory, overlapping language,
and the need to preserve human histories. Once
again, it is best to filter out the repeated lines in order to get at the heart of the new thought to consider. That thought is revealed in the first, third,
and fifth lines of the stanza: “You can understand
what I am doing when I think of the entry— . . . as
a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking
there . . . in a place that is something like a forest.”
Suddenly, the forest is not a real forest but something like a forest. Note, also, the seemingly contradictory description of an “entry” as a “limit.”
The beginning has become an ending, and it is all
because of the fallibility of human memory.
The line “in a place that is something like a
forest” is one of the few lines in the poem that is
not repeated. This fact alone is significant. Once a
memory has begun to fade, its imaginary “shape”
changes, like the actual shape of a visual object
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moving farther and farther away from the person
watching it. No matter how one tries to recall it—
to define or describe or envision it—the memory
is obscured in multiple layers of confused thoughts.
Losing the recollection of something tangible and
vital like a forest suggests a loss of humankind’s
own naturalness. One cannot feel connected to nature when the reality of it is lost from memory.
Something like a forest is all the speaker in the
poem has left. There is no need to repeat it because
its meaning would not be altered. Unlike other lines
that show up verbatim in subsequent stanzas, this
one simply tells it like it is the first time around.
Reality is blurred enough to make the speaker admit that she can no longer reach it. Her imagination must make up for all the realness that is lost.
The final line of “The Forest” is a near repeat
of the previously discussed third line of the first
stanza and fourth line of the second stanza. This
time it appears as, “but the truth is, it is, lost to us
now.” The word “gone” is replaced with “lost,” and
the commas come back into play with yet a third
meaning.
It is no coincidence that the poem ends with
this pivotal message, and it is not surprising that
the construction of the line is essential to its meaning. Consider the difference between the words
“gone” and “lost.” While one may make a case that
they generally convey the same point, their placement in this poem suggests otherwise. Stewart has
constructed a work with dense, opaque language in
which each component—whether a word or a punctuation mark—bears significance to the entire
poem. The switch from “gone” to “lost” implies a
responsibility on the individual who initially has an
ability then loses it.
Without getting bogged down in semantics, it
is safe to assume that when something is gone, it
is gone on its own, and when something is lost,
someone lost it. In Stewart’s poem, it is a forest—
both literally and figuratively—that has shifted
from “gone” to “lost.” Human beings have removed
themselves so far from nature and from natural
living that it is difficult to visualize that kind of existence. Attempts to do so are odd and uncomfortable. Note the line: “Once we were lost in the forest,
so strangely alike and yet singular, too.” The collective “we” implies both the speaker and all
humankind, and there is both a weird kinship
with and an undeniable estrangement from the
environment.
The comma placement in the final line is also
worth considering. Here, the two words “it is” are
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enclosed in commas, and the punctuation serves to
slow down the message for a very ponderous effect. The line is broken into three segments, each
to be read thoughtfully and deliberately: “but the
truth is,” “it is,” “lost to us now.” Obviously, such
a dismally resigned final phrase leaves one to consider not only the hopelessness it suggests but also
to ask, “Why?”
The short answer is “we” have gone too deep.
Humankind has mired itself in so many layers of
attempts at progress that discerning the real from
the false is not a simple task. Instead, the more one
tries to comprehend the multiple layers of human
history and make sense of how “we” got from there
to here, the more muddled it all becomes. It is like
someone taking a path through a forest, believing
all she has to do is turn around and retrace her steps
in order to exit at the point of entry. In turning,
however, she finds the woods are thick behind her
and the path overgrown. Attempts to find her way
out only lead her farther and farther off the original path and deeper into the dense flora.
This is the metaphor Stewart plays out in her
well-built poem. She constructs a forest of trees from
a forest of language—or vice versa—and ends up
with a remarkably clear message. Although the conclusion offers no hope for what is “lost to us now,”
the overriding point will only become more obvious
as new layers are added to the history of humankind.
Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “The Forest,”
in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the author discusses
Stewart’s career as a poet and nonfiction writer.
Since the late 1970s, Susan Stewart has forged
a dual writing career as a nonfiction writer and as
a poet. In her nonfiction, she has written from a perspective somewhere between that of a literary critic
and a philosopher, examining the parallels between
metaphors and their objects, as well as the metaphoric aspects of such commonplace practices as
keeping souvenirs. Dense and allusive, her writing
requires her readers to have considerable knowledge
of texts by writers such as James Joyce and critics
such as Roland Barthes. Stewart’s scholarly work
is—in the words of a Library Journal reviewer writing about her Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality
in Folklore and Literature (1979)—“not . . . for the
faint-hearted.” Stewart’s poetry, too, has been characterized as opaque and ephemeral, mysterious, and
tantalizing, qualities that have earned her enthusiastic reviews.
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In addition to her
scholarly work, Stewart has
written several books of
poetry, and in this arena as
well, a number of critics
have commented—in quite
favorable tones—on the
opaque quality of her
language.”
Nonsense, Stewart’s first book, draws on writings by Joyce and a number of other authors, including Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and
Samuel Beckett, known for an opacity that runs the
gamut, depending on one’s opinion, from playfulness to obscurantism. Availing herself of what
Library Journal contributor Charles Bishop called
“dense, impenetrable jargon,” Stewart examines the
uses of “nonsense” in the works of these and other
writers, as well as in nursery rhymes and logic loops
such as self-contradicting statements. Bishop found
Stewart’s examination of such “nonsense-making
devices” the most rewarding section of the book. A
contributor to Choice, calling Nonsense a “learned
and brilliant volume,” characterized the book as a
study in shifting paradigms: so-called nonsense becomes “a way of disorganizing the old order and
. . . experimenting with new forms of order.”
Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(1984) examines large and small objects, and the
tendency in Western society toward keeping souvenirs and building collections of objects. Lois
Kuznets, reviewing the book in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, wrote of “reading difficulties” that she encountered in reading Stewart: “I
am forced into an act of virtual translation, for which
I need to refer to an internal dictionary that I’m not
used to consulting.” Kuznets further observed that
“Stewart’s book is based on an extensive bibliography that is not simply the old-fashioned mixture
of literary works and their surrounding historical
and critical off-shoots, but ranges far and wide”;
furthermore, she noted, Stewart’s concepts are “embedded in a whole theoretical framework that she
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will not . . . reconstruct for me, but which I have
constantly to reproduce for myself.” Nonetheless,
Kuznets found much to admire in On Longing, such
as a section discussing the manner in which people
“immediately envision animation in miniature objects”; on the whole, however, she maintained that
the work was too opaque in its construction to be
fully “assimilated.”
Herman Rapaport in Criticism observed with
some admiration an aphoristic tendency in Stewart’s
writing that allows her to make startling observations. Comparing her style to that of Barthes, Rapaport observed that “Such statements incline towards
the grammatical rule of thumb, though reflected in
them are the fleeting impressions from which they
are derived.” In Stewart’s writing, he observed, “the
fleeting perception is at once more subjective and
even poetic than in Barthes.” Reviewing On Longing in Language in Society, Dan Rose observed that
the book had only begun a study which should be
applied to non-western cultures. Calling Stewart “the
leading figure in forming the new folklore,” Rose
described this folklore as having “broken with the
sciences and joined the humanities” to become a sort
of narrative anthropology.
In 1991 Stewart published Crimes of Writing:
Problems in the Containment of Representation, an
examination of clandestine and sometimes “criminal” forms of writing such as graffiti, forgery,
plagiarism, and pornography. While some critics
deemed it an interesting mix, Wendy Steiner, critiquing the book in the Times Literary Supplement,
found the results to be wanting. “How can such a
wonderful project have gone so wrong?” she asked.
Steiner blamed what she considered the book’s failure on Stewart’s dense language: “here we have a
writing through gauze,” she observed, “language so
opaque as to mask any hint of argumentative rigour.”
Quoting such statements from the book as, “It is the
nature of the commodity system, of its compelling
systematicity per se, to replace labor with magic, intrinsicality with marketing, authoring with ushering,” Steiner wrote, “Such claims might prove to be
true, if it were not so hard to know what they mean.”
Modern Language Notes contributor Henry
Sussman, on the other hand, “felt particularly grateful to Susan Stewart for having written” Crimes of
Writing. Stewart, the critic continued, had “furnished the contemporary scene with an up-to-date,
inventive, and highly eclectic psychopathology of
writing from a literary point of view.” Like Steiner,
he mentioned as particularly noteworthy a passage
discussing the Final Report of U.S. Attorney
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General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography in 1986. John Sutherland, in a London Review
of Books essay on Crimes of Writing, noted Stewart’s participation in a 1991 conference at Case
Western Reserve University on “Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship.” Sutherland concluded, “We do not, I think, have a label
for the kind of hybrid legal-literary critical approach
embodied in [Stewart’s nonfiction], which [combines] history, legal casuistry and literary aesthetics. But it is clear that it will be one of the livelier
areas of academic activity over the next few years.”
In addition to her scholarly work, Stewart has
written several books of poetry, and in this arena
as well, a number of critics have commented—in
quite favorable tones—on the opaque quality of her
language. Hence a reviewer in Publishers Weekly,
writing about 1981’s Yellow Stars and Ice, observed that “her poems exist only in their own making and on the page, but have no correspondence
with everyday reality.” Noting that the poet was
only twenty-nine years old at the time, the reviewer
called her “a disarmingly gifted writer.” Suzanne
Juhasz in Library Journal listed some of the commonplace objects that populate Stewart’s work—
pillowcases, headlights, feathers—but averred that
“The terrain of these lyrics . . . is that of dream and
the subconscious mind.” Calling Yellow Stars a
“beautiful collection,” Juhasz concluded that it
contained “magic as well as finesse.” Even a critic
in Virginia Quarterly who faulted Stewart for
“accommodat[ing] the fashionable, neo- surrealist
trend” did so in light of her talent as a poet, which
made such an alleged accommodation a particular
shame; the reviewer also referred to her “keen
imagination and her thorough knowledge of modern form and voice.”
Stewart’s poetic works have alternated with
her nonfiction; hence three years after On Longing,
she produced The Hive. As with her first collection, the imagistic poetry of The Hive bestows on
everyday objects an otherworldly and magical quality. Stewart, noted a contributor to Virginia Quarterly Review, “draw[s] us into a still, painterly
world with her quiet, steady voice.” David McDuff
in Stand noted that “There are some fine poems
here,” which he described as “possessing a spiky
energy akin to the dynamics of metal-crafting.” As
an example he quoted the passage from the poem
“Gaville” from which Stewart drew the book’s title: “And each evening would come / in on the yellow air like this one, / like a lost bee that never /
Knew what smoke means: / how something burns
always once the hive / has been destroyed.”
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“An aura of mystery envelops” The Forest, a
reviewer in Publishers Weekly observed of Stewart’s 1995 collection. Here her poetry is more narrative than in the two earlier collections, but the
familiar touches are there, the reviewer suggested,
creating a sense of removal from the ordinary that
imbues her work with the atmosphere of a fairy
tale. Carmine G. Simmons, in an appraisal of The
Forest for American Book Review, began by saying, “One can easily become disoriented within the
dark, frightening recesses of Susan Stewart’s latest
volume.” Her poems, Simmons wrote, reintroduce
the reader to “a kind of knowledge we have chosen to forget, one . . . lost among the cold geographies of contemporary culture.” As an example of
Stewart’s “thick, vivid imagery,” Simmons quoted
“The Spell”: “I thought of how in the black-andwhite / films a hand with one ring smashes / the
butt of the cigarette back and forth / in the plaid
beanbag ashtray until/the fire is out. The tiny
mummy stands / comically askew, yet is as well /
a symbol of a sinister resolve.” Simmons called
such imagery “Thoughtful, powerful, beautiful,”
and observed that such images, “bound in their decidedly human realm, ultimately rise above the
spaces of commonality to unite with the truth found
in the paled memories of a past we all share.”
Source: “Susan A. Stewart,” in Contemporary Authors
Online, Thomson Gale, 2004.
Carmine G. Simmons
In the following review of the collection The
Forest, Simmons notes the urgency of the subject
matter and the limitations of the speaker’s voice in
the title poem.
One can easily become disoriented within the
dark, frightening recesses of Susan Stewart’s latest
volume, The Forest. The poetry reveals a kind of
knowledge we have chosen to forget, one not as much
found in nature as lost among the cold geographies
of contemporary culture. The myth of the forest
seems to hold for Stewart both an answer and a challenge, the former veiled by the passing of untold
memories of time and the latter obscured by our modern removal from the cruel, honest realities of nature,
and its agency over our collective existence. Stewart’s compelling poetry reminds us that we must, finally, return to the primal spaces of the verdant,
vanishing, vociferous forest—be witnesses to its cycles of life and death, ritual and frenzy, passion and
rage—for with the relics of its fading memory we
may find for ourselves a “kind of life” commensurate with the great expectations of our creation.
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Like modern-day
Goodman Browns, sneaking
through the forest primeval,
Stewart takes her readers
on a journey into darkness
to look for what we cannot
fully imagine in our own
comfortable, discomforting
geographies: truth.”
The first section, “Phantoms,” opens with the
title poem, a prescriptive context-setter for the serious topographical exploration we encounter in the
volume. The somber voice heard through this poem
is representative of that found elsewhere. A kind
of stunned, perhaps entranced, speaker has control
of the collection, one who is able to apprehend reasons for remembering the forest but who cannot
quite muster up the appropriate reaction to the
memories stored there. “The Forest” begins
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing—
no, the truth is it is gone now
and so what details you can bring back
might have a kind of life.
The urgency of the stanza (and the poem) is not
well served by the speaker’s sleepy imperatives.
There in the forest, we are asked to believe, lie the
petrified remains of a former consciousness, yet we
are not quite commanded to go and seek but rather
soothed, eased, into a recollective space where
memory handles the action. Later in the poem,
within familiar and “singular” spaces of the forest,
the speaker confesses, “You can understand what
I am doing when I think of the entry—. . . / as a
kind of limit.” The poet’s re-entry into the past,
through reflection and conscious energy, is limited
only by a voice that never matches the dire importance of the occasions of re-entry. Though Stewart
writes passionately and, paradoxically, beautifully
of the human potential for savagery, removed as it
is in the modern world from necessity, her speakers, sadly, never quite manage a scream, the most
primal mode of announcement.
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Stewart’s use of repetition within and between
poems works well to reinforce the mystical nature of
such a recollection of the past, though the strongest
meanings of these lines are often neutralized by the
plurality of emphases she utilizes. For example, the
first three lines of the opening stanza are repeated in
the poem, and their substance transcends the boundaries of separate poems. But at times the lines become lost in the tedium of syntactical musical-chairs.
“No, the truth is it is gone” of line three becomes “no
the truth is, it is gone now,” in the second stanza, and
later ends the poem as “but the truth is, it is, lost to
us now.” What should be the comforting familiarity
of repeated diction becomes discomfort and disorientation for the reader who must split hairs of meaning to follow the poet’s lead.
What Stewart’s poems lack in voice and tone
is compensated in thick, vivid imagery, and by a
poetic insistence on the realism of the past and present which are her themes. There is not one forest
but many and each is crafted for a particular reason and purpose: the bucolic space of “The Arbor
1937,” where “bees were tensing / on the blueblack
grapes”; the shadowy, cloistered domestic scene
in “The Gypsy 1946.” Most noteworthy is the
crimson-infused field found in the brief poem, “The
Violation 1942”:
Stubble in the burnt field
her red plaid, flagging,
flagged; burnt in the straw,
stiff, stubbed,
stubbed out,
out.
When set adrift in “The Spell,” these laconic lines
latch onto apocalyptic images of violence and explode into signs that point the way to truth. The
stark image of “Stubble in the burnt field” expands
to include “strangers walking abreast,” the “sheet
unwinding” of a sloping meadow, and “icy fruit
softened, bruised, overturned.” Likewise, the final
line “stubbed out, out” ignites in “The Spell” to reveal surfeit recollective imagery:
I thought of how in the black-and-white
films a hand with one ring smashes
the butt of the cigarette back and forth
in the plaid beanbag ashtray until
the fire is out. The tiny mummy stands
comically askew, yet is as well
a symbol of a sinister resolve.
Thoughtful, powerful, beautiful. These images,
bound in their decidedly human realm, ultimately
rise above the spaces of commonality to unite with
the truth found in the paled memories of a past we
all share.
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The second part of Stewart’s collection, titled
“Cinder,” has some of the urgency of the first part
but, unfortunately, little else to recommend. It almost seems that, having raised and engaged with
the phantoms of the forest, Stewart scavenges over
the forest floor for nuggets (or seeds) to carry away
as souvenirs of the journey. Most of these don’t
germinate well in the poems, though there are some
fertile exceptions. In “Holswege,” for example,
Stewart writes of a walk through a chestnut grove:
It was as if I were stopped in the wing
of an endless building, a kind of ruin wound in
leaves.
And later:
It was always in Spring that I hoped to turn
away from myself, away from the inevitable closure
of feeling, hoping that some feeble maxim was the
truth.
Perhaps in these last lines we find the problem with
the “Cinders” section: the “inevitable closure”
never seems to happen in these curious poems. As
Stewart writes in the closing poem, “The Meadow,”
in perplexing, childlike innocence:
no, the snow had no
leaves to hold on to,” as it did, of course,
when it fell in the forest that was there
in the distance.
Much of this second section falls, however gingerly, eventually to the ground, for the trunk-shafts
Stewart envisions, or regenerates, lack the grasping power of foliage, and the real trees, those in the
distance, are too far removed from our reach to provide shelter from the icy blizzard of reality that returns when we close the book. Maybe a little more
joy could be uncovered when the cinders are swept
away; maybe just simple gratitude for the pods that
survive and are empowered by the blaze.
Stewart delineates her forests by contrasting
notions of givenness and action, memory and contemporary reality, and nature and natural agency.
There needs to exist, I think, a more even balance
between the images which are, through the magic
of her art, both beautiful and horrifying, and those
which are, through a lack of poetic sympathy,
merely the latter. Like modern-day Goodman
Browns, sneaking through the forest primeval,
Stewart takes her readers on a journey into darkness to look for what we cannot fully imagine in
our own comfortable, discomforting geographies:
truth. But once that truth is revealed, and we begin
on the long road back to the fallow future—
scratching our heads and wondering exactly what
it is that we have witnessed—one might wonder,
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as surely Goodman Brown must have, whether it
was not better to have let the phantoms of Stewart’s forest sift through the cinders undisturbed.
Source: Carmine G. Simmons, “Lost in the Woods,” in
American Book Review, Vol. 18, April 1996, p. 29.
Publishers Weekly
In the following review, the reviewer heaps
high praise on The Forest as a collection, calling
it “a rare phenomenon in recent poetry.”
An aura of mystery envelops Stewart’s (The
Hive) third collection of poetry. As she expresses
it: “. . . Bright night, true story, far torch and door;
/ neither yours nor mine, but both . . .” Narratives,
often rooted in history and reminiscent of fairy
tales, are told by unnamed speakers and peopled by
figures that can’t be pinned down. “Slaughter,”
first-person account of learning to butcher, masterfully permits readers to identify with an invisible
narrator pitted against an even more fleeting but
all-powerful “they.” Stewart stumbles slightly
when she becomes self-consciously literary: as her
endnotes inform us, “Nervous System” borrows its
rhyme scheme from John Donne; the extremely
weak, overly long “Medusa Anthology” uses
language from Shakespeare and Gerard Manley
Hopkins. Her own linguistic sensibility is refined
enough not to require such academic justification,
which also seems to curb her imagination. These
few examples aside, this volume is a rare phenomenon in recent poetry: poems which require
several readings, and promise to be equally intriguing each time.
Source: Review of The Forest, in Publishers Weekly,
Vol. 242, June 26, 1995, pp. 101–02.
Sources
Gioia, Dana, Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and
American Culture, Graywolf Press, 1992, pp. 1–24.
Harrison, Robert Pogue, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 155–56, 170.
Review of The Forest, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 242,
No. 26, June 26, 1995, pp. 101–02.
Roszak, Theodore, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and
Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, Faber and Faber,
1972, pp. 10–12.
Simmons, Carmine G., Review of The Forest, in American
Book Review, Vol. 18, April 1996, p. 29.
Stewart, Susan, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 332.
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T h e
F o r e s t
“Susan Stewart,” Pew Fellowships in the Arts, 1995, http://
www.pewarts.org/95/Stewart/ (accessed January 14, 2005).
Classroom’s Summer Institute, held at Columbia
University’s Teachers College in New York City.
Thompson, Jon, “Interview with Susan Stewart,” Free
Verse, Spring 2003, http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/
Archives/Spring_2003/Interview/interviews.htm (accessed
January 14, 2005).
Swiggart, Katherine, Review of The Forest, in Electronic
Poetry Review, 1996, http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue1/
alltext/rvsw.htm (accessed January 14, 2005).
Swiggart discusses “The Forest” in terms of the
force of its language. By the end of the poem, language has supplanted the physical realm. It seems
that only through the power of language to evoke reality can the forest, or any historical particularity,
be known.
Further Reading
Hass, Robert, et al, “‘How Poetry Helps People to Live Their
Lives’: APR’s 25th Anniversary Celebration,” in American
Poetry Review, Vol. 28, No. 5, September–October 1999,
pp. 21–27.
This article contains statements by prominent writers,
including Stewart, about the usefulness of poetry. For
example, Stewart comments, “A great poem will not
let the mind rest; it compels us to a continual engagement that is something like the force of life itself.”
Online Poetry Classroom, Summer 2000, http://www.online
poetryclassroom.org/ (accessed January 14, 2005).
This Web site contains the transcript of a poetry
seminar given by Stewart at the Online Poetry
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Zanzotto, Andrea, Selected Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto,
edited and translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann,
Princeton University Press, 1975.
Zanzotto is a twentieth-century Italian poet whose
work has attracted English-speaking readers. In his
poetry, a pervasive emblem for the source of both nature and culture is the forest.
Zipes, Jack, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests
to the Modern World, Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988.
Zipes demonstrates how the nostalgia of the Brothers Grimm for lost origins was linked to their concept of the forest as a place associated with a lost
unity in creation.
P o e t r y
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S t u d e n t s
If
Rudyard Kipling’s “If” is perhaps his most famous
poem. Kipling composed the poem in 1909 while
living in Great Britain. It was first published in
1910 in Kipling’s collection of children’s stories,
Rewards and Fairies, as a companion piece to the
story “Brother Square Toes,” which is an account
of George Washington and his presidency during
the French Revolution. The placement of the didactic poem after “Brother Square Toes” in the collection serves to distill a specific lesson from the
story for its young readers.
Rudyard Kipling
1910
“If” attracted immediate nationwide attention in
Britain, and it was quickly adopted as a popular anthem. In the Kipling Journal, C. E. Carrington relates
Kipling’s own words of subtle displeasure regarding
the unexpected rampant popularity of the poem:
Among the verses in Rewards . . . was one set called
“If,” which escaped from the book, and for a while
ran about the world . . . Once started, the mechanization of the age made them snowball themselves
in a way that startled me . . . Twenty-seven of the
Nations of the Earth translated them into their sevenand-twenty tongues, and printed them on every sort
of fabric.
“If” is a didactic poem, a work meant to give
instruction. In this case, “If” serves as an instruction in several specific traits of a good leader.
Kipling offers this instruction not through listing
specific characteristics, but by providing concrete
illustrations of the complex actions a man should
or should not take which would reflect these
characteristics.
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Rudyard Kipling
In modern times, “If” remains widely anthologized and is regarded as a popular classic of
English literature, not necessarily for a display of
artistry but for its familiarity and inspiration.
Author Biography
Poet, novelist, and short-story writer Rudyard
Kipling, the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature, was the most popular literary figure of his time. He was born December 30,
1865, in Bombay, India, to John Lockwood Kipling
and Alice MacDonald Kipling. John, who was a
teacher of architecture and an artist, inspired the
character of the Keeper of the Wonder House in
Kipling’s novel Kim (1901).
Kipling spent his early childhood in India and
was cared for by a Hindu nanny; as a young child he
spoke Hindi. However, as was the custom of the time,
at the age of five Kipling was sent to boarding school
in Britain, where he was subjected to severe strictness and bullying. His poor eyesight kept him from
advancing into a military career, so at the age of sixteen, Kipling returned to his parents in Lahore,
India, and began his career as a journalist, first at the
Civil and Military Gazette (1882–1887) and then as
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a worldwide correspondent for the Pioneer (1887–
1889), a newspaper in Allahabad, India. His work became quite popular, especially his satirical and humorous verse. When he returned to England in 1889,
he was already regarded as a national literary hero.
In 1892, Kipling married an American, Caroline Balestier, and moved to Vermont. Their two
daughters, Josephine—who died at the age of six
from pneumonia—and Elsie, were born in Vermont.
The Kiplings returned to England in 1896; their only
son, John, was born later that year. From that time
on, the Kiplings remained based in England, though
they regularly continued to travel around the world.
Kipling was a prolific writer whose work encompassed novels, children’s stories, essays, and poetry, and he remained intensely popular with the
common readership even though much of his verse
and essays were scathingly political. His children’s
stories and his poetry have remained popular into the
twenty-first century. “If” first appeared in his children’s book Rewards and Fairies, published in 1910.
Perhaps his most famous poem, “If” is addressed to
a young boy and was written for his young son, John,
as an instruction in becoming an upright and good
man. John was killed almost a decade later, in 1915,
during battle in World War I. John’s death was an
irreparable blow to Kipling and was one cause of
Kipling’s eventual decrease in productivity.
Kipling’s skill at storytelling, his immensely
readable and songlike verse, his refusal to mince
words, and the strong sense of British patriotism
that characterized his work made him immensely
popular with the common readership. However, his
receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1907 was met with disapproval from literary critics and writers, who considered him vulgar and lacking in craftsmanship.
Kipling died January 18, 1936, in London, following an intestinal hemorrhage. He was survived
by his wife and his daughter Elsie. His body was
cremated and his ashes were buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Among Kipling’s best known works are his
novels Kim (1901), Captains Courageous (1897),
The Jungle Book (1894), and The Second Jungle
Book (1895), and his poems “White Man’s Burden” (1899) and “Recessional” (1897).
Poem Text
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
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If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your
master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
5
10
Stanza 2
15
20
25
30
Poem Summary
Stanza 1
The first stanza of “If” illustrates the practice
of self-confidence and expresses that, in being confident, the reader must have the courage to face unpopularity and disagreement. This stanza also,
however, advises against a self-confidence that
does not allow for the consideration of opposing
ideas. In exhorting the reader to both ignore doubt
and make allowance for doubt (lines 3 and 4),
Kipling creates a paradox (the combination of
mutually exclusive ideas that, while seemingly contradictory, serve to make a point in their contradiction) that is characteristic of the tone of the
entire poem.
Line 5 advises patience, line 6 advises honesty,
and line 7 advises fortitude of character. These
three lines, along with the first four lines of the
poem, share a common thread: they provide instruction in the maintenance of righteous behavior
in the face of unrighteousness. However, in line 8,
Kipling is quick to qualify his advice, telling the
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reader “yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.”
That is, in behaving righteously, a person must
avoid self-righteousness.
The meter of the first stanza moves along at a
set and predictable pace. If it were to be read aloud,
the smooth pace of the regular meter would reflect
a quietness of tone—a tone that reflects the humility Kipling seems to be advocating in the last two
lines of stanza 1.
The second stanza employs variations in the meter. C. E. Carrington, in an essay on the poem for the
Kipling Journal, writes of line 12 in particular: “The
reader finds his voice rising with a sort of indignation to a climax at the words those two imposters.
(Read this line as an iambic pentameter and you
kill it dead.)” As Carrington notes, the consecutive
stressed syllables here are jarring in their phrasing,
serving to add heated emotion. Such a minor climax
is appropriate for this stanza, which warns the reader
of the impermanence of both success and failure and
the potential for an individual’s thoughts and dreams,
once made public, to be put to ill use by others.
The first two lines (9 and 10) of stanza 2 exhort the reader to find a balance between private
ideals and public action, warning against making
the machinations of the mind an end in itself. In
other words, to be a leader an individual must be
able to put private dreams and philosophies to public action. However, as in the first stanza, Kipling
creates a contradiction by warning what can happen when ideals and philosophies are brought into
the public arena. As noted in line 1, private
thoughts, once made public, can be “twisted” away
from their original meaning. The central focus of
this second stanza is to instruct the reader to act on
his ideals and to warn the reader at the same time
that action does not guarantee permanent success.
The nature of ideals in action is concretely illustrated in lines 15 and 16 as hard, continuous labor.
Stanza 3
The third stanza is characterized by hyperbole,
or the use of exaggeration as a literary device. After establishing in the second stanza that both “Triumph” and “Disaster” are impermanent by nature,
the first quatrain (four lines) of stanza 3 advises detachment from both. Kipling makes a recommendation to “make one heap of all your winnings /
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss” in order
to illustrate the complete detachment with which
an individual should regard both profit and loss,
neither of which is permanent.
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At the same time, a very sharp contrast is made
to this illustration of detachment in the ensuing four
lines, which offer the equally strong exhortation to
“Hold on!” As with earlier contradictions, this contradiction is done purposefully, a literary technique
known as “paradox.” It is Kipling’s point not that
fine leadership asks the impossible—that is, to simultaneously espouse contradictory behaviors and
traits—but that model leadership requires action
that is based on a worldview that is complex, multifaceted, and ultimately inclusive.
Stanza 4
The recommendation to the reader toward inclusiveness is further reflected in the last stanza,
which advises, in the first two lines, to “talk with
crowds” and not “lose the common touch” even
when aspiring toward transcendence of commonality. The third and fourth lines go further, recommending against favoritism and toward regarding
men with equality.
The entire poem, as evidenced by the title, is an
extended “if/then” statement; and the last line serves
as the answer to every “if” presented in the poem:
by emulating the characteristics of a model leader,
an individual can achieve “manhood.” The reader
learns at this point that the poem is meant as a specific address to a boy or young man. That the
achievement of “manhood” is directly associated
with the characteristics and actions of a model leader
reveals a societal attitude toward gender that excludes women from the realm of public leadership.
In the Kipling Journal, Carrington writes of
the poem’s last line: “Hostile critics have made
light of the final couplet, when the poet seems to
descend from high consideration of ethics, and to
drop to a final slangy compliment.” Carrington is
quick to point out that the poem must be considered in light of the circumstances of its original
publication, which reveals its purpose. The poem
is part of the children’s story collection Rewards
and Fairies, and thus the final line can be seen as
an appropriately affectionate address from an older
mentor to a young boy.
Themes
Manhood and Leadership
“If” was originally written as a companion piece
to the children’s story “Brother Square Toes,” a story
about George Washington’s presidency during the
French Revolution. The story portrays the character
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of George Washington as a model leader and was
meant to illustrate to children the virtues of an exemplary public figure. “If” was placed immediately
after this story in order to distill the lessons of the
story; the poem also offers a lesson in the characteristics and virtues of a model public figure or leader.
However, as evidenced in the last line of “If,”
the poem is not addressed to all children but specifically to boys. The poem therefore creates a mutual inclusiveness between the attainment of true
manhood and the abilities and virtues of a true
leader. This inclusiveness, by its very nature, excludes women, reflecting the attitude of early twentieth century society toward women. At the time,
women were not allowed to vote, hold public office, own property, or have an independent career.
Righteousness versus
Self-Righteousness
The first stanza of the poem exhorts the reader
to be patient, honest, and forthright, especially
when faced with opposition and temptation to act
in a less virtuous manner. This call to righteous behavior is qualified by the last line of the stanza,
however, which advises an individual, “don’t look
too good, nor talk too wise.” In other words, an individual must not appear self-righteous in his effort to emulate righteous behavior.
Strong Work Ethic
Praise of a strong work ethic is echoed
throughout the poem, as is a warning against idleness, exemplified in lines 29 and 30: “If you can
fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’
worth of distance run.” The third stanza also reflects an idealization of hard work by exhorting the
reader to “force your heart and nerve and sinew /
To serve your turn long after they are gone.”
The poem also places higher value on the ability to act than on the ability to philosophize, as reflected in lines 9 and 10: “If you can dream—and
not make dreams your master; / If you can think—
and not make thoughts your aim.” An exemplary
life is portrayed as one that is lived as an act of
continuous hard work, during which time an individual should be prepared to constantly “stoop” to
rebuild “with worn-out tools” the work to which an
individual’s life has been devoted. This recommendation of a strong work ethic reflects a
markedly Western, Protestant idealization of hard
work and its progress as ennobling and godly, a
view of work and progress that eventually contributed to the rise of industrialization and capitalism in the West.
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Ann Parry writes in The Poetry of Rudyard
Kipling that the question of whether Kipling was
truly a poet has been “perpetually debated.” She
quotes writer T. R. Henn’s answer to this question: “When his technical mastery, variety and
craftsmanship have all been recognized, it has to
be said that ‘Kipling, nearly, but never wholly
achieved greatness . . . the ultimate depth was
lacking.’” Look at several of Kipling’s poems of
your choosing, and discuss the following in an
essay: do you agree that Kipling’s work shows
“technical mastery?” Why or why not? Do you
agree or disagree with the assessment that
Kipling’s work lacks “ultimate depth?” Why or
why not? Use examples to support your opinions.
• Kipling wrote “If” in 1910. Research other poets who were writing and publishing in England
or the United States at the same time as Kipling.
Detachment
The first quatrain of stanza 3 advises the reader
to be able to “make one heap of all your winnings
/ And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss” and to
“lose, and start again at your beginnings, / And
never breathe a word about your loss.” This hyperbolic (exaggerated) instruction serves to illustrate the impermanent reality of both success and
failure, and thus the futility of seeking success, particularly material success, as a goal. A detachment
from material success is illustrated here as an
ideal virtue.
The Middle Way
Throughout the poem, Kipling illustrates ideal
behavior and virtue through the use of paradox:
righteousness without self-righteousness; detachment while practicing determination; and highbreeding blended with commonality. This paradox
is illustrated in the following lines: “If you can talk
with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with
Kings—nor lose the common touch.” The employment of these contradictory extremes throughout
the poem serves to illustrate a central theme of
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Compare and contrast Kipling’s style with the
style of another poet of your choosing from the
same time period.
• “If” was originally published in Kipling’s collection of children’s stories, Rewards and
Fairies, as a companion piece to the story
“Brother Square-Toes,” which features George
Washington as a character. Read “Brother
Square Toes.” Write a brief essay showing how
“If” serves to complement the short story.
• “If” is written in a strict meter. Each stanza consists of eight lines rhyming abab cdcd. The “a”
and “c” lines, each with eleven syllables, and
the “b” and “d” lines, each with ten syllables,
are written in iambic pentameter. Following the
structure of “If,” write your own didactic poem
on a subject of your choosing.
striving for an idealized “golden mean” in all facets
of life. This strong emphasis on balance possibly
reflects a Buddhist influence on Kipling’s own
life philosophy, as a basic teaching of Buddhism is
the quest for what is known as the Middle Way—
a quest for balance in the search for spiritual
enlightenment.
Style
Iambic Pentameter and Rhyme
“If” is written in iambic pentameter, a form
readers of Shakespeare will be familiar with, as the
bard most often wrote in this style. Iambic
pentameter consists of lines of five “feet” (twosyllable units) formed from an initial unstressed
syllable and a second stressed syllable, as in the
word “because.” The eleven-syllable lines each end
with an extra, unstressed syllable.
The poem is also written in four stanzas of
eight rhyming lines, according to the pattern abab
cdcd. “If” takes its name from the repetition of the
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word “if” at the start of the “a” and “c” lines, each
of which comprise eleven syllables. The “b” and
“d” lines each contain ten syllables.
Didacticism
The main aim of “If” is to instruct a young
man in what Kipling considers the virtues of model
leadership and exemplary manhood. To serve an
instructive end, the poem has been written in what
is known as a “didactic” tone, reminiscent of a sermon. The poem is structured as a list of several
short pieces of advice of varying lengths, a structure reminiscent of a familiar piece of didactic literature in the Western canon, the Book of Proverbs
in the Bible. This resonance with the Book of
Proverbs serves to underscore the poem’s similar
message of righteousness.
Paradox
A paradox is a statement that is contradictory
but that, in its contrariness, makes a point. “If” is
filled with paradox, typically advising the reader
toward two extremes of behavior. For example, the
fourth stanza advises the ability to “walk with
Kings—nor lose the common touch” and to allow
“all men count with you, but none too much.” Perhaps the most extreme paradox appears in the third
stanza, demanding the ability to part with all acquisitions and successes without attachment but simultaneously to have the “Will” to “Hold on!”
Kipling uses pairings of extremes to illustrate the
complexity that virtuous behavior and model
leadership entail. The seeming impossibility of simultaneously emulating two extremes illustrates
the true difficulty in becoming what Kipling
terms “a Man”—in other words, an exemplary human being.
Colloquialism
The tone of “If” is characterized by its use of
everyday phrases and slang, which lends it a colloquial (conversational, informal) tone. The opening lines use the common figure of speech “keep
your head”; “‘em” is purposefully used in line 16
rather than “them”; and most especially, the poem
culminates in an almost crudely common phrase,
“You’ll be a Man.” The diction, however, seems
appropriate as an address to a boy or a young man,
to whom the poem is specifically addressed in the
last line, and for whom the poem was originally
published in a collection of children’s stories. However, perhaps more importantly, this choice of diction seems to reflect the counsel of line 26 to not
“lose the common touch.”
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Historical Context
Children’s Literature of
the Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Centuries
“If” was first published as part of a collection of stories for children, Rewards and Fairies.
Literature written specifically for children is a
relatively new phenomenon, having evolved as recently as the early nineteenth century. Kipling was
well-known for his children’s works, many of
which featured fantasy worlds and talking animals
designed to appeal especially to a child’s imagination, as many other contemporary children’s works
did. However, the main aim of literature for children was not simply entertainment but also education in the morals and manners of society. Rewards
and Fairies is interspersed with poems that distill
lessons from its various stories. “If,” in its didactic format, is one such poem, offering instruction
on the virtues and characteristics of a model public figure.
Women in the Late Nineteenth
and Early Twentieth Centuries
As evidenced in its last line, “If” is specifically
addressed to a boy who would become “a Man.”
The poem creates an interconnectedness between
the attainment of true manhood and the abilities and
virtues of a true leader—a mutual inclusiveness that
by its nature excludes girls and women.
This exclusion of women from the attainment
of roles of public leadership directly reflects the political landscape at the time of the poem’s publication. In the late nineteenth century, American and
British society regarded a woman’s place as strictly
private. While a husband’s role was to provide for
his family and, therefore, maintain a public life by
nature of having a paying job, a wife’s role—
particularly that of a middle-class wife—was
strictly within the home. A woman was responsible
for all household affairs and for the moral upbringing of her children. This relegation of women to the
home excluded them from any role in public life,
including the rights to vote, to hold public office,
to own property, or to attain a higher education.
Women were treated as second-class citizens.
By the year 1910, the year “If” was published,
women had slowly been awarded a number of
rights—thanks to the work of middle-class
feminists—including the rights in some cases to
own property and to attain higher education. By
1910, however, women still had not been granted
the right to vote. In Great Britain, a militant
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1910: Women are granted few rights and are
treated like second-class citizens in both the
United States and Europe. In particular, women
are not allowed to work outside the home, may
not own property, are denied a higher education,
and are not allowed to hold public office nor to
vote. The feminist movement, which is supported primarily by middle- and upper-class
women, works toward more equality for women.
Feminists such as Emmeline Pankhurst even resort to violent means to gain attention for the
feminist cause, engaging in property damage
and notorious hunger strikes.
Today: Women in the Western world have
much greater freedoms than they did at the turn
of the twentieth century. They can live a life independent of men, with the ability to own property and maintain a career. Women also figure
greatly in public life and politics. Although the
United States has yet to vote in a female president, Great Britain has had a female prime minister, the United States has had several female
governors, and some states are represented in
the Senate by all-female delegations.
• 1910: The British Empire is the largest and most
powerful empire in world history. The saying
“The sun never sets on the British Empire”
suffragist movement was built up, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, which resorted to violent means to
campaign for women’s voting rights, from hunger
strikes to smashing department store windows.
World War I (1914–1918) brought a sudden
change for the better as far as women’s rights were
concerned. During the war, the social dynamics of
gender shifted when women became a powerful
workforce, filling spots made vacant by men serving in the military. The onslaught of the war and
the role that women played, which was instrumental in overturning the boundary between women
and public life, figured greatly in the right to vote
finally being awarded to women. In 1918, the
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reflects the global reach of the English. Its massive empire makes Britain the most powerful
country of the pre–World War I era.
Today: The twentieth century sees the demise
of the British Empire, brought about by two catastrophic world wars and the empire’s eventual
inability to keep a firm grasp on its colonies.
India, its most lucrative colony, wins independence in 1947. Britain today remains an important player in world politics but has ceded its
place of dominance to the United States.
• 1910: In the decades prior to World War II, most
poetry, such as the work of Rudyard Kipling, is
written according to strict meter and/or rhyme.
This observance is prevalent among the works
of Kipling’s contemporaries as well as his recent predecessors.
Today: The post–World War II literary world has
seen drastic evolution in poetic form as an artistic retaliation to the horrors of modern warfare
and as an echo of other artistic movements, such
as the development of jazz as a musical style. Poets abandon strict meter and experiment with free
verse, as reflected in the Beat movement. Computers and technology enable poets to experiment
further with language through hypertext.
United Kingdom granted full voting rights to
women age thirty and older.
Critical Overview
“If” is perhaps Kipling’s most famous poem. Originally published as a part of the children’s book Rewards and Fairies, it gained immediate popularity
as an independent piece, becoming a sort of inspirational anthem whose popularity endures into the
twenty-first century, almost to the point of becoming a cliché.
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The poem itself is not the specific subject of
significant literary criticism; however, Kipling himself has been the subject of scores of criticism since
he began publishing in his early twenties. His receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1907, while met with
wide approval from the general readership with
which he was immensely popular, was met with dismay by the literary world: he was perceived by the
literary establishment of his time as a writer of
verse, rather than of poetry; the simple style of much
of his prose was considered little more than entertaining; and many found the blunt, straightforward
political messages of his work unrefined and vulgar.
Toward the end of his life, Kipling’s once prolific output had ebbed, just as the optimism of the
British Empire had changed to disillusion after
the horrors of World War I. Kipling’s work, once
the most popular in Britain, became dated through
its belief in the superiority and the romance of imperialism that was an integral part of Victorian-era
philosophy.
It was the work of the poet T. S. Eliot that almost single-handedly brought Kipling’s reputation
back to serious literary consideration in the years
following Kipling’s death. Eliot found enough
value in Kipling’s verse to publish a newly edited
collection in 1941; in his introductory essay he defends Kipling’s abilities, despite his unpopular and
dated political messages, as a poet. Eliot writes in
the introduction to the collection, “Poetry is condemned as ‘political’ when we disagree with the
politics; and the majority of readers do not want
imperialism or socialism in verse. But the question
is not what is ephemeral, but what is permanent . . .
we therefore have to try to find the permanent in
Kipling’s verse.”
Continuing demand for a writer’s work long after his
death is one of the criteria that suggests literary greatness and value, and this perhaps explains why there
are a group of critics who have sought to admit
Kipling to the first rank of literature, having duly
chastised him for harmful attitudes, or having qualified his moral undesirability.
Criticism
Tamara Fernando
Tamara Fernando is a writer and editor based
in Seattle, Washington. In this essay, Fernando
shows how both Christianity and Buddhism play a
role in shaping Kipling’s didactic poem “If.”
Rudyard Kipling was the most beloved writer
of his time, and his most famous work was the
poem “If,” a four-stanza poem that first appeared
in his children’s collection Rewards and Fairies.
“If” gained instantaneous popularity as an independent piece, a popularity that persists to this day.
The poem is a rather inspirational instruction in
the achievement of idealized ethical and moral
behavior.
Kipling’s poetry is seen as a failure to be something
else, it is lacking in the range of qualities and characteristics for which high literature is valued. This
definition of literature depends greatly on the
ephemerality of popular texts: they must be lacking
in aesthetic complexity because they disappear so
quickly. It is at this point that Kipling becomes an
enigma, because his popularity has never receded. . . .
The gospel of work (one of [Methodist founder] John
Wesley’s ever-reiterated themes), a hatred of frivolity, earnestness about life’s purpose . . . these
[Kipling] inherited from his ancestors. And the language of the Bible in which to clothe [his work]; especially the Psalms, Proverbs, . . . didactic poetry, in
fact. This is the superficial inheritance of Kipling
from his Wesleyan grandfathers.
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Still, the question of Kipling’s ability as a poet
is one that writer Ann Parry, in The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, calls “perpetually debated.” Parry
quotes T. R. Henn, who wrote in 1967, “‘Kipling,
nearly, but never wholly achieved greatness . . . the
ultimate depth was lacking’ because there was ‘an
absence of that high-breeding which is the essence
of all style.’” Parry further notes in her book that
one of the abiding tests of the quality of literature
is its survival beyond contemporary popularity:
Kipling himself was a confirmed agnostic
throughout his life. However, upon careful examination, the poem “If” reveals a deep influence of religious ethics upon the worldview that Kipling puts
forth in this poem. In particular, “If” illustrates the
influence of both Protestant Christian and of Buddhist philosophies in a quest toward an ideal life.
Kipling himself was often a vocal critic of
Christian institutions, particularly of the doctrines
related to salvation and human sinfulness, and especially of Christian missionary work. As a child,
Kipling did not grow up in a particularly religious
household, and although his parents were not
churchgoing Methodists, both his paternal and maternal grandfathers had been Methodist preachers.
However, despite the relative lack of traditional
Christianity in Kipling’s life, Kipling’s own work
nevertheless bears a marked influence from the
tenets and the literature of Christianity. Angus Wilson writes in his biography of Kipling, The Strange
Ride of Rudyard Kipling:
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
I f
Two of the tenets of Protestant Christianity
mentioned here—the Protestant work ethic and the
influence of Biblical verse—are specifically evident in Kipling’s poem “If.” Indeed, the style of
the poem “If” is reminiscent of the Proverbs of the
Bible. Take, for example, the first few lines of
Proverb 12:
Whoever loves disciplines love knowledge
But he who hates reproof is stupid.
A good man obtains favor from the Lord,
But a man of evil devices he condemns.
A man is not established by wickedness
But the root of the righteous will never be moved.
This example from Proverbs instructs the
reader in righteousness and godliness by providing
specific examples of upright behavior and, for each
of these examples, the consequences of their parallel corrupt behavior. The structure of “If” is quite
similar to this Proverb, not only in its instruction toward righteous behavior, but in its use of parallels
throughout the entire poem. In just one example,
lines 3 and 4 of “If” read: “If you can trust yourself
when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for
their doubting too.” Just as parallel behaviors are illustrated in the Proverb above, forming the basic
structure of the verse, so too does Kipling use parallel structure to make his point in advising the need
to be able to both ignore doubt and make allowance
for doubt. This trend is continued throughout the
poem: for example, Kipling parallels the virtues of
righteousness and humility in the first stanza by advising, “being hated, don’t give way to hating, / And
yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.”
Kipling, though he did not espouse the theological doctrines of Protestantism, was still affected
by its ethical and moral precepts. One of the most
pervasive of Protestant ethics in Western society is
the exaltation of work and productivity as godly
and as a path toward salvation, along with an equal
disdain for idleness. This societal view of work was
in fact instrumental in the rise of industrialization
and capitalism in Western societies. As Wilson
notes in the quote given above, Kipling was not immune to the effect of the Protestant work ethic. This
philosophy too is an integral part of the message
Kipling puts forth in “If,” which offers instruction
in the virtues, actions, and behaviors that, to
Kipling, are the hallmark of model leadership and
the makeup of an exemplary man. The Protestant
work ethic is specifically reflected in the second
stanza: “If you can dream—and not make dreams
your master; / If you can think—and not make
thoughts your aim.” Here, Kipling recognizes the
need for idealism and philosophy, but it is truly the
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But the aspirations
of the poem are not toward
divinity, but clearly
towards manhood—with
a capital M. The ending
that Kipling chose makes
Manhood—humanity—the
pinnacle to be reached.”
ability to act on those thoughts and ideals that is
the message of these lines. Warning against idleness is also the aim of lines 29 and 30, which read,
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty
seconds’ worth of distance run.”
An idealization of work and action is also illustrated in the third stanza, exhorting one even to
go so far as to “force your heart and nerve and
sinew / To serve your turn long after they are gone.”
The bodily imagery here evokes manual labor, but
not just labor without purpose: the body of this life
should serve to make a lasting effect “long after”
it is gone. Labor and work, therefore, should have
lasting purpose.
It is interesting to note, then, that while these
lines of the third stanza advise toward labor,
progress, and results, the stanza’s first quatrain
seems to promote a much different message:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
The message of these lines is almost in direct
opposition to the instruction of the ensuing stanza,
whose message seems to be to labor toward a lasting purpose. Here, however, the fruit of labor—
both success and failure—is treated as absolutely
inconsequential and therefore should be regarded
with extreme detachment.
In fact, the exhortation toward detachment is
a constant theme throughout the poem, echoing a
very basic Buddhist teaching. Ainslie Embree, in
Sources of Indian Tradition, explains the basis of
Buddhist philosophy:
The threefold characterization of the nature of the
world and all that it contains—sorrowful, transient,
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I f
What
Do I Read
Next?
• Rewards and Fairies (1910) is a collection of
children’s stories by Kipling, a sequel to Puck
of Pook’s Hill. “If” was first published in this
collection as a companion piece to the story
“Brother Square Toes.”
• Something of Myself (1937) is Kipling’s autobiography, in which he discusses his life, his work,
and his political beliefs. It provides a humorous
insight into the mind of a man at once popular and
notorious for his blunt style and political views.
• The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle
Book (1895) are Kipling’s most famous and endearing works. The books contain a collection
of stories for children, set in the jungles of
India and featuring animals as their main characters. The most popular stories feature the character of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the
jungle.
• Captains Courageous (1897) is a coming-of-age
novel by Kipling that relates the adventures of
a rich, spoiled boy who is rescued from a shipwreck by a fishing boat. This novel is typically
classified as juvenilia.
and soulless—is frequently repeated in Buddhist literature, and without fully grasping its truth no being
has any chance of salvation. For until he thoroughly
understands the three characteristics of the world a
man will inevitably crave for permanence in one form
or another, and as this cannot, by the nature of things,
be obtained he will suffer, and probably make others
suffer also.
Buddhism teaches that sorrow is created by desire, and all desire is driven by a craving for permanence. To recognize the impermanence of everything
worldly is to rid oneself of desire. In Buddhism, the
complete annihilation of desire leads to salvation.
Just as “If” shows the influence of Christianity on Kipling’s worldview and artistry, so too
does it reflect the perhaps more weighty influence
of Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism.
Kipling, who was born in India and spent his early
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• Kim (1901) is often argued to be Kipling’s most
mature novel. The main character, Kim, also
known as Kimball O’Hara, is the orphaned son
of an Irish soldier who lives on the streets of
India. In search of his destiny, Kim embarks on
travels that bring him in contact with such figures as the Tibetan Dalai Lama. Although the
novel contains several racial stereotypes, it has
been praised in modern times for its ability to
rise above the racism that characterized other
contemporary works, and it is widely viewed as
Kipling’s best work.
• A Brief History of India (2003), by Alain
Daniélou, provides an insightful and easy to follow portrait of a country that figured prominently in Kipling’s life and writing.
• A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885, reprint, 1999,
with illustrations by Tasha Tudor), by celebrated
writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), is
filled with poems for young readers. Stevenson
lived at the same time as Kipling and wrote
children’s literature as well as adult literature,
like Kipling.
adulthood living and traveling the subcontinent as
a journalist, retained a passion for India throughout his life. Many of his most important works take
place there, including his best novel, Kim. Kipling
was throughout his life intensely interested in Eastern religions and held their philosophies in higher
esteem than he did Christianity’s. No doubt this
was an influence of his father, John Lockwood
Kipling, who was not a practicing Christian. John
was a specialist in what was then known as
Orientalism—that is, the study of the culture and
religions of the Asiatic parts of the British Empire.
For over twenty years, John ran a museum in Lahore, India, dedicated to the anthropological study
of the Indian subcontinent. According to Wilson in
The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, John, for
whom Rudyard had a lifelong admiration, had a
great deal of influence over the writings of his son;
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his knowledge and championing of Eastern culture
surely influenced Kipling.
The Buddhist teaching of the impermanence of
the worldly and the rejection of desire is reflected
in lines 11 and 12 of “If”: “If you can meet with
Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.” Triumph and disaster denote the polar opposite pinnacle of success and
depth of failure, but here Kipling puts them on
a completely even level. By calling them “imposters,” he exhorts the reader to recognize that
both success and failure are not guaranteed; they
are impermanent and, therefore, an illusion.
The action Kipling recommends—to treat both
success and failure, acquisition and loss, as one and
the same—is based on a recognition of the world as
impermanent. The poem implicitly advises against
attaching any desire to an individual’s actions, as has
been shown also in the lines of the third stanza.
Another doctrine of Buddhism closely related
to the philosophy regarding impermanence and desire, is the teaching of the Middle Way. Embree
quotes the Buddhist writing, the Samyutta Mikaya:
“There are two ends not to be served by a wanderer
. . . the pursuit of desires and the pleasure which
springs from desire . . . and the pursuit of pain and
hardship . . . the Middle Way of the Tathagata
avoids both these ends. It is enlightened.”
The Middle Way, the Samyutta Mikaya goes
on to explain, is what is known as the Noble Eightfold Path, which is a set of eight main precepts
guiding the actions of the follower toward a correct behavior that ultimately leads to enlightenment. While the Buddhist teaching of the Middle
Way is meant to lead the follower eventually to
spiritual enlightenment, Kipling applies a sort of
generalization of the ideal of a middle path to his
own precepts set forth in “If.” Indeed, the quest for
a middle path in behavior, thought, and virtue is a
running theme throughout the poem. In the first
stanza, Kipling advises the reader toward righteous
behavior—to be patient (line 5), honest (line 6), and
to avoid hatred (line 7)—and, at the same time, to
avoid self-righteousness (line 10). Other paradoxes
are constructed throughout the poem—between
thought and action in the second stanza, and even
between the detachment advocated by the first quatrain of stanza 3, and the second quatrain which exhorts the reader to “hold on when there is nothing
in you / Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold
on!’” These pairings of contradictory extremes
serve to illustrate both the need and the means toward finding a balanced approach to life.
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According to C. E. Carrington’s essay “If You
Can Bring Fresh Eyes to Read These Verses,” in
the Kipling Journal, Winston Churchill once commented that the last line of “If” should have read,
“You’ll be a god, my man!” Churchill’s point,
made tongue-in-cheek, was surely the impossibility of the idealist precepts set forth in “If” for a normal human being to accomplish. Indeed, the ideals
that shape the poem, drawn from two different spiritual traditions, are meant by these religions to transcend the human state and achieve a divine status,
be it the eternal salvation of the soul, or Nirvana.
But the aspirations of the poem are not toward divinity, but clearly toward manhood—with a capital M. The ending that Kipling chose makes
manhood—humanity—the pinnacle to be reached.
In The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Wilson writes of Kipling that his “lifelong agnosticism
includes always towards a reverence for the transcendental”; and indeed, “If” does call for a transcendence. But this transcendence, the poem seems
to imply, does not exclude the earthly, the worldly,
or the human, even though the spiritual traditions
from which Kipling draws his ethics and morals
would maintain quite the opposite. Rather, the last
lines offer a reward of worldliness—“Yours is the
Earth and everything that’s in it,” and for sublimity reached not in the spirit, but in the flesh of
humanity—“you’ll be a Man, my son!”
Source: Tamara Fernando, Critical Essay on “If,” in Poetry
for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Wendy Perkins
Perkins is a professor of American literature
and film. In this essay, Perkins explores the poem’s
idealistic yet bitter tone.
Kipling’s “If” has become his most popular
and anthologized poem. Since its publication in
1909, many readers have professed the poem’s set
of rules to be inspirational and motivational in their
focus on personal integrity and moral behavior and
consider it to offer excellent advice to younger generations. Lines from the poem appear over the
player’s entrance to the center court at Wimbledon,
a reflection of its timeless appeal. As James Harrison notes in his study of Kipling’s works, “as a
compendium of moral maxims, it may well still be
being discovered by new readers as a kind of secular decalogue.” Yet, not all readers have praised
the poem. Harrison writes that some will find that
it reduces “a minefield of moral complexities to a
series of simplistic equations.” He considers the
poem’s chief value to be as a “period piece—as a
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The sheer number of
obstacles that the speaker
suggests his son will have
to face attests to the
poem’s harsh vision of
human nature and destiny.”
nostalgic sampler, in fact, from an age when a combination of willpower and firm moral direction
could be seen as the solution.” The poem is, in fact,
an apt reflection of the period in which it was written as well as of the personal attitudes of its author
toward that period. As such, it becomes a fascinating juxtaposition of idealism and bitterness.
Kipling included “If” in his collection Rewards
and Fairies (1909). He placed it next to his short story
“Brother Square-Toes,” which champions George
Washington’s courage and leadership strengths.
Kipling’s depiction of Washington echoes not only
the American hero but also Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led several hundred Englishmen in
a battle with the Boers in southern Africa. The Jameson Raid, as it came to be known, was one of the major contributing factors to England’s engagement in
the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. Jameson became a
popular hero in England as a result. Kipling saw similar qualities in Jameson and Washington, regarding
them as ideal leaders. Kipling expresses his romantic
ideas about virtuous men of action by listing qualities
he most admires in the poem. The “Man” the speaker
envisions as a model to his son illustrates the author’s
idealist view of Washington and Jameson and could
be an apt description of the traditional hero of popular adventure novels.
The poem also contains a darker side that reflects Kipling’s attitude toward the failure of British
imperialism. George Orwell, in his essay on
Kipling, insists that the author “belongs very definitely to the period 1885–1902.” Orwell writes that
Kipling was “the prophet of British Imperialism in
its expansionist phase.” Toward the end of this period, public attitudes toward the British Empire began to change. Even though England had been
victorious in World War I, her power began to wane.
Orwell writes that the English became “antimilitarist, bored by the Empire. . . . [T]he desire to
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paint the map red had evaporated.” Kipling recognized that “the virtue had gone out of the classes he
idealized [and] the young were hedonistic or disaffected.” World War I “and its aftermath embittered
him.” Orwell concludes that Kipling “spent the later
part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that
account for this.” This bitterness emerges in “If” as
the bleak assessment of the world and its inhabitants, which provide grueling obstacles that one
must conquer to become a virtuous, ideal man.
Kipling writes the lines of the poem as one
long sentence running for four stanzas, which lists
all of the qualities the speaker insists are necessary
if one strives to become “a Man.” The sheer number of obstacles that the speaker suggests his son
will have to face attests to the poem’s harsh vision
of human nature and destiny. The son must meet
the challenges proffered by this hostile world with
courage and stoicism if he is to live with dignity.
Kipling’s bitter vision of the world begins in
the first stanza with a catalogue of betrayals and
attacks. The speaker calls on his son to find patience and the courage to ignore those who will
blame him for misfortunes, doubt him, lie about his
abilities, and hate him. In the final line, he calls on
his son to strive to achieve, “yet don’t look too
good, nor talk too wise,” suggesting that he will be
attacked for these qualities as well.
Kipling’s focus is on stoicism in the second
stanza as he warns of the dangers of losing control
of one’s self to dreams or thoughts or being affected too much by “Triumph and Disaster,” which
he cynically claims are both “impostors.” In this
world, “the things you give your life to” are “broken.” In the fifth and sixth lines, Kipling returns to
his assessment of human nature, which can prompt
the twisting of truths and the trapping of fools.
In the third stanza, Kipling concentrates on the
idealistic hero’s battles with destiny rather than with
others. The qualities that are required here are romantic daring, which will cause him to risk his fortune “on one turn of pitch-and-toss” and resilience
if he loses and must start again. He will need the traditional British resilience if he does lose and strength
of will when he begins to physically decline.
Kipling returns to his dark vision of human nature in the last stanza with its non-virtuous crowds
and hurtful friends. The speaker stresses a note of
humility here when he warns of the dangers of success and presents a more troubling suggestion to
his son about maintaining an emotional detachment
from the world, letting “all men count with you,
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but none too much.” This warning appears appropriate in the poem’s bleak world of lies and betrayals. The speaker’s final maxim is to fill each
moment with worthwhile activity.
By the time the poem’s final lines describe
the successful outcome of overcoming all of the
twenty-six obstacles listed above, becoming a man
appears to be an insurmountable task. The repetition of the word “if” suggests an uncertainty of accomplishment. Kipling’s ideal hero could combine
a stoic perseverance with self-reliant individualism
to accomplish these goals. But, the effort seems as
if it would require herculean skills and self-control.
Perhaps the uncertainty of overcoming such
obstacles reflects Kipling’s attitude toward the decline of British imperialism. David Perkins, in his
History of Modern Poetry, writes that Kipling
“maintained an ideal of the British Empire (conservative, protective, uplifting, and firmly legal);
he became one of its most popular spokesman.”
When public opinion began to turn against this enterprise, Kipling’s reputation suffered. Perkins suggests, “he was too vividly associated in the public
mind with British imperialism.”
The dark vision of human nature that permeates “If” could be a reflection of Kipling’s attitude
toward those who failed to support England’s imperialism and his own alliance with this enterprise.
When the speaker suggests that he has experience
with others blaming, doubting, and lying about him,
he could be revealing Kipling’s response to his detractors. Kipling’s attitude toward the waning support for imperialism is reflected in the speaker’s
advise to his son not to “make dreams your master” and to protect himself from failure since he has
seen the things he “gave [his] life to, broken.”
Kipling saw his dreams of empire wane and
suffered the criticism of many of his readers, yet
he refused to give up his artistic endeavors. When
the speaker of “If” calls his son to face the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that lay before him,
this could be an extension of Kipling’s own advice
to himself so that he, too, could gain “the Earth and
everything that’s in it.”
Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “If,” in Poetry
for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
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Sources
Carrington, C. E., “If You Can Bring Fresh Eyes to Read
These Verses,” in the Kipling Journal, December 1982,
pp. 20–27.
Eliot, T. S., “Introduction,” in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse,
edited by T. S. Eliot, Faber and Faber, 1941.
Embree, Ainslie T., Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1,
Columbia University Press, 1988.
Harrison, James, Rudyard Kipling, Twayne, 1982.
Orwell, George, “Rudyard Kipling,” in A Collection of
Essays, 1946, reprint, Harcourt Brace, 1981, pp. 116–31.
Parry, Ann, The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the
Nation, Open University Press, 1992.
Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry: From the
1890s to the High Modernist Mode, Harvard University
Press, 1976.
Wilson, Angus, The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His
Life and Works, Viking Press, 1977.
Further Reading
Forster, E. M., A Passage to India, reprint, Harvest Books,
1965.
Originally published in 1924, this novel follows the
lives of three English newcomers to India. It was
written at a time when India was still under British
control and explores the clash of Eastern and Western cultures there. Forster (1879–1970), like Kipling,
was fascinated with India.
Gilmour, David, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life
of Rudyard Kipling, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2003.
Kipling’s legacy has endured a long history of vilification, but this biography offers a fresh, earlytwenty-first-century perspective on his life and
ideologies.
Mallett, Phillip, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Mallett concentrates on Kipling’s writing life and
family life.
Yeats, William Butler, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats,
Vol. 1, The Poems, rev. 2d ed., Scribner, 1996.
Yeats, who received the Nobel Prize in 1923, was a
contemporary of Kipling, though a markedly different poet. Although Kipling was more popular than
Yeats during their lifetimes, Yeats’s work is today
regarded as far superior.
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It’s a Woman’s World
Eavan Boland
1982
Eavan Boland’s “It’s a Woman’s World” was first
published in her poetry collection Night Feed
(1982). The poem can also be found in An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987
(1996).
Like many poems in Night Feed, “It’s a
Woman’s World” focuses on issues of female
identity and how the contributions of women
have been overlooked in Irish art, myth, and history. Boland also highlights the domestic work
and lives of Irish women in the poem, which is
another popular theme throughout the collection.
In creating the poems in Night Feed, Boland
drew inspiration from the paintings of Jan Van
Eyck and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, which mostly
depict still-life and domestic scenes. By focusing attention on the domestic aspect of life,
Boland gives the domestic sphere a place of importance in history. By expressing that women
have contributed to the wider culture through
their domestic work, she also emphasizes the inaccuracy of leaving women off the historical
record.
Boland employs rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to enhance the impact of her themes in “It’s
a Woman’s World.” She also uses short lines and
varying stanza lengths, which break from tradition,
reinforcing her theme of reworking old modes of
expression to include contributions of women to
Irish history and culture.
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I t ’ s
a
W o m a n ’ s
W o r l d
Author Biography
Eavan Aisling Boland was born September 24,
1944, in Dublin, Ireland. The daughter of Frederick H. Boland, a diplomat, and Frances Kelly, a
painter, Boland grew up in Dublin, London, and
New York City. In 1966, she graduated with honors from Trinity College in Dublin, where she later
was a lecturer in the English department. From the
late 1960s through the late 1980s, Boland worked
as a cultural journalist, writing reviews for the arts
section of the Irish Times and other publications.
Since the 1980s, Boland has taught at several colleges in the United States and Ireland, including
Bowdoin College, Washington University, University College Dublin, and Stanford University. Since
1995, she has been the Bella Mabury and Eloise
Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and director of the creative writing program at Stanford.
In 1967, Boland published a collection of poems titled New Territory. Boland has since published ten poetry collections, including The War
Horse (1975), Night Feed (1982), Outside History:
Selected Poems, 1980–1990 (1990), An Origin
Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (1996),
and Against Love Poetry: Poems (2001). “It’s a
Woman’s World” appears in Night Feed.
Boland has also published volumes of prose,
including Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman
and the Poet in Our Time (1995) and A Kind of
Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition
(1989). She coauthored a biography of the Irish
poet William Butler Yeats, W. B. Yeats and His
World (1998), and has edited several anthologies,
including, with the American poet Mark Strand,
The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (2000).
Boland has received many distinguished
awards, such as the 1994 Lannan Award for poetry, Poetry magazine’s 2002 Frederick Nims
Memorial Prize, and the Yale Review’s Smartt Family Prize for Against Love Poetry.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–4
In the first stanza of “It’s a Woman’s World,”
Boland introduces the idea that women’s lives have
remained largely unchanged throughout history.
Boland’s use of a clichéd phrase as the title sets the
poem’s somewhat bitterly ironic tone. The first word
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Eavan Boland
of the poem, “Our,” refers to women, as the poem’s
title indicates that the poem’s subject is the female
sphere. Her reference to “a wheel” alludes to another
clichéd phrase, “since the invention of the wheel,”
which generally means “since humans started using
tools,” or “since ages and ages ago.” The use of
“knife” as the last word also creates a sense of drama
and hints at danger or violence to come.
Lines 5–8
In the second stanza, Boland elaborates on the
theme she established in the first stanza. She stresses
that women’s lives have remained unchanged, although technological advances such as more powerful combustion and improved wheels have occurred.
In so doing, Boland invokes two of the most significant discoveries in the development of civilization,
as both fire and the wheel have been crucial to human progress and industry. “Flame” introduces the
symbol of fire, which Boland invokes several times
in the poem. Her second use of “wheel” (which appeared in the first stanza) subtly reinforces the sense
of the passage of time, as suggested by yet another
common phrase, “the wheels of time turning.”
Lines 9–17
Boland extends the long sentence begun in the
second stanza through the third and fourth stanzas.
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I t ’ s
a
W o m a n ’ s
W o r l d
By providing details from the traditionally female
world of domestic labor, she continues to elaborate
on the theme of how women’s lives have hardly
changed. The “loaf” alludes to the daily chore of
buying groceries for a family, while the “washing
powder” and “wash” refer to the domestic chore of
doing laundry.
Using the metaphor of “milestone,” which is a
marker on a road, Boland expresses that the speaker
and other women measure their lives by the “oversights,” or tasks they have forgotten to do. Boland
suggests that, throughout history, women’s work has
consisted of a series of preoccupying but unmemorable daily responsibilities centered on food and
cleaning. By twice using the word “left” in these stanzas, she emphasizes how forgettable these tasks are.
Boland also highlights the economic aspect of the
work by mentioning the cash register and the paidfor powder. By including these details, she suggests
women have not been paid for their domestic work.
These two stanzas depart from the form established in the first two stanzas. Stanza 3 contains
five, not four lines. Instead of end rhyming the first
and last lines of each stanza as she did in stanzas
1 and 2, Boland uses a different pattern of end
rhyme. In stanza 3, she rhymes the third and fourth
lines. In stanza 4, she supplants end rhyme with internal rhyme (rhyme within the line itself), using
“cash” and “wash” in the middle of lines 14 and
17. She also steps up her use of alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds) in stanza 3 by repeating the “l” sounds in “lives,” “living,” “lights,”
“loaf,” and “left,” as well as assonance (repetition
of similar vowel sounds) in, for example, the “e”
sounds of “left” and “wet.” Boland’s use of internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, rather than
the end-rhyme pattern she used earlier in the poem,
indicates the poem is breaking away from and will
not follow any kind of regular, traditional form.
Lines 18–28
In these next three stanzas, Boland drives home
her point that women have been defined by domestic tasks that have been neglected by historical
record. She first concludes the long sentence started
in stanza 2, “like most historic peoples / we are defined / by what we forget // and what we never will
be: / star-gazers, / fire-eaters.” These lines emphasize the idea that women have been occupied and
identified by unmemorable household chores such
as cooking and cleaning that keep them from more
notable, glamorous activities. “Star-gazers” can
be interpreted as a metaphor (a word or phrase used
in place of another word or phrase, suggesting a
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likeness between the two) for intellectuals or artists,
while “fire-eaters” can be seen as passionate innovators, performers, or revolutionaries. By using the
phrase “like most historic peoples,” Boland refers
to Irish women but also to Irish people as a whole
and to other societies with a history of oppression.
Lines 24–28 express the idea that consignment
to domestic duty has kept women out of history as
we know it. Her repeated use of the word “never”
in this section highlights the idea that this situation
has always been the case for women. The exact
rhyme of “time” and “crime” serves to emphasize
Boland’s statement by making it literally sound
more emphatic.
Lines 29–34
In these lines, Boland refers to an unspecified
ancient crime, in which a king is beheaded. This
anecdote illustrates how women have been left out
of history, since women have been too busy with
cooking and other daily chores to fight wars, kill
monarchs, and change the course of history. This
violent crime also probably alludes specifically to
Irish history and to the fight for Irish nationhood,
in which women were not generally allowed to participate as warriors. By invoking this grisly event,
Boland acknowledges that women have avoided
some of the nastier aspects of history. The tone is
ironic and self-mocking, as the phrase “getting the
recipe / for a good soup” seems sardonic. The
speaker would rather have had the chance to contribute to something other than the family meal.
Lines 35–42
As in stanza 2, Boland states that the role of
women has changed very little over time and that
the pattern will continue into the next generation.
The children to which Boland refers are presumably female, since they are relegated to the domestic sphere symbolized by the hearth rather than
the more public sphere of history. The metaphor of
the moth for female children is ominous, since
moths usually die when they are drawn to flames.
Boland uses the symbol of fire in different ways
here, with the flame representing both the warmth
of home and the passion of history or revolution.
In the next stanza, Boland stresses how the enduring situation of women as working only in the
domestic and not the historical arena has incited a
righteous anger, which has also been ignored. The
speaker expresses a desire for recognition in music
or some other art form of this unjust exclusion of
women from the public sphere. The exact rhyme
of “page” and “outrage” highlights the statement of
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Topics
For Further
Study
• While creating the poems in Night Feed, Boland
looked to the paintings of Jean-Baptiste Chardin
and Jan van Eyck for inspiration. Find a painting by one of these visual artists, and write your
own poem, story, or play based on the painting.
• Research the history of an occupation that is
thought of as traditionally female, such as nursing, quilting, or cooking. Trace the development
of the occupation, and prepare a presentation on
how the job has changed in recent years. You may
want to compare the occupation to its traditional
male counterpart, such as doctor, tailor, or chef.
• Stanza 8 of Boland’s poem alludes to a historical beheading of an unnamed king. Research the
story of Judith and Holofernes, and then find
versions of the story in literature and painting
and present a comparison of some of these depictions of the tale. Discuss how the details of
the story vary in different versions.
frustration. The term “low music” conveys that
women have been quiet about their dissatisfaction
with the situation, but that their outrage is humming just below the surface.
Lines 43–48
In these lines, Boland hints at the idea that
women have in fact made contributions to culture and
society that have been overlooked. She implies that
the artistic or intellectual work of women has been
discounted or misinterpreted as ordinary, everyday
acts. Boland asserts that women have in fact been the
star-gazers referred to in stanza 6 but that, because
of the misconception that women do not do creative
work, such actions have gone unacknowledged.
• Research the history of the feminist movement
in late twentieth-century Ireland. Create a time
line of events. Then give an oral report discussing the major issues feminists sought to address, the groups involved, and what effects
the movement has had on politics and culture in
Ireland.
• Boland invokes the image of fire several times
in the poem. Research how the discovery of fire
has impacted human civilization. Also find out
about the contributions of French chemist Antoine Lavoisier to our understanding of how fire
works. Then create a comic strip or play based
on your findings.
• Research the history of the wheel. Prepare and
deliver a demonstration showing how the wheel
developed and how the wheel works. Use drawings, photographs, and diagrams to support your
presentation.
due to misconceptions about what women do. The
ending suggests that woman’s place in history is
changing, in spite of the speaker’s previous statements that things have always been the same. Boland
again uses fire here to indicate a powerful change
from one situation to another, as the neighbor is portrayed in dramatic, powerful terms. The metaphor of
the burning plume suggests fire, a feather, and a pen,
and these images in turn convey change, flight, and
expression. Even if the neighbor is simply returning
home to the domestic realm, Boland has already
given her—and women in general—a measure of
complexity and recognition by portraying woman in
fresh ways for the public record.
Lines 49–53
Boland concludes the poem by citing another
example of a woman who may be a force of history.
She conveys that the speaker’s neighbor, like the
star-gazer in the previous stanza, may be a fire-eating
revolutionary, but she may not be perceived as such
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Themes
History
The poem argues for two things: the recognition of women’s contributions to art and history and
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the greater inclusion of women in public life outside of the domestic sphere. Throughout the poem,
the speaker laments that the way of life for women
has barely changed since the dawn of history, which
she states in the first stanza. Boland emphasizes that
women have been too preoccupied with daily household chores such as purchasing bread, doing the
wash, and cooking soup to participate in more public events that would qualify for the historical
record. Although she also acknowledges in stanza
8 that this relegation of women to the domestic
realm has enabled women to avoid some of the
grislier aspects of history, she also firmly decries
this situation, likening it to being drawn selfdestructively like a moth to a flame. In stanza 11,
Boland rues the fact that women’s history and anger
about being left out has been ignored by music and
the other arts when she writes, “And still no page /
scores the low music / of our outrage.”
Feminism
From the ironic title onward, the poem focuses
on the exclusion of women from public life and calls
for a need to change the situation. The speaker states
that while technological advances have abetted society, the lot of woman has stayed largely the same.
Using rhyme to emphasize her direct statements,
Boland laments the lack of integration of women
into public life. In writing this poem and elucidating how women have been left out of history—and
specifically Irish history, with its fight for sovereignty from Britain—Boland seeks to set the record
straight and give women a place in that record.
Change
Throughout most of the poem, the speaker emphasizes that the work and lives of women have
“hardly changed / since a wheel first / whetted a
knife.” She declares that since the dawn of civilization, women have borne the brunt of domestic duties that have left little room for more glamorous
activities such as “star-gazing,” which is a metaphor
for creative work, or “fire-eating,” which is a
metaphor for political revolution. The speaker
stresses the seeming intractability of the situation,
twice repeating the word “never” and stating that the
same lot awaits “our [female] children.” However,
by writing this poem about women’s work, Boland
shifts away from the old mode of neglecting female
contributions to society, by making those actions and
frustrations apparent in the poem. In addition,
Boland invokes the symbol of fire throughout the
poem, which with its transformative properties, represents dramatic and thorough change.
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Anger
From the title onward, the poem’s tone is angry. The speaker illustrates over and over how
women have been consigned to domestic responsibilities and excluded from other events. The knife
in the first stanza hints at the anger this unjust situation has engendered, and the sense of anger
seems to rise as the poem progresses. In stanza 11,
Boland explicitly writes, “And still no page / scores
the low music / of our outrage.” The exact rhyme
of “page” and “outrage” underscore a sentiment of
extreme dissatisfaction and frustration. In addition,
the word “low” reinforces the self-mocking, angry
attitude, alluding to “lowing,” or the sound a cow
makes. Boland seems to be saying that although
women have been quiet about their outrage, the
emotion is boiling beneath the surface.
Style
Rhyme
Boland uses full or exact rhyme (rhymes in
which the two words have different initial consonants followed by identical stressed vowel sounds)
as well as slant or half rhyme (only the final consonant sounds of the two words are similar, but the
preceding vowel and consonant sounds are different) to differing effects in the poem. In several sections, she uses exact rhyme to emphasize the
statement being expressed, as in the first stanza
with “life” and “knife” and in the sixth and seventh
stanzas with “time” and “crime.” These instances
of exact rhyme impart a sense of boldness and closure, which invigorate the statements about the role
of women throughout history. Exact rhymes also
serve to make the poem cohere as a whole, since
Boland repeats rhymes (and, in fact, the same
words) across many stanzas, as with the repetition
of “same” and “flame” in stanzas 9 and 10. These
repetitions give the poem a sense of unity and reinforce the idea that conditions have not changed.
Boland’s use of half or slant rhyme undermines
this sense of permanence. Boland concludes each
of the last two stanzas with the half-rhyming words
“plume” and “home.” This half rhyme imparts a
sense of shifting away from the restriction of exact rhyme, which mirrors the desire to expand the
place of women beyond the private, domestic
sphere. Whereas an exact rhyme would create a
sense of closure, the half rhyme here indicates a
slight opening outward.
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Boland also uses internal rhyme (rhyme within
a line, rather than just at the end of lines) to create
a sense of both cohesiveness and subversion. In
stanza 4, she internally rhymes “cash” with “washing” and “wash.” The internal rhyme in this instance marks a shift away from the structure she
established in the first stanzas, which employed end
rhyme in the first and fourth lines. By using internal rhyme instead, Boland establishes that the poem
will depart from traditional regular form. This
change reinforces the theme of how society needs
to shift away from the tradition of restricting
women to domestic duty.
Assonance and Alliteration
Boland uses assonance (repetition of similar
vowel sounds) and alliteration (repetition of similar consonant sounds) to enhance her themes. For
example, in stanza 3, she uses alliteration by repeating “l” sounds in “lives,” “living,” “lights,”
“loaf,” and “left.” This repetition of sound reflects
the repetitive nature of women’s work. The repetitive sound also imparts a kind of lulling effect.
Similarly, in stanza 4, the use of assonance with
the repetition of “a” sounds in “cash,” “washing,”
“wrapped,” and “wash” reinforces a sense of repetitive action.
Symbolism
Boland uses the symbol of fire throughout the
poem to express the notion of progress, as well as
the steady flame of the home. The discovery of fire
by early humans ushered in civilization, as people
could cook food, improve tools, and protect themselves at night. Fire is first mentioned in stanza 2,
with flame signifying passion, technological
progress, or history. In stanza 6, Boland uses
the term “fire-eaters” to describe what women
“never will be.” In this instance, fire again symbolizes something passionate and public and something forbidden to women. She again invokes the
symbol in stanza 10, when she contrasts the flame
of the hearth, or the symbol of home, with the flame
of history, or the symbol of revolution. Again, she
uses a symbol to illustrate how women have been
excluded from participation in wider culture. At the
end of the poem, Boland refers to fire again in describing the neighbor’s mouth as a “burning plume”
and asserting that “she’s no fire-eater / just my
frosty neighbour.” The contrast between the burning plume and the frozen breath of the neighbor
makes the ending ambiguous, as it is unclear
whether the neighbor experiences the transformative power of fire or the stasis of ice.
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Historical Context
During the early 1980s, when the poem was written, the feminist movement was beginning to take
hold in Ireland. Irish feminists seeking equal rights
and opportunities for women gleaned insights from
the gains of the feminist revolution that took place
in the United States during the 1970s, as well as
the gains of civil rights movements in the United
States, Ireland, and elsewhere. Writers such as
Boland also drew inspiration from feminist poetic
predecessors, such as the American poet Adrienne
Rich. In prose and poetry, Irish women writers
such as Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala ni
Dhomhnaill, and Eilean ni Chuilleanain pioneered
writing that explicitly addressed women’s concerns
and the fight for women’s rights in the face of the
then mostly male-dominated body of Irish literature. These writers also sought a place for
women and women’s concerns within the fight for
Irish identity and nationhood, which had taken
place over centuries to combat colonization by
Great Britain.
Critical Overview
The collection in which “It’s a Woman’s World”
appears, Night Feed, stirred some controversy upon
its publication in 1982. Along with Boland’s In Her
Own Image, Night Feed marked a departure from
her first collection by focusing on the role of
women in Irish literature and society. Some early
critics dismissed Boland’s poetry as “woman’s
writing,” or unimportant in subject matter, while
other critics lauded Boland’s woman-centered,
feminist perspective, as well as her technical
agility.
Many of the poems in Night Feed were republished in Boland’s collection Outside History,
along with poems from her 1983 collection The
Journey and newer poems. With Outside History,
Boland gained wide recognition in the United
States for her poetry, which bolstered her reputation in Ireland. Published in 1990, Outside History
was praised for its craft and its ennoblement of
previously overlooked subjects. Writing in the
Women’s Review of Books, Jody Allen-Randolph
notes, “By taking as her subject the routine day that
most women in Ireland live (caring for children,
washing, cooking and sewing), Boland renews the
dignity of demeaned labor and establishes a precedent for its inclusion in Irish poetry.”
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Criticism
Anna Maria Hong
Hong earned her master of fine arts in creative
writing at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers and is a writer-in-residence at
Richard Hugo House. In the following essay, Hong
discusses Boland’s use of alliteration, assonance,
and rhyme to reinforce her ideas about the role of
women in history.
Boland’s poem “It’s a Woman’s World” argues for the greater inclusion of women in public
life outside of the domestic sphere and for the
recognition of women’s contributions to history
and art. From the poem’s ironic title onward, the
poem focuses on how women have been consigned
to household duties, which have kept them from
participating in activities that are more widely recognized, such as political activism. As a feminist,
Boland argues that this exclusion of women from
the larger culture needs to change, and she expresses her outrage over the situation, using rhyme
and other techniques to emphasize her points.
From the poem’s first stanza, Boland emphasizes that the work and lives of women have
“hardly changed / since a wheel first / whetted a
knife.” These lines set up a major theme of the
poem, which is that from the dawn of civilization
women have been restricted to domestic duties that
have left little time for more glamorous activities
that would garner public recognition. Boland elaborates on this idea in the following nine stanzas,
citing examples of how women have been consumed by household chores, in spite of the technological advances that have occurred over the
centuries. The speaker declares that women have
measured or “milestoned” their lives with unseen
markers: the forgotten loaf of bread or packet of
detergent, or the wet untended laundry.
By noting how easily these tasks are forgotten,
Boland highlights how unmemorable such daily
chores are and implies that women are so preoccupied with a constant stream of responsibilities
that they are overworked and apt to forget one thing
or another. By using alliteration and assonance,
Boland reinforces the sense of how repetitive
women’s domestic work is. In stanza 3, for example, she invokes a series of “l” sounds in “lives,”
“living,” “lights,” “loaf,” and “left,” which create
a repetitious, lulling effect that mirrors the unremarkable nature of daily tasks. In stanzas 3 and 4,
she also repeats vowel sounds with the “i” sounds
of “milestone,” “lives,” “oversights,” and “lights,”
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and with the “a” sounds of “cash,” “washing,”
“wash,” and “wrapped.” All these repetitions of
sound enhance the feeling of deadening sameness
that Boland declares has been the lot of women
throughout time.
In the next three stanzas, Boland extends her
ideas about women’s roles by writing, “like most
historic peoples / we are defined / by what we
forget // and what we will never be: / star-gazers,
/ fire-eaters. / It’s our alibi / for all time: // as far
as history goes / we were never / on the scene of
the crime.” In these lines, Boland expresses the idea
that rather than being defined by what they do,
women are identified by what they cannot be, with
star-gazers standing in as a metaphor for intellectuals or artists and fire-eaters representing passionate people of action. The speaker explicitly
asserts that being consigned to the domestic sphere
has functioned as an excuse or “alibi” for women’s
non-participation in history.
By using the phrase, “like most historic peoples,” Boland also draws parallels between
women’s experiences and those of other oppressed
or disenfranchised groups, including the Irish, who
fought against colonization by the British for
centuries. This comparison, however, is not uncomplicated, as Boland’s phrase also points to the
fact that Irish women were left out of the political battles for Irish nationhood and that during
the twentieth century the Irish government actively
restricted the roles women could play in society.
As Christy Burns notes in her essay “Beautiful
Labors: Lyricism and Feminist Revisions in Eavan
Boland’s Poetry”:
Women [in 1920s Ireland] were ushered back into
the domestic realm with the help of both legal and
rhetorical gestures. Most significantly for Boland’s
concerns, the government’s equation of womanhood
with marriage rhetorically marked a stark separation
between the ‘home’ that was the political and geographic space of Irish politics and the ‘home’ that
was to be the realm of women.
For Irish women, the phenomenon Boland describes of being limited to the domestic realm was
a reality enforced by Irish society at large. Boland’s
description of women as “historic people” ironically alludes to the omission of women from other
Irish struggles.
Throughout the poem, the speaker expresses
anger and frustration over the relegation of women
to the margins of history. In stanzas 8 and 9, Boland
acknowledges that the restriction of women to the
home has enabled them to avoid some of the nastier aspects of history, as she writes, “When the
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king’s head / gored its basket, / grim harvest, / we
were gristing bread // or getting the recipe / for a
good soup.” The tone is bitterly ironic. The juxtaposition of the gored head with the “good soup” is
grisly and self-mocking. In addition, Boland’s use
of sardonic alliteration with the repeated “g” and
“gr” sounds in “gored,” “grim,” “gristing,” “getting,” and “good” heightens the sense of anger and
self-recrimination.
The sense of outrage over women’s limited
roles in society peaks in the following lines, as the
speaker states, “It’s still the same: // our windows /
moth our children / to the flame / of hearth not history.” These lines emphasize the idea that the role
of women has remained unchanged and that there
is little hope for future generations, as our presumably female children will be drawn inevitably to the
realm of the hearth, which symbolizes the home. By
using the metaphor of the moth’s attraction to the
flame, Boland reinforces the idea that the domestic
path is seductive but deadly, as moths generally die
when they are drawn toward flames.
Boland further notes that part of the problem
is that women’s anger over their limited roles in
history has gone unnoticed. In stanza 11, she asserts that “still no page / scores the low music / of
our outrage.” The “page” represents the public
record of both history and art, which has excluded
the contributions of women and women artists.
With these lines, Boland calls attention to the omission of women from the arts, as their “low music”
has been completely unrecognized. In an interview
with Marilyn Reizbaum in Contemporary Literature, Boland states:
As an Irish woman poet I have very little precedent.
There were none in the nineteenth century or early
part of the twentieth century. You didn’t have a thriving sense of the witness of the lived life of women
poets, and what you did have was a very compelling
and at times oppressive relationship between Irish poetry and the national tradition.
Boland’s poem subtly suggests that the lack of
women in the arts—especially in the traditionally
male-dominated world of Irish poetry—has led to
a persistent misinterpretation of women’s actions
and a lack of recognition of women’s real contributions to both history and culture. In stanzas 12
and 13, the speaker states, “Appearances reassure:
/ that woman there, / craned to / the starry mystery,
// is merely getting a breath / of evening air.” The
woman in these lines is a star-gazer, engaging in
creative or intellectual pursuits that have traditionally been forbidden to women. However, Boland
implies that due to the misperception that women
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Boland’s poem subtly
suggests that the lack of
women in the arts—
especially in the
traditionally maledominated world of Irish
poetry—has led to a
persistent misinterpretation
of women’s actions and a
lack of recognition of
women’s real contributions
to both history and
culture.”
cannot be artists, this woman is mistakenly seen as
someone merely going about her day. In these lines,
Boland argues that women have, in fact, been active participants in public life, but that those actions have been dismissed as inconsequential.
Boland concludes the poem by elaborating on
how pernicious and misleading the idea of women
as homemakers and only homemakers can be. The
last lines are ambiguous as one cannot be sure
whether it is just the speaker’s wishful thinking that
makes the neighbor seem like a revolutionary fireeater or if the neighbor is, in fact, a fire-eater in
unassuming guise. In either case, however, Boland
presents the thrilling possibility that with this
woman and others, there is much more than has traditionally met the eye. The vivid image of the
neighbor’s mouth as a burning plume simultaneously signifies a feather, a pen (as in the phrase
“plumed pen”), and a flame, and these elements in
turn connote freedom, expression, and change.
While other people might automatically conclude
that the woman is simply going home to fulfill expected domestic duties and roles, the poet-speaker
sees—and wants to see—something more exciting
going on.
The poem argues powerfully for both the need
for change and for change’s imminent possibility,
with the poet herself amending the situation she has
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Boland’s collection An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967–1987 (1996) contains her five
early volumes of poetry, including Night Feed.
• Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (1993) contains the American feminist poet’s poems, prose,
and criticism on her work.
• Boland’s poetry collection Against Love Poetry:
Poems (2001) features poems about the contradictions of daily love and the necessity of
women’s freedom.
• The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1903) contains poems by this prominent Irish poet who influenced Boland’s writing.
• Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990) comprises
poems by Boland’s colleague, the Nobel laureate and Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
• The Irish Women’s History Reader (2000) contains essays about different aspects of the lives
of Irish women since 1800.
• The anthology Stories by Contemporary Irish
Women (1990) features fiction by Mary Lavin,
Edna O’Brien, Julia O’Faolain, and others.
• The American poet Rita Dove’s collection Selected Poems (1994) features poems by this
Pulitzer Prize–winning, former U.S. poet laureate.
described. Although Boland’s rhetoric may seem
pessimistic with her insistence that things have not
changed for women throughout history, her words
belie the fact that in this very poem, transformation has occurred. Unlike her poetic predecessors,
Boland focuses attention on the daily lives of
women, giving their contributions a place of importance in the public record. Even as she claims
that “no page / scores the low music / of our outrage,” she herself is setting the record straight by
naming both the exclusion of women from the public sphere and women’s anger, and by asserting that
women have and are shaping the world in ways that
may remain unnoticed. Boland uses her role as a
poet to recognize a previously overlooked past and
present. As Shara McCallum puts it in her Antioch
Review essay: “If history, as Boland recognizes, is
often a site of forgetting, then retelling myths, legends, and other culturally shared stories in poetry
becomes an act of recovery.”
In “It’s a Woman’s World,” Boland recovers
women’s history by making women’s hidden concerns, actions, and work apparent. She also uses
her technical agility to enhance her ideas. As men-
tioned, Boland frequently uses assonance and alliteration to heighten the effects of her words, repeating vowel and consonant sounds in various
ways. In addition, Boland uses rhyme throughout
the poem to bolster her meanings. In several instances she uses exact end rhyme to emphasize her
points, as in “life” and “knife” in the first stanza,
and “time” and “crime” in stanzas 6 and 7. The
rhymes in these cases call extra attention to her
statements about the role of women in history. The
exact rhymes and repetitions throughout the poem,
such as the repetitions of “same” and “flame” in
stanzas 9 and 10, also serve to give the poem a
sense of unity and to reinforce the idea that conditions have not changed.
However, Boland’s use of slant rhyme undermines this sense of permanence or of enduring injustice, as she concludes the poem with the word “home,”
which half rhymes with “plume” in the previous
stanza. Each of these words echoes the earlier exact
rhymes of “flame/same” and “time/crime”—but these
concluding words only half rhyme with these previous pairings, in addition to only half rhyming with
each other. The excessively half-rhyming concluding
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• In Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman
and the Poet in Our Time (1995), Boland blends
autobiography with polemic to elucidate her
ideas about the roles of women in Ireland and
of women poets in the traditionally maledominated Irish literary world.
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words shift away from the established pattern of the
previous stanzas, recalling the earlier sounds but
changing them significantly, with the “u” and the
“o” replacing the old “a” and “i” sounds. This shifting of vowel sounds out of the restrictive groove of
exact rhyme mirrors the desire Boland expresses
throughout the poem to revolutionize women’s roles
and to expand their opportunities beyond the old limitations of hearth and home. Whereas an exact rhyme
at the end of the poem would have imparted a sense
of tightness and affirmation of the old rules, the half
rhyme here suggests an opening outward, a shifting
away from the old paradigms, with the home resounding the burning plume of fiery and eloquent
transformation.
Source: Anna Maria Hong, Critical Essay on “It’s a Woman’s
World,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
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I have liked to
imagine when reading
Boland’s poetry that her
poem sequences are, in part,
a response to a similar
predicament of needing
to fragment a narrative
in order to get at its
deeper truth.”
Shara McCallum
In the following essay excerpt, McCallum discusses how Boland blends history and domesticity
in her poetry and how Boland’s poetry foretells and
informs her growth as a woman.
The relationship between myth and history in
Boland’s poetry is a close one. If history, as Boland
recognizes, is often a site of forgetting, then retelling
myths, legends, and other culturally shared stories
in poetry becomes an act of recovery. This makes
particular sense given the specific history Boland is
intent on restoring: that of Ireland, which has been
under threat of erasure for centuries due to British
colonization. Coupled with Boland’s desire to etch
out a space for women within Irish history and poetry as subjects rather than objects, her poems are
often acts of not only reimagining myths but also
of reinventing them. This latter aspect of her poetry
and her lack of reticence in discussing the omission
of women from Irish public life and literature have
often placed her work, and Boland herself, in a controversial position within Irish letters. Yet Boland
has refused to back down from such conflict. In a
December 1999 interview that appeared in Colby
Quarterly, Boland defends the vision that women
poets, particularly Irish women poets, offer in their
work: “Because women have been outsiders within
an outsider’s culture, they have the root of the matter in them.” Her poems serve as affirmation of that
consciousness and seek to reflect “the actual human
truths of a woman’s life.”
Since first encountering her work in In a Time
of Violence, I have read Boland’s earlier poems in
the collected and selected volumes that have been
published in the U.S., Outside History (1990) and
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An Origin Like Water (1996), as well as her two
most recent books of poetry available in the States,
The Lost Land (1998) and Against Love Poetry
(2001). The more I read Boland’s poems, the more
she becomes a model for me in thinking through
how a woman and poet can position herself within
a history and culture that on some level seeks to
dismiss or contain her experiences. Whether it be
the legend of Anna Liffey or the story of Lir,
Boland knows that the stories a people tell about
themselves are what define them and shape the
meaning of their lives. Perhaps one can eschew
such narratives—and the notion of narrative
altogether—only once these are established as your
right and your due. While challenging the versions
of the myths that have been passed down and particularly how women are represented in such tales,
Boland still recognizes that the stories, and storytelling itself, matters.
Thinking of the distinctions made between the
lyric and narrative impulses in contemporary U.S.
verse and the move beyond these boundaries
into the terrain loosely called “language poetry,”
Boland’s poems have offered me a welcome respite
from the sometimes bitter and confusing debates
between the purists in these various camps. Like
Boland, I relish the exquisite possibilities of the experimental strain of American poetry, most notably
the use of free verse. I also revel in the pure lyric
of much American poetry for its musical and imagistic high jinks. Yet even while the lyric freezes the
moment, and in that way can be viewed as antinarrative, it also offers me a widening space—as
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writer and reader—into which I can step and into
which the story, in an archetypal sense, floods back.
In Boland’s work, I am particularly interested
in how the stories she tells get dispersed over a
number of poems. Beginning with “Domestic Interior” from Night Feed (1982) and, in my view, seeing its finest evocation to date in “Colony” from
The Lost Land, Boland has been writing poem sequences for the past twenty years. What this practice affords her is the ability to incorporate several
of the traditional modes of poetry—the narrative
and lyric as well as the dramatic, with its emphasis on persona and voice—into one long poem.
Boland’s numbered sequences operate for me, as a
reader, like collages, in which my viewing of the
parts in relation to one another, rather than the
pieces in isolation, are what create the meaning of
the whole work. As a poet, I have found myself
plagued by the inability to tell a story in linear
fashion—or perhaps buoyed by this inability, depending on one’s point of view. I have liked to
imagine when reading Boland’s poetry that her
poem sequences are, in part, a response to a similar predicament of needing to fragment a narrative
in order to get at its deeper truth.
Introducing the poems collected in An Origin
Like Water, poems that represent her early development as a poet, Boland says of her work: “The
truth is that I came to know history as a woman
and a poet when I apparently left the site of it.” The
word apparently strikes me here because Boland’s
poems so often look beyond appearances. In her
reckoning with history, she frequently redefines its
“site.” History in Boland’s poetry doesn’t take
place solely on the battlefields or in legislative
rooms, it also occurs in the personal, often domestic, sphere—in a mother lifting a finger to a fevered
child’s forehead, in a long marriage between two
people in which love and “passion” are measured
by constancy, by “duty, dailyness, routine.”
Two recent poems stand out for me as strong
examples of how Boland personalizes history and
simultaneously broadens the scope of individual,
often women’s, experiences: “Heroic” from The
Lost Land and “Quarantine” from Against Love Poetry. In the former poem, a young woman, walking home in the rain, stops to stare up at a statue
of a “patriot,” a soldier returning from war, and unconsciously compares her own role and place in the
world to his. The poem closes with the young
woman’s plea to the statue: “make me a heroine.”
In this poem, as with several others in the same collection, Boland challenges the common definitions
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of heroism and patriotism, offering the idea that a
woman and poet, as witness, can possess such
traits. The “heroine” or “patriot” is not only someone in a position of war-time glory but is also one
in a less glamorous role who seeks to “know [her]
country.” She is one who is, in notably nurturing
fashion, willing to “look again . . . Into the patient
face of the unhealed.”
“Quarantine,” the fourth part of the poem sequence “Marriage” in Boland’s most recent collection, is another instance of her blending of
history and domesticity. The poem begins in narrative mode, recounting the death of a couple from
“famine fever” in “the winter of 1847” in Ireland.
Then, in the fourth stanza, the poem shifts gears
and moves into the territory of the lyric, beginning
with the startling declaration “Let no love poem
ever come to this threshold.” As though the weight
of the story itself has become too much for the
poem to bear, the poet’s voice breaks in. That lyric
voice helps us to make sense of this story and to
see how two individuals’ lives, easily forgotten in
the annals of history, become emblematic of the
Irish famine that decimated or exiled a third of the
population and also of love, of “what there is between a man and woman. / And in which darkness
it can best be proved.”
The subtext of Boland’s attention to history in
“Quarantine,” and in numerous other poems, is the
legacy of British colonization and accompanying
feelings of loss and exile for Irish living within and
outside of the country. The Lost Land offers her
most sustained discussion of these issues, and the
thematic development that collection represents is
a major reason I have returned more seriously to
Boland’s work over the past five years. Familiar
with her biography and probably because of my
own, I have been personally invested in seeing how
she navigates an insider-outsider position in addressing such issues as colonization and exile in
her poems. Like Boland, who was born in Ireland
but spent time as a child in England and the U.S.
away from her home, I have a partly “exiled” relationship to Jamaica, the country of my birth and
the subject of much of my poetry.
While Boland’s return to Ireland as a young
adult reestablished her connection to the land, at
times she has still faced implied or direct questions
of authenticity in the criticism of her verse. Yet
all poets who address their nation’s history and
culture—even Seamus Heaney, whose Irishness has
not been called into question in the same manner—
face charges of being voyeuristic or opportunistic
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in their choice of subject and must confront the technical difficulty and ethical question of how, as an
individual, one can speak convincingly to history
and for a people. Boland’s poems make their own
best argument for not only her right but also her
ability to lay claim to Irishness and Ireland. They
do so with unflinching honesty and without sentimentality; and yet, as with the best lyric poems, they
are ultimately beautiful. In Boland’s poetry, to borrow from the words of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, beauty resides in the firm belief that “One’s
homeland is not [only] a geographical convention,
but an insistence of memory and blood.” I began
this essay invoking an image of a young woman
writer at her desk, working on a poem as dusk falls
outside her window. This image is one that has recurred in Boland’s work, in her description of herself as a young woman poet in her poems and in
her prose memoir, Object Lessons: The Life of the
Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995). It is an
image that I consciously borrowed to describe, as
well, my own younger self as a writer, following in
Boland’s footsteps. As I write this essay, I am in a
place that twilight, as a metaphor for transition,
aptly captures. In one month, I will be moving from
Memphis, a city in which I’ve lived for the past four
years, to forge a new life in a quieter town in central Pennsylvania. Even more significantly, as I
write I am pregnant with my first child, who will
arrive in four months.
Faced now with entering the domestic sphere as
I have never quite done before, I find myself rereading Boland’s poems about child-rearing and the life
of a woman and poet and looking to find myself in
that world, looking for a tradition to sustain and carry
me forward. That the first poem I remember ever really loving by Boland already anticipated this need
reassures me now when I read it again: “The best
thing about the legend is / I can enter it anywhere.
And have . . . If I defer the grief I will diminish the
gift. / The legend must be hers as well as mine.”
Boland’s “gift” to me has been her fostering my
awareness that knowledge worth having is seldom
easy and uncomplicated and that it cannot be given
to you by another. What I’ve taken from her poems
over time has shifted, in part, because of my own development as a reader returning to her work across a
period of years. One of the strengths of Boland’s poetry, though, is that her poems provide for and foretell such growth. In them, she has afforded me the
space to find myself at various points along the way.
Source: Shara McCallum, “Eavan Boland’s Gift: Sex, History, and Myth,” in Antioch Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter
2004, pp. 37–43.
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Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the critic touches briefly
on Boland’s career in recent years.
Over the course of a career that began in the
early 1960s, when she was a young wife in Dublin,
Eavan Boland has emerged as one of the foremost
female voices in Irish literature. Describing those
formative years in an interview with Jody Allen
Randolph in Colby Quarterly (later included on the
Web site of her publisher, Carcanet Press), Boland
said, “I began that time watching milk being taken
in metal churns, on horse and cart, towards the city
center. And I ended it as a married woman, in a flat
on Raglan Road, watching this ghostly figure of a
man walking on the moon. I suppose I began the
decade in a city which Joyce would have recognized, and ended it in one that would have bewildered him.”
During this time, Boland honed an appreciation for the ordinary in life, an appreciation reflected in the title of her 2001 collection, Against
Love Poetry. “So much of European love poetry,”
she told Alice Quinn of the New Yorker online, “is
court poetry, coming out of the glamorous traditions of the court. . . . Love poetry, from the troubadours on, is traditionally about that romantic lyric
moment. There’s little about the ordinariness of
love.” Seeking a poetry that would express the
beauty of the plain things that make up most people’s existences, she found that she would have to
create it for herself. It is “dailiness,” as Boland
called it, that reviewers often find, and praise, in
Boland’s poetry. Frank Allen, in a Library Journal
review of Against Love Poetry, wrote, “This
volume . . . dramatizes conflicts between marriage
and freedom (‘what is hidden in / this ordinary, aging human love’).”
Certainly, “conflicts between marriage and
freedom” is a feminist theme, and though Boland
has been described as a feminist, her approach is
not an overtly political one. Perhaps this is because
she is not content, as a poet, to uphold one view of
things to the exclusion of all others: hers is a voice,
in the words of Melanie Rehak in the New York
Times Book Review, “that is by now famous for its
unwavering feminism as well as its devotion to both
the joys of domesticity and her native Ireland.”
Acknowledgement for Boland’s work has been
long in coming, but as Randolph noted, that recognition has arrived, and in a big way. Irish students
wishing to graduate from secondary school must
undergo a series of examinations for what is called
the “leaving certificate.” The writings of great
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national poets such as Seamus Heaney are a mandatory part of the leaving exam, and since 1999,
would-be graduates are required to undergo examinations in Boland’s work as well.
Source: “Eavan Boland,” in Contemporary Authors Online,
Thomson Gale, 2003.
Christy Burns
In the following essay, Burns explores the
“tension in Boland’s work between her political investment in representing women . . . and her attraction to beautiful images and seductive, lyrical
language.”
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Boland has sought to
recover the silenced histories
of those outside of the
privileged classes, working
to reach beyond the often
stereotypic image of the
Irish peasant.”
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Burns, Christy, “Beautiful Labors: Lyricism and Feminist
Revisions in Eavan Boland’s Poetry,” in Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall 2001, pp. 217–36.
McCallum, Shara, “Eavan Boland’s Gift: Sex, History, and
Myth,” in Antioch Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter 2004,
pp. 37–43.
Reizbaum, Marilyn, “An Interview with Eavan Boland,” in
Contemporary Literature, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter 1989,
pp. 471–79.
Further Reading
Haberstroh, Patricia Boyle, Women Creating Women:
Contemporary Irish Women Poets, Syracuse University
Press, 1996.
In this book, Haberstroh analyzes the work of five
Irish women poets, including Boland.
Source: Christy Burns, “Beautiful Labors: Lyricism and
Feminist Revisions in Eavan Boland’s Poetry,” in Tulsa
Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 20, No. 2, Fall 2001,
pp. 217–36.
Sources
Allen-Randolph, Jody, “A Passion for the Ordinary,” in
Women’s Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 7, April 1992,
pp. 19–20.
Boland, Eavan, “It’s a Woman’s World,” in Night Feed,
Marion Boyars, 1982.
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Hagen, Patricia L., and Thomas W. Zelman, Eavan Boland
and the History of the Ordinary, Academica Press, 2004.
This study offers a review of Boland’s work and life.
Maguire, Sarah, “Dilemmas and Developments: Eavan
Boland Re-examined,” in Feminist Review, No. 62, Summer 1999, pp. 59–66.
In this article, Maguire considers the changing nature
of the dilemmas women poets face in light of
Boland’s earlier essay, “The Woman Poet: Her
Dilemma.”
Robertson, Kerry E., “Anxiety, Influence, Tradition and
Subversion in the Poetry of Eavan Boland,” in Colby Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4, December 1994, pp. 264–78.
Robertson analyzes Boland’s reworking of the maledominated tradition in Irish literature.
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Metamorphoses
Ovid
8 A.D.
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Ovid is, after Homer, the single most important
source for classical mythology. The Metamorphoses, which he wrote over the six-year period
leading up to his exile from Rome in 8 A.D., is the
primary source for over two hundred classical legends that survived to the twenty-first century. Many
of the most familiar classical myths, including the
stories of Apollo and Daphne and Pyramus and
Thisbe, come directly from Ovid.
The Metamorphoses is a twelve-thousand-line
poem, written in dactylic hexameters and arranged
loosely in chronological order from the beginning
of the universe’s creation to the Augustan Rome of
Ovid’s own time. The major theme of the Metamorphoses, as the title suggests, is metamorphosis,
or change. Throughout the fifteen books making up
the Metamorphoses, the idea of change is pervasive. Gods are continually transforming their own
selves and shapes, as well as the shapes and beings
of humans. The theme of power is also ever-present
in Ovid’s work. The gods as depicted by the Roman poets are wrathful, vengeful, capricious creatures who are forever turning their powers against
weaker mortals and half-mortals, especially females. Ovid’s own situation as a poet who was
exiled because of Augustus’s capriciousness is
thought by many to be reflected in his depictions
of the relationships between the gods and humans.
It can be argued with a great deal of justification that the Metamorphoses is Western literature
and art’s most influential work. Ovid was hugely
popular during his lifetime, and the influence of his
M e t a m o r p h o s e s
work continued to grow immediately after his death.
Writers as diverse as Dante, Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ted Hughes have drawn on the
Metamorphoses for inspiration. Artists throughout
the centuries have depicted scenes from Ovid’s
work in their own paintings. The list of writers, poets, artists, musicians, and performers who have
been directly influenced by the Metamorphoses is
extensive and covers virtually every era since
Ovid’s death in 17 A.D. Many English translations
of the work, in both prose and verse, exist, giving
further evidence of the poem’s lasting significance.
The discussion in the Plot Summary, Themes,
and Style sections below focuses on Book 1 of the
Metamorphoses.
Author Biography
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid, was born
on March 20, 43 B.C. in Sulmo, Italy, and died at
the age of sixty-one in exile in the Black Sea port
of Tomi, known today as Constantsa, Romania.
Considered to be one of the most influential poets
in Western literary tradition, Ovid wrote several
important works, including Heroines and The Art
of Love. His most famous and revered work, and
considered alongside the works of Homer and Virgil as among the world’s masterpieces, is Metamorphoses, which he finished around 8 A.D.
Of the details of Ovid’s life, historians know
very little. He was born into an upper-middle-class
family. To prepare for a professional career, he was
sent to Rome to study rhetoric, the standard core
of study for Roman education at the time. Upon
completion of his studies in Rome, Ovid spent a
year in Athens studying philosophy, following
which it was presumed by his family that he would
return to his home to begin his career. Ovid did return home to spend a year as a public official; however, poetry soon became his passion, and, rather
than choosing the life of a professional careerist,
he began to work on his first book, Loves, or
Amores, when he was twenty years old.
Loves was followed by Heroines, a collection
of fictional letters from mythical heroines to their
absent lovers. Soon thereafter came The Art of
Love, and in a six-year period between 2 and 8 A.D.
Ovid penned Metamorphoses. Between the publications of Amores and Metamorphoses, Ovid was
married three times and fathered a daughter.
The fact about Ovid’s life that came to define
him was his banishment in 8 A.D. to Tomi by the
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Ovid
Roman Emperor Augustus. Tried personally by
Augustus himself, Ovid was found guilty of a crime
that remains unclear. Although Ovid wrote about
banishment in the poem Tristia, or Sorrows, the
reasons for the exile remain uncertain. “Two offenses, a poem and a mistake, have destroyed me,”
was all that Ovid wrote in Tristia.
Ovid’s final years would be spent in Tomi
writing long letters and poems of appeal to Augustus to allow him to return to Rome. The pleas
were useless, and Ovid remained in exile until his
death in 17 A.D.
Poem Summary
Book 1: Lines 1–162
The major theme of the Metamorphoses is introduced in the poem’s first sentence: “I want to
speak about bodies changed into new forms.” The
theme of metamorphosis, or change, is the unifying and distinguishing feature of Ovid’s work. In
lines 1–162 of Book 1, Ovid describes the creation
of the world, how the chaos that ruled the universe
metamorphosed into the Earth as people know it.
Ovid opens with his version of the cosmogony, or
the origins of the universe, and follows that with a
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Media
Adaptations
• The Ovid Project: Metamorphosing the “Metamorphoses,” http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/ovid/ is
the University of Vermont’s online, digitized
collection of illustrations from the 1640 edition
of the Metamorphoses by George Sandys and
the 1703 edition from seventeenth-century German artist Johann Wilhelm Bauer. The illustrations are taken from the university’s private rare
book collection and offer a rare glimpse into
some of the English translations’ early artistic
depictions of the classical tales.
• The University of Virginia’s Electronic Text
Center at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/
hosts an extensive database of Metamorphoses
resources, including the original Latin text, five
English translations, and many related links.
• While the breadth of movie adaptations of
Ovid’s tales is extensive, one notable example
is the 1959 Cannes Film Festival Prize–winner
and that year’s Academy Award–winner for
Best Foreign Film, Black Orpheus. Set in Brazil
with an all-black cast and a jazz soundtrack that
went on to sell over a million copies, the movie
is an adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice
legend and is available widely on video.
• Perhaps the most famous of all adaptations
of an Ovid story is George Bernard’s play
description of the evolution of the myth of ages and
his version of the gigantomachy, or the battle of
the giants for control of the universe.
In the beginning was Chaos, a lifeless, warring
mass. The great Creator of the universe separates
Earth from sky, and from the Earth, Prometheus
molds man. What distinguishes man from other living creatures is that man stands upright, can hold
his head erect, and is able to raise his eyes to the
stars and the heavens. As man evolves, he passes
through four distinct stages, each one worse than
the previous. Under Saturn, the Golden Age exists,
in which man lives in harmony with nature, and the
Earth provides man with everything he needs. War
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Pygmalion, which was based on the story told
by Orpheus in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses
and which in 1964 was made into the hugely
successful movie My Fair Lady, starring Audrey
Hepburn.
• While not specifically about Ovid, the thirteenpart British Broadcasting Company production
of I, Claudius covers the years of Augustus’s
rule, from the days when Ovid was launching
his poetry career through the years of his exile.
The series stars Derek Jacobi as Claudius and is
widely available on video and DVD.
• Metamorphoses: A Play, by Mary Zimmerman
(a playwright and teacher of drama at Northwestern University), was launched on Broadway
and toured extensively across the United States
to positive reviews.
• Perhaps the most Ovidian of Shakespeare’s
plays, Titus Andronicus draws heavily on the
tales of Actaeon and Philomela. Although not
specifically based on the Metamorphoses, Julie
Taymor’s 1999 film adaptation of the play,
Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, reveals the extent of Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare and is
widely available in video and DVD formats.
is not yet known to the world, and all humans are
faithful to the gods and to one another. When Saturn is overthrown by his son Jupiter, the Silver Age
begins, and along with it come the four seasons,
which force man to work hard for food and shelter. The Bronze Age introduces war to humankind,
and with the Iron Age trickery, greed, and deceit
are introduced. It is during the Iron Age that the
gods convene to discuss the future of mankind.
During the Iron Age, not only is life on Earth
violent and strife-ridden, so too is life among the
gods. In their bottomless desire for power, giants
attempt to reach Mount Olympus, the domain of
the gods, in order to take control. In revenge, Jove
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strikes them down with his lightning and destroys
them, but the blood of the giants drenches the Earth,
and out of the blood arise mortals full of evil intent.
Book 1: Lines 163–415
Jove becomes so disgusted and irate over the
state of mankind that he calls a council of the gods
on Mount Olympus. Jove tells the gods how he has
tried to do everything to purge humankind of its
wickedness but to no avail, and it is now time to
destroy the human race. He relates the story of how
he disguised himself as a traveler and entered the
palace of Lycaon, the king of Arcadia, a land
known for its race of men with cannibalistic traditions. Even after making his immortal presence
known to the king, Lycaon still tried to feed the
god with human flesh. In return, Jove destroyed his
palace and turned him into a wolf.
With the assistance of his brother Neptune, Jove
destroys the human race with a flood. He first fills
the Earth with rain so relentless that all of mankind’s
crops are destroyed. Humans themselves, however,
survive, so Jove turns to Neptune, the god of the seas,
who unleashes the fierce powers of the oceans. The
only survivors of the god’s wrath are Deucalion and
his wife and cousin, Pyrrha, who land on Mt. Parnassus and seek out the prophetess Themis who gives
them instructions of how to repopulate the Earth
through an oracle that they must interpret. “Leave the
temple and with veiled heads and loosened clothes
throw behind you the bones of your great mother,”
Themis tells the couple. Deucalion and Pyrrha are
confused at first, but when they realize that the Earth
is their “great mother,” they decide that the Earth’s
stones are her “bones.” The stones that Pyrrha throws
behind her spring up into women, and the stones that
Deucalion throws metamorphose into men, and thus
a new race of humans is brought to life.
Book 1: Lines 416–451
As the Earth continues to warm, life forms of
all natures spring forth. Soon the Earth is abundant
with animals as well as humans. With the new life
arrives a creature not yet seen by man: the giant
python who crawls across entire mountain ranges
and strikes fear into the hearts of mankind. Apollo,
the archer god, destroys the python with his arrows
and thus gives rise to the sacred Pythian games.
Book 1: Lines 452–779
The capricious nature of the gods and their unquenchable lusts are brought to full light in this last
section of Book 1. After successfully killing the
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python, Apollo notices Cupid with his own arrows,
and the mighty god mocks the blind, winged boy.
In revenge, Cupid strikes Apollo through the heart
with an arrow designed to induce love in the god,
and he similarly strikes an arrow into the beautiful
Daphne, the daughter of the river-god Peneus, with
an arrow that repels love. When Apollo eyes the
beautiful virgin, he is overcome with desire and sets
out to chase her through the forests. Daphne, under the influence of Cupid’s bow, runs away with
great speed. Despite Apollo’s incessant pleas,
Daphne continues to run, and just as the god is
about to overtake her, she calls out to her father to
destroy her beauty. Peneus answers his daughter’s
pleas and transforms her into a laurel tree. Apollo
continues to love her, however, and he proclaims
the laurel as the decoration for Rome’s emperor and
for all conquering generals.
With the story of Io, the theme of female revenge is introduced into the Metamorphoses. Io,
the daughter of Inachus, is returning from her father one day when Jove catches sight of her and
rapes her. In order to hide his passions from his
jealous wife Juno, Jove hides the Earth under a
cloud cover. Juno grows suspicious, and she clears
away the clouds. Jove quickly turns Io into a white
heifer in order to hide his affair. Juno, distrustful
of her husband, asks for the animal as a gift, a request the god cannot deny. Juno gives the heifer to
Argus, a creature with one hundred eyes, for safekeeping. Meanwhile, Io’s family is looking for the
young girl. Eventually they realize that she has
been transformed into the heifer. Argus separates
her from the family, and Io becomes a heartbroken
slave. Jove has pity for Io and sends Mercury to
Earth, disguised as a shepherd, to kill Argus. He
eventually lulls Argus to sleep with his music and
storytelling and cuts off his head. Juno, who is furious, places the eyes of Argus into the tail of the
peacock, and she places a spell on Io that forces
her to circle the Earth in terror. Jove eventually
promises Juno that he will never be unfaithful to
her and, in return, Juno changes the heifer back to
human form. Io becomes a goddess who, with
Jove’s seed, gives birth to Epaphus.
Book 1 closes with the introduction of Phaethon,
the friend of Epaphus who believes that Apollo is
his father and sets outs to the palace of the sun in
Ethiopia to find proof. Book 2 of the Metamorphoses opens with Apollo granting the boy any
wish he desires as proof of his devotion to him.
Phaethon wants to drive his father’s chariot across
the sky. Apollo fears for the boy’s life but keeps
his vow, and Phaethon takes the reins of the sun
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M e t a m o r p h o s e s
Topics
For Further
Study
• The story of Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha is
often referred to as an “archetypal” flood story.
What is meant by that term? What is an
archetype? Find flood stories in other traditions
and compare them to the flood story in
Metamorphoses.
• Epic poems usually tell historical and mythical
tales of war or conquest, yet Metamorphoses is
considered an epic poem. Research the characteristics of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and
Virgil’s The Aeneid and compare them to the
characteristics of Metamorphoses. What are
the major similarities and differences between
the works? Do you think the Metamorphoses
should be referred to as an epic poem? If not,
how should it be labeled?
and list significant differences in his account
from Ovid’s.
• In Genesis, man is said to be formed “from the
dust of the ground.” In the creation story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, humans are similarly created
from the ground when the oracle calls on Pyrrha
to toss the “bones of her mother” behind her.
When was Genesis written? Would Ovid, or any
of his contemporaries, have had widespread access to the stories in Genesis? If not, what do
you think accounts for the similarities between
the stories?
• A portion of Book 1 in the Metamorphoses is
devoted to the theogony, or the heredity of the
gods. Ovid drew much of his information from
Hesiod’s Theogony. Research Hesiod’s work,
• In many ways Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be
read as a study of power relationships. Analyze
how power is used between the sexes in the
Metamorphoses. Do male figures always hold
power over females? If not, how do females exert their power? Based on your analysis, how
would you characterize Ovid’s view of sexual
relationships?
god’s powerful chariot. However, he quickly loses
control and flies too close to the Earth, scorching
Ethiopia, turning the skin of its people black and
creating the Sahara desert. When the pain becomes
unbearable, Mother Earth calls out for help, and
Jove is forced to kill Phaethon with a bolt of lightning in order to extinguish the fire.
Beyond the literal acts of creation, many of the stories in the Metamorphoses explain how certain living beings and traditions came to be. For instance,
in Book 1, Ovid explains the origin of the design
of the peacock feathers in the story of Io, and in
the story of Daphne he explains how laurel wreaths
came to represent victory.
Metamorphosis
Themes
Creation
A large portion of the first book centers on the
theme of the creation of the universe, the Earth, and
humankind. Ovid describes the nothingness of
Chaos as the Metamorphoses opens and how
Prometheus formed man from the ground. After
Jove and Neptune nearly destroy all humanity with
the great floods, Deucalion and Pyrrha are able to
save it with the help of the prophetess Themis.
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The major theme of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is
metamorphosis itself. “I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms,” the poet declares in
the first sentence of the poem. Throughout the
twelve thousand lines of the Metamorphoses, Ovid
describes how change continually occurs in the universe; how the gods, out of revenge or capricious
desires, endlessly exert their transformative powers on the world. Metamorphosis is the recurring
theme throughout all the stories in the Metamorphoses, and it is the theme that artists and writers
have drawn from Ovid over the centuries.
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Power
Violence
When read in the light of Ovid’s own banishment from Rome, much of the Metamorphoses can
be interpreted as an allegory about the capricious
nature of power. Like Augustus who at his own discretion had the power to exile Ovid, the gods as
portrayed in the Metamorphoses have absolute
power over life and death in the world. Although
humans are sometimes able to trick the gods for a
short time, mortals are essentially powerless to respond to the gods’ capricious acts.
Violence, especially violent change, permeates
the universe of the Metamorphoses. From the earliest battle of the giants that results in drenching
the world with blood to Jove’s shooting down
of Apollo’s son Phaethon with a lightning bolt,
Book 1 is, if nothing else, one story after another
of violent transformation.
Style
Rape
In Book 1, Daphne is the first female to experience the lustful urges of the gods. When Cupid
pierces Apollo with an arrow, Apollo falls uncontrollably in love with the young virgin and tries to
rape her. Her speed and quick wits save her from
the god, but the price she pays is her youthful
beauty. Io similarly experiences the sexual powers
of the gods when Jove finds her and rapes her.
Throughout the Metamorphoses, women, especially young virgins, are subject to the urges of and
violent rapes by the male gods.
Dactylic Hexameters
Dactylic hexameter is the meter that traditionally was used in Greek and Latin epic poetry. From
the Greek meaning “finger,” a dactyl is a metrical
arrangement that consists of one stressed syllable
followed by two unstressed syllables. Hexameter
literally means “six metra.” The term dactylic hexameter is a metrical pattern that per line consists of
six successive dactyls. Virgil’s Aenid is an example of an epic written in dactylic hexameters. Beginning with the second line of the Metamorphoses,
Ovid employs dactylic hexameter for his epic.
Revenge
Revenge takes at least two forms in the Metamorphoses. The first is the revenge the gods take
upon humankind for humanity’s perceived indiscretions, and the second is the revenge the gods
take upon each other, especially the revenge goddesses out of jealous anger take upon the gods.
Early in Book 1, Jove tries to destroy the world
when greed and wickedness take over it. When he
is caught by his wife Juno having an affair with Io,
Juno exacts her revenge by turning the object of
the god’s desire into a heifer. In relation to the
Judeo-Christian tradition, the gods of the Metamorphoses are very much like the God of the Old
Testament: their anger is profound, and they do not
hesitate to take revenge upon humankind as a
means of teaching lessons never to be forgotten.
Theogony
From the Greek theogonia combining “god”
and “to be born of,” a theogony is an account of
the origin of the gods. The Metamorphoses, especially Book 1, provides an account of the age of
the Roman gods. Ovid used and in some cases corrected Hesiod, whose Theogony, written around
700 B.C., is the most thorough account of the gods.
Much of Ovid’s work in the Metamorphoses
focuses on explaining the births and lineage of
the gods.
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Epic
An epic is a long poem that deals with mythical, legendary, or historical events, or a combination of the three. Homer is considered to be the
first, and arguably greatest, epic poet. Although the
stories that make up the Metamorphoses do not
form a single narrative whole—that is, while the
stories may be linked thematically, they are not
connected sequentially in terms of plot—the Metamorphoses is an epic because it is long and because
it takes as its main subject the origins of the created universe and the history of humankind up to
the Roman era.
Mythology
The themes of change and power are presented
in the first twelve books of the Metamorphoses
through mythic stories. Many of the stories in
Ovid’s work were orally transmitted over the centuries and formed the basis of pagan belief systems.
Ovid may also have been influenced by several earlier Latin and Greek poets, including Nicander,
Boios, and Parthenius of Nicaea, but most of their
works have not have survived.
Translation
With the demise of classical education in the
twentieth century, most readers who study Ovid’s
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M e t a m o r p h o s e s
Compare
&
Contrast
• 8 A.D.: Christianity does not yet exist. Romans
continue to pray to their gods, and Augustus
moves to restore ancient temples for prayer.
• 8 A.D.: Ovid’s place of exile, the port of Tomi,
on the Black Sea, is a distant outpost of the
Roman Empire.
Today: The Vatican, which is located in Rome,
is the home of the pope, the spiritual leader of
the Catholic Church. Italy itself is overwhelmingly Catholic, and the ancient Roman religion,
in later centuries called paganism, no longer exists as an institutional religious force.
Today: Tomi is known as Constantsa, Romania, and is a shipping port and resort on the
Black Sea coast.
• 8 A.D.: Rome is the mightiest empire in the
West. Its reign extends across the known world,
made up of all of the Mediterranean basin and
extending through much of Europe. Augustus is
the most powerful leader in the West.
Today: Italy is a relatively small democratic
nation. Although it is an advanced Western society, it is no longer considered a military or
political power.
Metamorphoses in the early 2000s must rely on a
translation. Unfortunately, the quality and the style
of translations vary widely, and, while the basic
content can be found in a competent translation,
many of the nuances of Ovid’s original style, including his use of meter, metaphor, and wordplay,
are lost. While translations bring the ancient worlds
to the English reader, they cannot convey the true
artistry of the original and in many ways must be
treated as a separate works of art in their own right.
Historical Context
About the time of Ovid’s birth in 43 B.C., Gaius
Julius Caesar Augustus Octavianus, the grandnephew of Julius Caesar and more commonly
known as Augustus, came to Rome as a young man
to assert control over the estate his granduncle had
bequeathed to him. For the next twenty years, Augustus methodically gained power over his adversaries, and, by the time Ovid began writing poetry
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• 8 A.D.: Slavery plays a large role in Roman society. Nearly three million of the empire’s
eleven million inhabitants are slaves.
Today: Slavery has long been prohibited in Italy.
• 8 A.D.: Exile is a common form of punishment
for men and women who are classified as enemies of the state.
Today: So-called enemies of the state are no
longer sent into exile. Instead, punishment takes
the form of imprisonment.
at the age of twenty, Augustus was firmly established as the emperor of Rome and had long since
set about to exact measures to purify Rome of its
immoral influences.
Although far from being considered a prude
himself, Augustus nevertheless saw sexual licentiousness as a lifestyle that could undermine the
power and efficacy of the state. The Roman Empire
itself had experienced decades of upheaval. Roman
civil wars alone had killed some 200,000 Italians,
and the empire’s outposts were continually on guard
against invasions. Augustus’s great achievement
was to end the wars and work to establish a sense
of stability throughout the empire. In large part, he
was highly successful, and in many ways history
views him as the greatest of all the emperors.
Part of his successful strategy was to give
Romans a sense of the morally upright state. If Romans were to love anything at all, Augustus reasoned, they ought to love the state. Thus, he set out
to pass laws regulating such activities as premarital
sex and enforced economic measures that penalized
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individuals for avoiding marriage and children.
However much he tried to control sexual expression
in his domain, his efforts only succeeded to a certain degree. His only daughter, Julia the Elder, was
caught in an affair with Marc Anthony, one of the
emperor’s mortal enemies, and she was banished to
the island of Pandateria. Bereft of the opportunity
to have a direct heir, Augustus was irrevocably
affected, and when his granddaughter, Julia the
Younger, was similarly caught with a man in suspect circumstances, she was also banished.
While the details are unclear, it seems unlikely
that Ovid was somehow involved with the indiscretion connected to Julia the Younger. Although
Ovid had been playfully critical, especially in his
book Loves, of the emperor’s attempts at legislating sexual morality, Ovid was not known to have
had a contentious relationship with Augustus.
However, in return for what he calls a “mistake,”
Ovid was tried by Augustus personally. In the same
year that Augustus banished his granddaughter
from Rome, he sent Ovid to live out his years in
the distant outpost of Tomi on the Black Sea.
In the context of his relationship to the capricious and powerful Augustus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be read. Certainly, with his early elegies
on love, Ovid had contributed to the liberalization
of sexual mores in the empire, effectively setting
himself against the leadership in Rome.
With respect to the mythological themes of the
Metamorphoses, it should be remembered that
Rome was still several centuries away from adopting Christianity. In fact, Christianity as such did
not yet exist, and so-called pagan belief systems
continued to be widely accepted and practiced for
the next three centuries. Augustus, in fact, believed
that a part of the moral breakdown of Rome was
due to laxness regarding traditional religious rites
and customs. During his reign, he moved to restore
major temples to the gods.
Critical Overview
The influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Western art, music, drama, poetry, and literature cannot
be overstated. If emulation is the greatest form of
flattery, as it has been said, then there is perhaps
no more complimented writer in the Western canon
than Ovid.
Ovid’s impact is distinguished among the classical writers in that his fame grew during his own
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lifetime and continued to grow unabated after his
death. Archeologists have found Ovidian graffiti dating to Ovid’s lifetime on the walls of Pompeii. According to Peter Knox, writing in his biographical
essay on Ovid for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Seneca said in reference to Ovid’s oratorical
skills, “He had a neat, seemly and attractive talent.
Even in those days his speech could be regarded
as simply poetry put into prose.” However, Knox
also quotes the Spanish rhetorician, Quintilian
(35–96 A.D.), who criticized Ovid’s transitions in the
Metamorphoses as examples of “feeble and childish
affectation” that Ovid uses “without restraint.”
Ovid’s influences remained strong after
his death. The twelfth century, for instance, was
called the Ovidian Age because so many poets
wrote imitations of Ovidian hexameters and used
themes introduced in the Metamorphoses. Dante
acknowledged his debt to Ovid by placing the poet
alongside Homer, Horace, and Lucan in Limbo in
The Divine Comedy.
Ovid was easily the most influential of the
classical poets during the Renaissance, with
painters, sculptors, poets, and dramatists drawing
freely upon his influences. Edmund Spenser and
John Milton alluded frequently to Ovid’s work,
and, starting with Titus Andronicus, William
Shakespeare returned to Ovid repeatedly for inspiration. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance,
relies on the legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, and
Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet
contain references to the tragic story of Phaethon.
E. J. Kenney, in his introduction to the Oxford’s World Classics edition of the Metamorphoses, quotes Edward Gibbon (1737–1794),
author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who claimed to have “derived more pleasure”
from the Metamorphoses than from Virgil’s
Aeneid. In 1873, Virgil scholar James Henry, according to Kenney, described Ovid as “a more natural, more genial, more cordial, more imaginative,
more playful poet. . . than [Virgil] or any other
Latin poet.” In the twentieth century, Ezra Pound’s
Cantos and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid continued the Ovidian legacy.
The list of painters who have drawn on Ovid’s
stories is also extensive: for example, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Pieter Brueghel, Peter
Paul Rubens, Marc Chagall, and Pablo Picasso.
Painters throughout the centuries have been inspired by the Roman poet, as well as sculptors.
In the performing arts, Ovid’s influence can
be seen in the American Ballet Theater’s 1958
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production Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in the 2002
Broadway production by Mary Zimmerman of
Metamorphoses: A Play. In film, Jean Cocteau
drew upon the story of Orpheus and Eurydice for
his 1949 film Orpheus. In 1958, Marcel Camus
made Black Orpheus, a version that sets the two
star-crossed lovers in Brazil and stars an all-black
cast and includes a jazz soundtrack that went on to
sell a million copies. Black Orpheus won the 1959
Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize and the Oscar’s
Best Foreign Film award.
Criticism
Mark White
White is the publisher of the Seattle-based
press Scala House Press. In this essay, White argues that the themes of the gods’ vengeance and
caprice were drawn from the poet’s experience in
Augustan Rome.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is arguably the most
influential literary work in the Western canon. For
two millennia writers and artists of every genre
have turned to the Roman epic for inspiration, more
so than to any other single book, with perhaps the
exceptions of the Bible or Homer’s Odyssey. The
major theme the poem addresses—and the theme
that the vast majority of its influences repeatedly
use—is, as the title suggests, metamorphosis, or
change. Two equally important themes emerge
from the poem: revenge and the gods’ capricious
use of power. Time and time again Ovid describes
otherwise innocent beings transformed beyond
recognition, either to save themselves from the
caprices of the gods or because of the gods’ wrathful vengeance itself.
While it is unclear how autobiographical or allegorical Ovid originally intended his masterpiece
to be, the parallels between his life in Augustan
Rome and the lives of his creations are undeniable.
The history of the Roman Empire in total, and in
particular the forty-year reign of Augustus, Rome’s
first emperor, provided ample character studies for
Ovid as he set out to create his vengeful and capricious gods. And at the height of his powers and
popularity as a poet, Ovid had to look no further
than himself for a real-life example of a victim of
the emperor’s caprices. The exiling of Ovid to the
distant Black Sea outpost of Tomi can be viewed
in much the same way as any number of transformations in the Metamorphoses: with a dramatic
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swipe of the hand and for questionable reasons at
best. Ovid, the well-known poet of love, was thus
transformed over night to a potentially soon forgotten writer of whining letters and tedious verses.
“I want to speak about bodies changed into
new forms,” Ovid proclaims, announcing the major theme to the Metamorphoses in the poem’s first
line. For the rest of the epic, Ovid would do just
that, describing some of literature’s most poignant
stories of metamorphoses: Daphne turning into a
laurel; Io being transformed into a heifer; the young
virgin Callisto being turned into a bear and then
into a constellation; the beautiful young Adonis being metamorphosed at his death into the anemone.
The list is extensive, and the idea of change, of
metamorphosis, is what links these otherwise disparate stories.
The poem’s very next lines—“You, gods,
since you are the ones who alter these, and all other
things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins
to my own time”—turn the attention from metamorphosis to the source of all change, the gods
themselves. Viewed in the context of Ovid’s life in
Augustus’s Rome, these secondary lines—the lines
that are normally viewed as the subtext to Ovid’s
masterpiece—take on a primary significance.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Octavianus—or
Augustus, as he came to be known—came to power
in Rome around 23 B.C., around the same time that
Ovid was abandoning a career in law in favor of
poetry. Augustus, which is Latin for “majestic” or
“venerable,” set out to consolidate his power and
return Rome to what was called the mos maiorum,
or the customs of the ancestors, as a strategy for
bringing Rome to the state of grandeur for which
it would ultimately be remembered. In an early undertaking, Augustus rebuilt many temples to the
gods that had fallen into disrepair from disuse and
neglect, and his restoration of the Secular Games
in 17 B.C. was a symbolic gesture of his desire to
restore the ancient religious traditions. Eventually,
Augustus turned to issues of sexual mores, making
adultery a criminal offense and encouraging the
building of nuclear families by offering economic
incentives to couples with more than three children.
While Augustus was in many ways widely regarded as Rome’s greatest and most just emperor,
his efforts to regulate the morals of society may
have been seen as intrusive to Ovid, whose book
The Art of Love (or Ars Amatoria), a collection of
poems that parodied contemporary love verse and
poked fun at Roman society, was a hit among the
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more liberal classes, much to the chagrin of Augustus. Not that Augustus was a prude himself;
rather, Augustus saw in his return to mos maiorum
a great symbolic vehicle for uniting his empire in
line with his grander political ambitions. Ovid’s
writing was probably seen by the emperor as having more of a gadfly effect than being a legitimate
threat to his power, but enough of a gadfly to take
heed of. In this context Ovid is the perfect explanation of why Plato called for the expulsion of poets in his Republic; poets, choosing the dictates of
their muses over that of their leaders, are by and
large not reliable citizens of the state.
Although no one knew for certain why Augustus, in 8. A.D., personally tried and prosecuted
Ovid, The Art of Love, which was published seven
years earlier, was probably a factor, though certainly not the direct one. Instead, speculation centered on the indiscretions of Augustus’s daughter,
Julia the Elder, and his granddaughter, Julia the
Younger, as the more direct reasons.
Julia the Elder, like many in her circle, was reputed to be a fan of Ovid’s work and was known
widely for her licentious ways. Rumors of her sexual abandonment circulated throughout the empire.
After being caught in an affair with her father’s enemy, Marc Antony, she was banished to the distant
island of Pandateria where she eventually died of
malnutrition. Her daughter Julia, similarly grew to
be fond of Ovid’s writing. Not more than eight years
after her mother’s forced exile, she was also banished. The fact that Julia the Younger and Ovid were
banished months apart from one another added fuel
to the historical speculation that Ovid was somehow involved, however indirectly, with one of her
affairs. While there could be some political justification for the banishment of Augustus’s daughter,
there was little doubt among historians that the motives behind the emperor’s exile of his granddaughter had no political source whatsoever.
Although the exiles of Julia the Younger and Ovid
certainly had political and social implications, the
motives behind them were primarily personal. Augustus, at the age of 71, bereft of an heir once he
banished his only child, was fed up with what he
perceived as the immorality of his own family members when the larger issue of the public morality of
the entire empire was at stake. Rather than give in
to the loosening of control within his own family,
he chose to rid himself and Rome of the problems
once and for all.
Of his banishment, Ovid is quoted only as saying that it was the result of “a poem and a mistake.”
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And at the height of
his powers and popularity
as a poet, Ovid had to look
no further than himself for
a real-life example of a
victim of the emperor’s
caprices.”
The poem was most likely The Art of Love, and as
for the mistake, history may never know what that
was. Regardless, Ovid was exiled to Tomi, in what
became in the twentieth-century Romania. With his
greatest works already written, he spent his remaining years there, writing letters to Rome bidding for his return and crafting poems that made
up his Tristia, or Sorrows—verses critics generally
looked upon with disfavor. In exile, Ovid was
clearly transformed into a second-rate poet.
The themes of caprice and vengeance, then,
that can be seen emerging from Ovid’s interactions
with Augustus, are prevalent throughout the Metamorphoses. In the story of Lycaon, Jupiter disguises himself as a traveler and enters the King of
Arcadia’s lands where he finds that the rumors of
wickedness that preceded his arrival were “even
milder than the truth.” When the god realizes that
Lycaon intends to murder him, he turns the king
into a wolf. Now, if the story had concluded with
that (arguably) understandable response, one could
attribute some moral justification to his actions.
However, upon returning to Olympus, Jupiter lobbies his colleagues to retaliate by wiping out the
entire human race. This action may be compared
to Augustus taking vengeance on Ovid for the perceived moral indiscretions of his daughter. Jupiter
exerts his wrath on the entire human race for the
issues he has with Lycaon. “One house has fallen,
but others deserve to also.” Jupiter concludes his
rallying cry on Olympus, a cry that could have easily been uttered by Augustus at Ovid’s trial. “Wherever the Earth extends the avenging furies rule. You
would think men were sworn to crime! Let them
all pay the penalty they deserve, and quickly. That
is my intent.”
This excess of vengeance, although it recurs
frequently in the Metamorphoses, is not the
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M e t a m o r p h o s e s
What
Do I Read
Next?
• In 1988, German novelist Christopher Ransmayr
published The Last World to widespread critical
acclaim. Ransmayr’s novel is set in Tomi shortly
after the death of Ovid and tells of a Roman admirer of the poet who is in search of a lost manuscript of the Metamorphoses.
• Tristia is Ovid’s personal account of his banishment. Although he never reveals the reason for
his exile in the book, he expresses his most personal and deep-seated feelings about his exile.
• Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron
(1997) tells the story of a dying elderly South
African woman during apartheid. The war between blacks and whites is at its fiercest, and the
letters the woman writes to her daughter who is
in voluntary exile in America make up the narrative of the novel. Although not directly related to
Ovid, Coetzee’s work is a prime example of how
prevailing way the gods exert their power over the
world. Rather, the stories of Daphne, Io and Argus,
and Pan and Syrinx set the tone and the style for
the gods’ preferred method of control. In each of
these instances, an otherwise beautiful and innocent (virginal) girl (or nymph) is minding her own
business in the woods when suddenly she is chased
by a lustful, monomaniacal god who can only be
sated by physically consummating his sexual desire. In the cases of Syrinx and Daphne, rape is
avoided at the last instant when they are metamorphosed into inanimate objects—a reed in Syrinx’s
case and a laurel tree in Daphne’s. In both cases,
however, their original beauty is replaced by
vegetation. Io, on the other hand, is both raped
by Jupiter and transformed into a heifer by Juno,
his jealous spouse. Her humiliation is twice that
of Daphne’s and Syrinx’s, though her beauty
is eventually restored, and she gives birth to
Jupiter’s child.
At first glance, parallels between the situations
experienced by Ovid and the characters of his
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the Metamorphoses has been used as a model for
writers of all genres and styles through the years.
• After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (1995), edited
by Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, is an
anthology of poetry that includes the works of
forty-two poets from around the world whom
the editors commissioned to “translate, reinterpret, reflect on, or completely reimagine” Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. The poets include Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Amy
Clampitt, and Charles Simic among others.
• I, Claudius and Claudius the God, by Robert
Graves, are the fictional accounts, written in the
form of autobiographical memoirs, of Claudius,
the Roman emperor who was famous for his
stutter and his ability to survive the many intrigues and scandals of Augustus, Tiberius, and
Caligula.
Metamorphoses may not be significant, but a closer
look reveals similar patterns. Ovid was presumably
exiled as a result of his liberal sexual attitudes and
perhaps his practices. The victims of the gods’
caprices in the Metamorphoses are mostly virgins
who suffer from the “liberal” sexuality of the gods.
Both the victims and Ovid lack control in matters
thought important by the state, especially sexuality. Although this may seem a minor point, Augustus did not ban his daughter and granddaughter
or Ovid because they were sexual per se; he exiled
them because they stepped outside the sexual
boundaries that he, as supreme leader of Rome, prescribed. For Augustus, the issue of control was of
absolute importance; when he perceived losing that
control, he fought back capriciously with his decrees of exile, much as Jupiter exacted his wrath
upon the world with floodwaters when he lost his
hold on the world and much like Juno exacted her
revenge upon Io for drawing Jupiter’s attention. For
both Ovid the Roman citizen and his characters, ultimately their freedom extended only so far; if the
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emperor or Jupiter wanted to reduce their vassals,
doing so was their prerogative.
It is not clear that Ovid set out to write a personal, or even a political, allegory with his Metamorphoses. Far too little of his life outside his
poetics is known to make any concrete deduction
in this direction. But what is known is that the universe he created in the Metamorphoses is a universe ruled by capricious and vengeful gods, and
the physical world he inhabited was one ruled by
a capricious and vengeful emperor. Like his creations who would be remembered both for the
wrath that they suffered and the new forms they ultimately took, Ovid has gained permanent place in
Western civilization for the forms he created.
“Wherever Rome’s influence extends, over the
lands it has civilised,” Ovid concludes the Metamorphoses with words more prophetic than even
he could have believed, “I will be spoken, on people’s lips: and, famous through all the ages, if there
is truth in poet’s prophecies, vivam—I shall live.”
Source: Mark White, Critical Essay on Metamorphoses, in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
S. E. Sweeney
In the following essay, Sweeney argues that the
“allusions in Lolita to the myth of Io and Argus”
help the reader to see the connection between
Lolita’s “metamorphosis in Humbert’s eyes . . .
and his own subsequent apotheosis as an artist.”
Human characters in Lolita continually metamorphose into animals. Tourists passing through
Nabokov’s menagerie view phocine Charlotte,
porcine Mr. Swine, and a leporine psychiatrist, not
to mention simian Humbert Humbert; while the
physical descriptions of Lolita herself, as Diana
Butler pointed out in her uneven but provocative
essay, “Lolita Lepidoptera,” pertain also to
butterflies—particularly those, like “Nabokov’s
Wood-Nymph,” discovered by Nabokov himself.
Such permutations, recurring throughout the
novel’s imagery, are further integrated and exemplified by the theme of “the enchanted hunters”—
both in Quilty’s play, with its mythical and fairy
tale trappings, and in the hotel, whose dining room
murals depict “enchanted hunters in various postures and states of enchantment amid a medley of
pallid animals, dryads and trees.”
As Alfred Appel remarks, “everything in Lolita
is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, including the novel itself.” The plot, for example,
traces Lolita’s temporal evolution from prepubescent nymphet in her prime to a woman “hopelessly
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worn at seventeen,” against the background of her
travels with Humbert and her final exile to “Gray
Star.” More important than the temporal and spatial
changes Lolita undergoes, however, is her transformation into a nymphet in Humbert’s eyes, his later
correction of that perception, and his own subsequent apotheosis as an artist. Thus the relationship
between Lolita’s and Humbert’s metamorphoses
provides the dramatic action of the novel, and is
echoed by other transformations in its imagery, leitmotif, and overall structure.
Nabokov’s inspiration for the theme of metamorphosis, and its recurrence, at the level of
metaphor, throughout his novel, may have been
Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a work which not only
takes such magical transformations as its subject,
but also duplicates them in its structure, with each
story flowing seamlessly into the next. The Metamorphoses further resembles Lolita, moreover, because it describes a magical realm where conflict,
exile, and unsatisfied desire are resolved by stylized
metamorphosis. Nabokov’s novels often depict just
such a Never Never Land in order to satisfy the twin
nostalgias, physical and temporal, which dominate
his fiction and the lives of his heroes: the exile’s
longing for his homeland, and the aging adult’s for
his lost childhood. Earlier versions include the
painting of a fairy-tale forest above Martin’s bed in
glory the crystal land of Zembla in Pale Fire, and
the new and improved planet of Antiterra in Ada; it
is manifested in Lolita as the “intangible island of
entranced time,” the distinctly mythological setting
Humbert imagines for his nymphets. “It will be
marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones,”
Humbert explains. “In fact, I would have the reader
see ‘nine’ and ‘fourteen’ as the boundaries—the
mirrory beaches and rosy rocks—of an enchanted
island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.” Thus immutable
boundaries of space and time are resolved, and
dissolved, by art’s beautiful incongruities; and the
paradise which Humbert half-remembers, halfimagines, synthesizes Nabokov’s own idyllic Russian childhood with his adult exile.
“Quelquepart Island,” as Quilty dubs it in his
hotel registration entries, is comprised of bits and
pieces from European folklore; fairy tales; such literary fantasies as Poe’s “kingdom by the sea”; and
classical mythology. A likely source for these classical allusions, as we have already seen, is Ovid’s
Metamorphoses—because of its subject, myths of
love and transformation; the way that subject
shapes its structure; and the stylized world where
such magical transformation take place. An even
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more convincing argument for the influence of the
Metamorphoses, however, is one particular myth to
which Nabokov often alludes, and which, like his
own novel, focuses on two interrelated metamorphoses; the myth of Io and Argus.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the myth of Io and
Argus immediately follows the tale of Daphne’s
pursuit by Apollo and her transformation into a laurel tree. It includes, as a story within a story, the
tale of Syrinx’s pursuit by Pan, and her subsequent
change into the reeds from which his pan-pipes
were fashioned. Io’s story, like theirs, is one of sexual pursuit and metamorphosis; however, her
change yields no respite.
According to Ovid, the nymph Io, daughter of
a river god, is pursued and finally raped by Jupiter,
who promptly changes her into a heifer to avoid
Juno’s jealously. Unfortunately, Juno admires the
animal and demands it as a gift. Still more unfortunate is the fact that she remains suspicious—even
though Jupiter reluctantly bestows the altered Io
upon her—and assigns hundred-eyed Argus to
guard the heifer.
Io’s father does not recognize her until she
traces her name in the dust with one hoof; and even
then he can’t help his daughter, because Argus
herds her away to distant pastures. Jupiter feels responsible for Io’s plight, and asks the god of left
and trickery, Mercury, to rescue her. Mercury disguises himself as another herdsman, and upon
meeting Argus begins playing on his reed pipes and
telling him stories, one of which—the myth of Pan
and Syrinx—lulls the monster to sleep, after which
Mercury beheads him. Outraged by this murder,
Juno adorns the tail of her peacock with Argus’
hundred eyes. She also sends a Fury to torment Io
and drive her over the earth—until Jupiter finally
confesses, begs Juno’s forgiveness, and forswears
Io’s charms, upon which the nymph returns to her
former state. Subsequently, according to Ovid, she
is worshipped as a minor goddess.
There are several striking similarities between
this myth and Lolita, especially in plot, character,
and theme. In each a beautiful young girl—
a “nymphet,” in Nabokov’s classically-inspired
neologism—is raped by a powerful older man; is
led from family and home, and forced to go on what
Ovid calls “interminable wanderings;” and undergoes a metamorphosis directly linked to male sexuality and female objectification.
The various male characters in the myth parallel Humbert’s multiple roles as Lolita’s surrogate
stepfather (Io’s father); as her powerful lover
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(Jupiter); and, finally and most importantly, as the
self-described monster who imprisons her (Argus).
Mercury, the god of thieves, ingenious devices, and
roads, whose name has become a synonym for
“quicksilver,” is a suggestive parallel for Quilty, the
“veritable Proteus of the highway,” and Humbert’s
double. Just as Mercury lulls Argus to sleep with a
story, and then attempts to steal Io, so Quilty begins his liaison with Lolita during the performance
of The Enchanted Hunters (his play within play Navokov’s novel), and ultimately steals her during
Humbert’s delirium. It is Humbert who murders
Quilty, of course, and not the other way around; yet
the confusion of roles is appropriate, because their
doubting is stressed throughout the novel.
In addition to these similarities in plot and
character, Lolita elaborates upon important themes
from Ovid’s myth: love and metamorphosis; vision,
recognition, and abnormal perception; enchantment, hypnotism, and sleep; and selfconscious art.
The organization of these themes is even more significant, however, because the transformation of Io
and Argus, as chronicled in the myth, correspond
to the most important aspects of Nabokov’s novel:
the interrelated metamorphoses undergone by
Lolita and Humbert Humbert.
The major attribute shared by Io and Lo, beyond the initial similarity in their names, is their
designation as nymphs (or “little nymphs”). Although, according to Charlotte, Lolita is “a sturdy,
health, but decidedly homely kid,” Humbert is able
“to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly
feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a
downy limb, and other indices which despair and
shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to
tabulate—the little deadly demon among the
wholesome children.” Thus he pronounces her a
nymphet. Nabokov’s use of this word and its sibling, “faunlet,” derives, of course, from the minor
deities of classical mythology, neither human nor
divine, who haunt specific natural locales. Nymphs
seduce men yet flee their embrace, sometimes even
changing from anthropomorphic to natural shape
(trees, water, and so on) in order to escape human
sexuality; thus it’s especially appropriate that in
Quilty’s play, The Enchanted Hunters, Lolita plays
“a woodland which, Diana, or something,” who enchants stray men in Dolly’s Dell.
The nymphet’s most distinguishing characteristic is her prepubescence, which implies an undefined, incomplete state of metamorphosis. Like the
lepidopteral nymph or pupa (a usage with which
Nabokov was familiar, and which he certainly
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intended), who is neither caterpillar nor butterfly;
or the classical nymph, who is neither human nor
divine—Lolita is no longer a child and yet not quite
an adult. In such fairy tales as Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, to which Nabokov also alludes, this
same state of arrested development is manifested
as an enchanted trance from which the sleeper
awakes into womanhood. In the Metamorphoses, it
is indicated by the changed shapes—a laurel tree,
or a handful of reeds—which nymphs adopt to protect themselves from sexuality and sexual experience. That Nabokov referred deliberately to such
magical changes is evident when Humbert describes his shopping trip for Lolita: “There is a
touch of the mythological and the enchanted in
those large stores where according to ads a career
girl can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and
where little sister can dream of the day when her
wool jersey will make the boys in the back row of
the classroom drool.” It is this “quiet poetical afternoon,” in fact, that prompts their stay at the Enchanted Hunters.
It is not surprising, given this emphasis on arrested development, that Io and Lolita are defined
by their specific metamorphoses and by a general
tendency towards transformation. Io changes from
a nymph to a heifer, and back again, before becoming a goddess. Not only does Lolita undergo
similar transformations from ordinary little girl, to
nymphet, to teenager, to ordinary wife and expectant mother, but Humbert also worships her in various other avatars—as Aphrodite, the Madonna,
and other deities; as famous mistresses of history
and legend; and as the Hollywood starlet she aspires to be. Ultimately she, too, achieves immortality through the medium of Humbert’s art.
Yet why are Io and Lolita victimized by these
changes, instead of protected by them? Rather than
having organic cause—as in other myths from the
Metamorphoses (for instance, those of Daphne and
Syrinx) or traditional fairy tales—their respective
transformations signify a rape brought about by
male sexuality, male perceptions, and female objectification. Consider the mistaken recognitions
and false male perceptions which recur throughout
Ovid’s myth: Jupiter disguises Io as heifer; her father fails to recognize her; Argus, her captor, is
characterized by his deviant vision; and in order to
kill Argus, Mercury disguises himself as a herdsman. Consider such themes as voyeurism, disguise,
and mistaken identity, in Nabokov’s novel, as well
as its frequent allusions to visual media from billboards to movies. More significantly, Lolita’s involuntary metamorphosis into a “nymphet” is
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caused solely by Humbert’s self-absorbed perception of her: ldquo;What I had madly possessed was
not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful
Lolita—perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her,
and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no
life of her own. The child knew nothing, I had done
nothing to her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance that affected her as little as
if she were a photographic image rippling upon a
screen and I a humble hunchback abusing myself
in the dark.” Humbert’s vision of Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters, when he experiences “a confusion
of perception metamorphosing her into eyespots of
moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush,” goes even
further to exemplify such solipsism on his part in
terms of an apparent change in Lolita herself.
Io’s and Lolita’s respective metamorphoses
not only reflect their objectification by male
voyeurs, as we have seen, but also their corruption
by male sexuality—for both are corrupted, despite
the innate sexuality of nymphs, the supposed sexuality of nymphets, and the fact that Lolita is not
a virgin (she is traumatized more by premature exposure to adult sexuality than by sex itself). Thus
Io’s metamorphosis symbolizes her changed social
and sexual status as a result of the rape. Becoming
a heifer, in particular, emphasizes her gender and
sex role, and connotes bestiality—especially in
contrast to the asexual changes undergone by
Daphne and Syrinx. Lolita’s transformation is also
specifically sexual, because nymphets are characterized by both their implied sexuality and the eroticism they afford the discerning male. In addition,
the polarities represented by Io’s two lives (humanity and bestiality, innocence and depravity)
neatly parallel what Humbert identifies as the perverse “twofold nature of this nymphet . . . this mixture in my Lolita of tender dreamy childishness and
a kind of eerie vulgarity.” “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point,” Humbert muses, attempting to describe their first fateful night in The
Enchanted Hunters, “and it is that borderline I
would like to fix.”
Humbert’s descriptions of Lolita as an animal
not only fix that borderline, but also delineate such
“eerie vulgarity.” At The Enchanted Hunters he
gazes at her “glimmer of nymphet flesh, where half
a haunch and half a shoulder dimly showed.” “Now
and then it seemed to me that the enchanted prey
was about to meet halfway the enchanted hunter,
that her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach.”
Later Humbert characterizes their relationship in
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terms of “the quiet murmured order one gives a
sweatstained distracted cringing trained animal even
in the worst of plights (what mad hope or hate makes
the young beast’s flanks pulsate, what black stars
pierce the heart of the tamer!).” The implied connotations of bestiality in such imagery stress the perversion of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita, “our
singular and bestial cohabitation.”
Despite such references to Lolita as an animal,
or as “enchanted prey,” Nabokov’s novel never directly refers to Io or her changed shape. Yet the
following dialogue, preceding Humbert’s and
Lolita’s arrival at The Enchanted Hunters, and unexplained by the text, is so significant that it represents Lolita in the “Hegelian synthesis linking up
two dead women” at the novel’s end: “‘Look, Lo,
at all those cows on that hillside.’ ‘I think I’ll vomit
if I look at a cow again.’” And Immediately before
retiring to their bedroom that night, Humbert spies
in the hotel lobby “a delightful child of Lolita’s
age, in Lolita’s type of frock, but pure white, and
there was a white ribbon in her black hair. She was
not pretty, but she was a nymphet, and her ivory
pale legs and lily neck formed for one memorable
moment a most pleasurable antiphony (in terms of
spinal music) to my desire for Lolita.” (After Io
was changed back into a nymph, according to Ovid,
“de bove nil superset formae nisi candor in illa.”
Abashed at Humbert’s gaze, the little girl turns
away “in specious chat with her cow-like mother.”
Two other passages from the narratives seem oddly
similar. Ovid says of Io: “si modo verba sequantur, /oret opem nomenque suum casusque loquatur;/littera pro verbis, quam pes in pulvere
duxit, /corporis indicium mutati triste peregit.” In
Nabokov’s novel, Lolita reads advice to victimized
children aloud from a newspaper: “‘If,’ she repeated, ‘you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough
to read and write—this is what the guy means,
isn’t it, you dope—scratch the number somehow
on the roadside.’ ‘With your little claws, Lolita.’”
Such possible allusions to Io’s role in the myth
are more suggestive than conclusive, however; Io
and Lolita resemble each other not in specific details but in general circumstances, in their shared
status as victims of rape, sexual objectification,
mistaken recognition, and captivity, and in the
metamorphoses they undergo. Similarities between
Argus and Humbert, on the other hand, are not only
more convincing, but are supported by unmistakable references to the myth. Yet the apparent incongruity isn’t contradictory, because the roles of
captor and captive are always interdependent; and
although Argus may not be a narrator and hero in
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Ovid’s myth, Humbert is the major character
of Lolita.
Allusions to Argus are scattered throughout
Nabokov’s fiction and even his poetry, as Alfred
Appel has demonstrated: “In Laughter in the Dark,
Albinus meets his fatal love in the Argus cinema,
where she is an usher, ‘My back is Argus-eyed,’
says the speaker in ‘An Evening of Russian Poetry.’
In Pale Fire, one of the aliases of the assassin
Gradus is ‘d’Argus’; Hermann in Despair envisions
‘argus-eyed angels;’ the title character in The Real
Life of Sebastian Knight ‘seems argus-eyed;’ Ada
and Van dread ‘traveling together to Argus-eyed
destinations,’ and Van, in search of the nature and
meaning of Time, drives an ‘Argus’ car.”
Most of these are casual allusions to paranoia,
keenness of vision, or the sense of sight. In Lolita,
on the other hand, most of the references to Argus
not only emphasize Humbert’s perversion and
voyeurism—and the solipsism which these traits
illustrate—but also foreshadow his eventual apotheosis as an artist.
Humbert’s relationship with Lolita is characterized by the same watchfulness and jealous possessiveness displayed by Argus, and he even suffers
from recurrent bouts of insomnia (Arugus never
sleeps). Moreover, his descriptions of himself reinforce the analogy: “attractively simian.” “Humbert the Cubus,” “a humble hunchback abusing
[himself] in the dark,” with “two hypnotic eyes,”
his “aging ape eyes.” Most significant, however,
are the parallels between Argus’ perceptions and
voyeurism, and Humbert’s own: for Argus’ abnormal eyes, like those of Homer’s Cyclopes, imply a
distorted vision of reality; and because he has one
hundred such eyes, he is the archetypal voyeur.
Two of the novel’s direct allusions to Argus are
significant, particularly in context, because of what
they reveal about Humbert’s perceptions. “There
my beauty lay down on her stomach,” Humbert
notes in an early journal entry, “showing me, showing the thousand eye wide open in my eyed blood,
her slightly raised shoulder blades, and the bloom
along the incurvation of her spine, and the swellings
of her tense narrow nates clothed in black, and
the seaside of her schoolgirl thighs. Silently, the
seventh-grader enjoyed her green-red-blue comics.
She was the loveliest nymphet green-red-blue Priap
himself could think up. As I looked on, though prismatic layers of light, dry-lipped, focusing my lust
and rocking slightly under my newspaper, I felt that
my perception of her, if properly concentrated upon,
might be sufficient to have me attain a beggar’s bliss
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immediately; but, like some predator that prefers a
moving prey to a motionless one, I planned to have
this pitiful attainment coincide with one of various
girlish movements she made now and then.” Humbert’s “thousand eyes wide open,” such word choice
as “prismatic” and “focusing,” his Technicolor imagery, and the relationship between predator and
prey, clearly allude to Argus; yet they are also peculiarly appropriate to Humbert’s voyeurism and his
belief that he can possess Lolita without affecting
her. Later, anticipating Quilty’s murder, Humbert
rhapsodizes: “To wander with a hundred eyes over
his purple skills and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the
punctures and mess, and music of pain.” Quilty not
only functions as Humbert’s Doppelgänger in the
novel, but he resembles him physically as well—
even to the purple robe Humbert wore during the
masturbation scene in which “Lolita had been safely
solipsized.” What Humbert foreglimpses with his
hundred eyes, then, is the death of his own image,
as well as the solipsism it represents. Thus both references to Argus underscore Humbert’s distorted
perception of reality at important points in the narrative, at the same time that they appropriately modify their contexts.
Several allusions to Argus’ metamorphosis as
the peacock’s tail also subtly reinforce the themes of
Humbert’s voyeurism, his solipsism, and his relationship to Quilty, while on a more basic level they
describe the visual effects of dappled light and shade.
Humbert remembers Lolita skipping rope: “the pavonine sun was all eyes on the gravel under the flowering trees, while in the midst of that oculate paradise,
my freckled and raffish lass skipped, repeating the
movements of so many others I had gloated over on
the sun-shot watered, damp-smelling sidewalks and
ramparts of ancient Europe.” The pavonine sun—
which, by the way, recalls Lolita’s visual metamorphosis into “eyespots of moonlight”—reappears later
when Humbert watches Quilty watching Lolita from
under “the peacocked shade of trees,” and later still
when, after killing his Doppelgänger, Humbert walks
out into “the spotted blaze of the sun.”
More important than mere allusion to Argus’
metamorphosis, however, is the fact that is paralleled by Humbert’s. By gradually correcting his
memories of Lolita, seeing her in her true state, and
symbolically killing his double, Humbert is able to
transcend his solipsism in the final chapters of the
novel, and discover that he loves Lolita not as he
perceived her—“a photographic image of rippling
upon a screen”—but as she truly is. Completing his
manuscript, Humbert finally evolves from sexual objectification to artistic invention: “I am thinking of
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aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments,
prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the
only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
Other allusions to peacocks foreshadow this apotheosis. When the Ramsdale Journal identifies Humbert, early on, as the author of “‘several books on
Peacock, Rainbow and other poets,’” this multilingual pun on the names of Thomas Love Peacock and
Arthur Rimbaud links Argus’ metamorphosis with
love and art, as well as with rainbow imagery; and
the rainbow, in particular, not only describes the visual iridescence of the peacock’s tail, but serves as
an additional emblem of transcendence. Thus Humbert, who has already identified the “thousand eyes”
within his “blood” in terms of primary colors, muses
at The Enchanted Hunters that “in and out of my
heart flowed my rainbow blood.” Visiting Yellowstone Park with Lolita, he describes the “colored hot
springs” as “rainbows of bubbling mud—symbols
of my passion;” and they are especially appropriate
symbols because they condense Humbert’s perversion (the bubbling mud) and his rainbowed transcendence of it, into a single unified image.
The network of allusions to Argus similarly express Humbert’s gradual transformation as a single
conceit, but on a much larger scale. They stress his
self-absorbed perception of Lolita, and his accompanying voyeurism and objectification of her, at the
same time that they foreshadow his eventual transcendence over these things. Just as Argus’ monstrous eyes become the peacock’s iridescent tail, so
Humbert’s own solipsism metamorphoses into the
deliberate and acknowledged solipsism of art.
It is clear that neither the myth of Io and Argus, nor the Metamorphoses itself, served in any
sense as antecedent for Nabokov’s glittering fairy
tale. Instead, Ovid’s myth is one of several literary
parallels, most of which are already documented,
which Nabokov reflects and parodies in his novel;
and it may be considered the classical counterpart
for such romantic subtexts as Merimée’s Carmen
and Poe’s Annabel Lee. However, in significant
contrast to these romantic parallels, which mislead
the reader (for the references to Annabel Lee at
worst invite the kind of Freudian interpretation
Nabokov despised, and at best provide an easy rationale for Humbert’s predilection; while the references to Carmen erroneously suggest that Humbert
will kill Lolita), this classical subtext clarifies,
rather than obscures, the novel’s dramatic action.
That dramatic action, allusions to the myth
suggest, lies in the novel’s two separate metamorphoses—Lolita’s transformation into a “nymphet,”
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and Humbert’s later apotheosis into an artist—and
their interdependence. Lolita’s initial metamorphosis is the direct result of Humbert’s objectification
of her, while Humbert’s apotheosis depends upon
his correction of that mistaken perception. Such
transformations are thus a function of either false
or accurate recognitions of others; and recognition,
voyeurism, objectification, and mistaken identity
are major themes in both Ovid’s myth and
Nabokov’s novel, as we have already seen. Significantly, in both narratives these metamorphoses are
accompanied by variants of the classic “recognition scene” of mythology and folklore, which dramatizes changes which have taken place and at the
same time asserts a character’s continued identity.
Consider Io’s metamorphosis, which externalizes
Jupiter’s perception of her and is demonstrated by
her father’s failed recognition. Later, when Io regains her former shape (but only when Jupiter
swears to cease his sexual attentions), the reader
witnesses her miraculous transformation.
Nabokov’s novel also uses recognition scenes
to record the changes that have transpired. Lolita’s
unwitting metamorphosis into a nymphet begins
when Humbert perceives her as the incarnation of
his childhood sweetheart, Annabelle Leigh, in a brilliant parody of the recognition scene: “as if I were
the fairytale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her
nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds). I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With
awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely
indrawn abdomen.” The change in Humbert’s perception of Lolita is underscored near the end of the
novel, when he recalls overhearing a conversation
between Lo and a friend: “it struck me, as my automation knees went up and down, that I simply did
not know a thing about my darling’s mind and that
quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile clichés,
there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace
gate—dim and adorable regions which happened
to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in
my polluted rags and miserable convulsions.” Although this parallel passage also recalls the classic
recognition scene, it actually describes an antirecognition instead: Humbet’s ironic discovery that
he has never known Lolita, and never can know anything but his recreation of her though art. Note, too,
that the figure in rags is no longer Lolita, but Humbert himself. As in Ovid’s myth, the heroine’s first
transformation is caused by desire—in particular,
by sexual objectification—and the reversion to her
true form is caused by love and pity. Thus the two
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scenes, with their allusions to folklore, neatly telescope the change in Humbert’s perceptions.
The function of such metamorphoses, and such
carefully staged recognition scenes, is so figuratively represent for the reader whatever changes in
character—or in one character’s perception of
another—have occurred. In order to understand
Nabokov’s novel, then, and to resolve its delicate
moral balance between Lolita’s seductiveness and
Humbert’s seduction, it is crucial that the reader perceive the connection between her metamorphoses
in Humbert’s eyes (from little girl to nymphet, and
from nymphet to her true identity), and his own subsequent apotheosis as an artist—as well as the transformation of this whole drama into the novel itself.
The allusions in Lolita to the myth of Io and Argus
guide the reader toward this essential recognition.
Source: S. E. Sweeney, “Io’ Metamorphosis: A Classical
Subtext for Lolita,” in Classical and Modern Literature,
Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 1986, pp. 79–88.
Sources
Kenney, E. J., “Introduction,” in Metamorphoses, by Ovid,
translated by A. D. Melville, Oxford University Press, 1986,
pp. xii–xxix.
Knox, Peter E., “Ovid,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 211, Ancient Roman Writers, edited by Ward W.
Briggs, Gale, 1999, pp. 193–206.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by A. S. Kline, http://www
.tkline.freeserve.co.uk/.
Further Reading
Brown, Sarah Annes, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From
Chaucer to Ted Hughes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Brown shows the complexity of Ovid’s influences
and how his work has provided inspiration for six
centuries of writers, poets, composers, and painters.
Martindale, Charles, ed., Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences
on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
With an emphasis on the influence that Ovid has had
on literature (although there are some writings on the
influence Ovid has had on art), this collection covers the period from the twelfth century through the
twentieth century and includes the poet’s influence
on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot.
Sharrock, Alison, and Rhiannon Ash, eds., Fifty Key
Classical Authors, Routledge, 2002.
With essays on fifty of the major classical authors,
including Ovid, Sappho, Homer, and Cicero, this
P o e t r y
f o r
S t u d e n t s
M e t a m o r p h o s e s
book sets out to tell the story of how classical literature flourished and changed throughout the years.
Each of the essays is prefaced by a substantial introduction to the author’s background.
Southern, Pat, Augustus, Routledge, 2001.
Southern’s biography of the Roman emperor was the
first to appear in more than seventy-five years. Concentrating on Augustus himself rather than the politics of the time, Southern covers the emperor’s life
from his family’s heritage to his deathbed.
Taylor, A. B., ed., Shakespeare’s Ovid: The “Metamorphoses” in the Plays and Poems, Cambridge University
Press, 2000.
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Ovid’s work was a source of lifelong inspiration to
Shakespeare. Taylor brings together Shakespeare
scholars and covers all of the playwright’s major
plays that show Ovidian influence and includes
twentieth-century criticism on the subject.
Zimmerman, Mary, and David R. Slavitt, Metamorphoses:
A Play, Northwestern University Press, 2002.
Set in or around a large pool of water in the center
of the stage, this play opened on Broadway in March
2002 after first being performed by students at Northwestern University, where Zimmerman teaches. The
book includes the script, a production history, and
photographs from several productions.
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Omen
Edward Hirsch
1985
Poet and critic Edward Hirsch began his career with
an energetic collection of poems titled For the
Sleepwalkers (1981). Since then, he has emerged
as one of America’s most prominent poets. It was
with his second volume of poetry, Wild Gratitude
(1986), that he began to delve into autobiographical themes and to reach the level of sophistication
for which he is now known. The success of this
second collection is in great part due to personal,
direct, and moving poems such as “Omen,” an elegy for Hirsch’s friend Dennis Turner, who died in
his late thirties. “Omen,” which first appeared in
The Missouri Review in 1985, comments on such
themes as grief, childhood, and insomnia and uses
the conventions of a contemporary elegy to describe the feelings of a man anticipating the death
of his close friend.
One key aspect of “Omen” is its meditation on
fate and God, anticipating Hirsch’s later explorations in this area. The poet uses flashbacks to the
speaker’s childhood and imagery of the powerful
and overbearing night sky in order to suggest the
presence of a higher power that works in predetermined natural cycles. Hirsch’s specific implications about fate and God are not necessarily clear,
and the poem is also important simply as an exploration of the emotion and fear related to impending death. Interpreting these emotions based
on the realm of experience from his childhood,
the speaker comes to feel extremely close to his
friend at the same time as he is preparing to never
see him again.
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Author Biography
Edward Hirsch was born on January 20, 1950, in
Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He attended
Grinnell College in Iowa, graduating in 1972. He
then embarked on a Watson traveling fellowship to
study the relationship of violence to poetic form in
England, Wales, and France. Hirsch earned a Ph.D.
in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania in
1979, two years after marrying Janet Landay.
During his doctoral program, he was an instructor
with Poetry in the Schools programs in New York
and Pennsylvania. Afterward, Hirsch taught at
Wayne State University and then at the University
of Houston.
Hirsch’s first book, For the Sleepwalkers
(1981), is a collection of energetic and imaginative
poems that frequently depict insomnia and comment on themes such as art, survival, and loss. In
1986, Hirsch published his second collection of poetry, Wild Gratitude, which includes “Omen.” It
was a critical success, winning a National Book
Critics Circle Award in 1987. Hirsch’s The Night
Parade (1989) carries on the personal themes explored in Wild Gratitude, but this collection has a
different poetic style, seldom employing regular
block stanzas. In Earthly Measures (1994), Hirsch
focuses on religious issues, while On Love (1998)
engages voices of diverse poets from the past in an
imaginary discussion about love. Lay Back the
Darkness (2003) continues Hirsch’s exploration of
mythological and political themes.
Hirsch has also published a variety of prose
works, including his successful How to Read a
Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999). As a
poet, literary critic, and editor, Hirsch has been involved with a variety of magazines and journals,
including Wilson Quarterly, Paris Review, and the
New Yorker. He has received numerous awards and
fellowships, including the Rome Prize (1988), the
American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in
literature (1998), a Guggenheim poetry fellowship
(1985–1986), and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (1998). In 2002, Hirsch began serving as
the president of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation.
Poem Text
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Poem Summary
Stanzas 1 and 2
“Omen” begins with a speaker lying on his
side in the “moist grass,” drifting into a “fitful,” or
restless, “half-sleep.” It is nighttime. Given that
Hirsch’s first two poetry collections tended to focus on insomniacs, a reader familiar with the poet
might assume that the speaker of “Omen” is regularly unable to sleep at night. During his half-sleep,
the speaker listens to the wind in the trees and, in
stanza 2, notices the moon coming out.
Describing the moon as “one-eyed,” Hirsch
uses a poetic technique called “personification,” or
the attribution of human qualities to something that
is not human. The speaker says the moon “turns
away from the ground, smudged,” as though looking at the ground has marked its “glassy” eye. Getting ready to describe the October sky and how it
relates to his thoughts, the speaker then notes, “the
nights are getting cold.”
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Stanzas 3 and 4
In the night sky, which is “tinged with purple”
and “speckled red,” the speaker watches clouds
gather above the house “like an omen”—a phenomenon that portends a future event. The speaker
cannot stop thinking about his closest friend, which
suggests that the omen of the gathering clouds is
somehow related to this friend, who the reader
learns in stanza 4 is suffering from cancer. The
speaker goes on to describe the “small, airless
ward” of the downtown hospital, where his friend,
who is thirty-seven years old, is suffering.
The fact that the speaker says the hospital is
downtown implies that the speaker is in the suburbs,
perhaps the suburb of Skokie, Illinois, where Hirsch
grew up. The speaker says his friend is “fingered by
illness,” which implies some greater fate has chosen
the friend as a victim and increases the sense of foreboding that the friend is marked for death. Describing his friend as “boyish,” “hunted,” and “scared,”
the speaker makes his friend seem like an innocent
child about to encounter something horrible, which
sets the speaker thinking about his own childhood.
Stanzas 5 and 6
It is significant that the speaker first thinks
back to the “immense” summer nights of his childhood, as opposed to the cold October nights he
experiences in the present. The speaker compares
these “clear . . . pure, bottomless” nights to a “country lake,” and he compares the stars to “giant kites,
casting loose.” This language emphasizes the great
freedom and possibility of childhood nights, and
the four-dot ellipsis at the end of stanza 5 reinforces
the image of the kites casting loose, off the edge
of the line.
Stanza 6 provides a sharp contrast to the summer nights, describing the autumn nights of the
speaker’s childhood as “schoolbound, close,” and
full of “stormy clouds” like those that have appeared
as a bad omen. The speaker associates the fall nights
of childhood with “rules” and the indoors, which
reminds the reader of the small ward of the hospital. With the rain banging against his house like a
“hammer,” the speaker’s fall childhood nights close
him in and confine him, seeming to take away the
possibilities promised by the summer nights.
Stanzas 7 and 8
Stanza 7 continues the thought at the end of
stanza 6. This technique of running one line of a
sentence or phrase onto the next line is called “enjambment.” The speaker says that the rain beat
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against his head during these autumn nights, and
he recalls waking up from a “cruel dream” to find
that he is coughing and unable to breathe. Again,
this description reminds the reader of the speaker’s
friend in his “airless” ward, as does the speaker’s
feeling that he was “lost” after these dreams.
Stanza 8, which describes the pain the speaker’s
friend feels, is a smooth transition, since the autumn
night and the hospital are similar in a number of
ways. The friend’s pain, for example, which is “like
a mule” repeatedly “kicking him in the chest,” is
like the rain “banging” and “beating” against the
speaker. With the phrase “Until nothing else but the
pain seems real,” the friend seems more distant from
the speaker’s childhood remembrances, as though
nothing can be as important or pressing than the
friend’s current situation. In effect, this phrase
brings the speaker out of his wandering thoughts
and reminds him of the present autumn night.
Stanzas 9 and 10
In the present, lying in the grass, the speaker
says that the wind is whispering “a secret to the
trees,” which he describes as “stark and unsettling,
something terrible.” The reader expects this secret
to have something to do with the speaker’s friend,
and it seems likely it is related to the omen of the
clouds gathering above the house. Like the friend,
the yard is trembling, which causes the trees to shed
leaves. Unlike the giant kites from the summer nights
of the speaker’s childhood, which were cast loose
into the sky, the leaves are falling to the ground.
In the first line of stanza 10, the speaker realizes his “closest friend is going to die.” This realization is likely a result of the omen in stanza 3, the
significance of which has dawned on the speaker,
and it is followed by dark and foreboding imagery.
First, the entire night sky tilts “on one wing.” Second, the clouds that brought the omen seem to break,
“Shuddering with rain” and descending on the
speaker. It seems the speaker will again feel, as he
did in his childhood, the rain pounding on his house,
trapping him inside and banging against his head
like a hammer. Like his friend in the hospital who
is in constant pain, the speaker himself is associated
with a fearful, powerless, and suffering child.
Themes
Grief
One of the main themes of Hirsch’s poem is
the grief the speaker feels in anticipation of his
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Topics
For Further
Study
• “Omen” is an elegy for Hirsch’s close friend
Dennis Turner, and the poem draws on a variety
of autobiographical themes. Research Hirsch’s
biographical details on the Web and in articles
such as Peter Szatmary’s “Poetic Genius,” published in the April 1999 edition of Biblio. Speculate on the variety of details from Hirsch’s
personal life that come out in “Omen.” How do
these details find their way, directly or indirectly,
into the poem?
• Hirsch is a prominent critic of poetry, and he
has written a variety of influential scholarly
works. Read one of these works, such as How
to Read a Book: And Fall in Love with Poetry
(1999) or Responsive Reading (1999), and discuss its relationship to “Omen.” How can you
apply the themes of the book you have chosen
to Hirsch’s elegy? Discuss how you think Hirsch
might analyze his own poem.
• Research the history of the elegiac form, from
ancient Greek times to the present. How have
elegies changed, and how do they differ in various languages and traditions? Read and discuss
several of the most influential elegies in the
friend’s death. “Omen” is unique in that it describes
this grief at a point before the friend has actually
died, but it deals with the typical themes of a traditional elegiac poem that remembers a person
after his/her death. In an expression of sorrow and
resignation, Hirsch explores the ways in which people deal with death and experience loss.
Vital to Hirsch’s commentary on grief is the
fact that his speaker deals with his friend’s illness
by feeling and remembering his friend’s pains and
fears. Because the friend feels repeated, agonizing
pain, the speaker remembers the rain banging
against his own head, and because the friend is confined to an “airless” hospital ward, the speaker remembers when he himself was “unable to breathe”
during his sleep. This appears to be more than sim-
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English language, such as Thomas Gray’s “An
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751).
Describe the important characteristics of a contemporary elegy. In what ways is “Omen” an elegy, and in what ways does it differ from the
convention?
• Research the history of cancer. How have medical attitudes toward cancer changed across history? How have treatments been developed, and
what are the major sources for cancer research
funding? What was it like to be a cancer patient
in the 1980s, and how is that different from what
it is like to be a cancer patient today?
• Insomnia is an important theme in Wild Gratitude. Research some of the medical theories
about insomnia, including its possible causes
and its frequency in the United States. Then read
some of Hirsch’s poems about insomnia, such
as those from his first collection, For the Sleepwalkers. How does Hirsch envision insomnia,
and how does he use the condition to elaborate
on other themes? How does his description of
insomnia relate to medical theories about the
condition?
ple identification with his friend’s feelings; Hirsch
is implying that people deal with the death of those
close to them by physically and mentally suffering
along with them.
The Cycles of the Seasons and of Life
Hirsch’s poem is not simply a tribute to his
friend Dennis Turner, and it does not spend any time
praising his friend. Instead, Hirsch concentrates on
the feelings of someone facing death and the emotions of that person’s friends, meditating on the
place of fate and a higher power in the world. Since
the poem is set before the friend’s death occurs,
it concentrates on the building emotions to this
point and the feeling of powerlessness as death approaches, implying that humans are not in control
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of their own lives. The poem also comments on how
people view fate and possibility at different stages
of their lives; while the summer is characterized by
great hope, the autumn is confined and worn down,
waiting for the finality of winter. With flashbacks
to the speaker’s childhood, Hirsch suggests that
death and loss are an implicit part of every year of
life and that fate regularly bears down harshly on
humanity. This stresses the sorrow of the experience of death and implies that the freedom and limitlessness of summer nights will eventually return.
Hirsch seems to envision death as an inevitable
aspect of life, somewhat like the weather in that it
moves in cycles, but it is not a random or unpredictable occurrence. Death seems to be connected
to some higher instrument of fate in the poem, although Hirsch makes no mention of God. The main
evidence that the poem considers religious themes
is the fact that it portrays death and the weather as
part of a preordained vision of a higher power. To
underscore this idea, Hirsch gives the moon and
clouds human qualities when they view the world,
provide omens, whisper, and periodically rain
down on it, all of which make them seem like instruments of some kind of deity.
Insomnia
Like many of Hirsch’s poems from the 1980s,
“Omen” deals with the phenomenon of insomnia.
The present moment and all of the speaker’s memories take place at night. At no point does he seem
able to fall entirely asleep. Hirsch implies that night
is a place of extremes for insomniacs; it can inspire
“immense” possibilities and hopes, or it can become a dreadful, foreboding, painful, and confining space. In both cases, insomnia seems to inspire
powerful emotion and insight, and sleeplessness allows the speaker to realize the true importance of
his friend’s illness and impending death.
Childhood Experience
Another theme Hirsch explores in “Omen” is
the way in which childhood experience and memory impact later life. The speaker’s childhood is
very important to him, and it serves as a defining
array of experiences that apply to the predicaments
of his middle age. The fact that the cycles of the
speaker’s childhood repeat themselves in his adult
life suggests that childhood is the source of his fundamental emotions and that it serves as an important filter through which the speaker understands
the world, particularly during times of duress and
sorrow. The friend’s illness makes the speaker ap-
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pear “boyish” and causes him to revert to childhood memories because, Hirsch implies, during
stressful times people cling to the belief systems
they develop as children.
Style
Elegy
“Omen” is an elegy, a type of poem that began in ancient Greece and Rome, where it signified a specific “meter,” or a systematic rhythm in
verse. At this time, an elegy could be about any
subject, but it needed to have alternate lines of six
and five three-syllable units. Some elegies were
laments and some were love poems. In modern languages, such as German, an elegy continues to
mean the meter of a poem as opposed to its specific content. Since the sixteenth century, elegies
in English have come to signify a poem of lamentation, often expressing sorrow for one who is dead.
They can be written in any meter. It is the modern
English meaning of elegy that applies to “Omen,”
which is set in three-line stanzas that are not in the
strict elegiac meter.
While modern elegies tend to be sorrowful and
nostalgic, the emotions expressed in “Omen” are
better described as fearful and resigned. This attitude is one of the unique aspects of Hirsch’s use
of the elegiac form, and it reveals how the poet interacts with the convention of an elegy, suiting it
to his own thematic goals. Although the poem
laments the sad circumstances of his friend’s death
and reaches back to old memories, it does not confine itself to an expression of sorrow over past
events. By setting the poem in a time before his
friend’s death, Hirsch focuses on contemplating the
mysteries of life as they are happening rather than
grieving over what has been lost.
Flashback
One of the important stylistic devices in
Hirsch’s poem is his use of flashback to the
speaker’s childhood. The transitions to and from
the three stanzas that flashback to the speaker’s
summer and autumn childhood nights are carefully
and artfully placed so that they echo the words and
ideas of the present setting. For example, stanza 5
uses the word “boy” to connect seamlessly to the
word “boyish” in stanza 4. Also, Hirsch ties the
emotions of the speaker’s childhood to the friend’s
experience in the hospital; the airlessness of the
hospital connects to the speaker being unable to
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1980s: Cancer is a common and devastating disease for which there are treatments but no cure.
Today: Cancer is the second leading cause of
death in the United States, and there is still no
cure for it, although scientists have learned a
great deal more about how it functions, and treatments have become much more sophisticated.
• 1980s: Ronald Reagan, a Republican, is president for most of the decade. He is known for his
communication skills, his tax cuts, and his reduction of funding to social services.
Today: George W. Bush, known for the war on
Iraq as part of the war on terrorism and for fiscal and social conservatism, is president of the
United States.
breathe in his sleep, and the friend’s repetitive pain
and fear connects to the speaker’s emotions during
the autumn nights of his childhood. In the concluding stanzas of the poem, Hirsch integrates
flashbacks completely within the present narrative
by placing the speaker in the same situation as that
of his childhood autumn nights. At both points in
his life, the speaker sits indoors, sorrowful and enclosed, and waits for the rain to fall on him.
Historical Context
American Society in the 1980s
The 1980s was a decade of social and economic conservatism in the United States. Ronald
Reagan, a former actor, was president from 1980
to 1988, and, George Herbert Walker Bush (Reagan’s vice president) was president from 1989 until 1992. The Reagan and Bush administrations
were fiscally and socially conservative, cutting
taxes for the wealthy, eliminating certain restrictions on businesses, and reducing funding to a wide
variety of social services such as low-income food
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• 1980s: MTV, a new television station that plays
music videos and defines popular music trends
is popular with young adults.
Today: MTV is still influential, but it is no
longer unique, and several other cable stations
play music videos as well.
• 1980s: Russia is part of the communist U.S.S.R.,
one of the world’s superpowers, although it is
in the midst of a decline in power that will lead
to its dissolution.
Today: Since the breakup of the U.S.S.R., Russia has struggled to develop a stable market
economy and a new political order. The country is currently in the midst of a violent separatist conflict with the Islamic province of
Chechnya.
programs and child day care centers. During this
time there was economic growth and prosperity for
the well-to-do, while the nation accumulated enormous national debt because the budget was not
balanced.
One of the areas that suffered cutbacks during
the Reagan years was government funding for hospitals and medical programs. Many mental health
centers and centers for the elderly shut down during the decade, and hospitals were often overcrowded, particularly those in the inner city, such
as the one mentioned in “Omen.” Meanwhile, in
social policy, the Reagan administration rolled
back many of the affirmative-action policies enacted in the 1960s and 1970s to improve conditions
for minorities. Reagan, who was known as the
“great communicator” because of his ability to connect with the public, argued that minorities should
not receive any special treatment.
The 1980s was a period of major technological advance; the first reusable spacecraft was
launched, computers became available in homes
and schools, and popular music began to be influenced by electronic innovations such as synthesizers. However, it was also a period of escalating
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social problems in some areas; illegal drug use increased, the divorce rate climbed, and AIDS
emerged as a deadly disease. By the end of the
decade, major changes in world politics were occurring, including the withdrawal of Soviet troops
from the Eastern Bloc of formerly communist
countries and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a symbol
of world communism. Meanwhile, the United
States was experiencing an economic recession because consumer and investor confidence was
shaken by the loss of jobs and the devaluation of
the dollar.
Eimers goes on to cite “Omen” as an example
of Hirsch’s increased attention to autobiographical
material, writing that the poem “is more sparse and
direct in its presentation of [personal] details than
most of Hirsch’s earlier poems.” The poem is also
mentioned in R. S. Gwynn’s article in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, in which
Gwynn writes that it is an “elegiac” poem in which
Hirsch inhabits “familiar settings” to confront the
death of his friend. “Omen” has not received much
other individual critical attention, but critics consider the shift toward more personal themes an important development in Hirsch’s career.
American Poetry in the 1980s
In the 1980s, poetry in the United States was
greatly influenced by postmodern theory, which
refers to the new ways of thinking about language
and philosophy that developed in the years following World War II. Postmodernism is probably
best known for challenging traditional understandings of reality and contending that the world is
composed of layers of meaning. It has inspired
many critical theories, such as Jacques Derrida’s
linguistic theory of “deconstruction.” Although
postmodern theory had been important for decades,
its influence expanded in the 1980s, and it began
to be apparent in the work of a wider variety of
American poets. Often skeptical of straightforward
depictions of reality, poets experimented with these
new philosophies and theories of language. Their
poetry often pictures reality as endless; it uses new
techniques like the jump-cuts and shifting angles
that are used in film; and it tends not to take for
granted traditional understandings of how people
experience and remember events.
Critical Overview
Wild Gratitude, Hirsch’s poetry collection that includes “Omen,” was received favorably by critics,
winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and
an award for poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. The prestigious writer Robert Penn Warren
commended the book’s best poems as unsurpassed
in their time. Daniel L. Guillory, in his review of the
book for Library Journal, praises Hirsch’s poems as
offering “poetic surprises on every page. Highly recommended.” As Nancy Eimers writes in her Dictionary of Literary Biography entry on Hirsch:
“Critics comparing it with For the Sleepwalker have
generally praised Wild Gratitude for its greater control and maturity of technique and subject matter.”
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Criticism
Scott Trudell
Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell examines the relationship of this
poem to the other poems in Hirsch’s collection, focusing on the themes of fate and God.
For a short poem, “Omen” brings up a great
variety of themes, but its true implications seem
somewhat underdeveloped until they are placed
into context within Wild Gratitude. Images, symbols, and metaphors only briefly alluded to in
“Omen” attain a broader significance and develop
much more profoundly when considered along with
the other poems of the collection. Fate and God are
crucial themes in “Omen,” but Hirsch’s deeper implications about these ideas become clearer after
the reader has examined the allusions to a higher
power in its companion poems.
This is not to say that the poem fails to stand
by itself; it is a powerful tribute to Hirsch’s friend,
and its meditation on grief and loss is coherent independently from the poet’s other work. “Omen”
also implies a great deal about the importance of
childhood experience throughout a person’s life,
and it seems to suggest the existence of a vague
higher power that bears some relation to the fate of
humanity. The appearance of an omen presaging
the speaker’s friend’s death suggests that a God exists, and the speaker looks to the night sky as the
source of this fate or higher power.
The specific characteristics of this fatalistic
force are quite unclear. From the scant evidence of
the poem, it is possible that the omen is merely an
effect of the speaker’s state of mind. This essay will
therefore examine how the images and symbols that
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seem to relate to a higher power in “Omen” are
treated throughout Wild Gratitude. Since Hirsch
seldomly refers to God explicitly, the best place to
begin this examination is with his treatment of
death, which is a central theme in the collection
that naturally leads to many of the poet’s meditations about religion.
“I Need Help” introduces the key idea in the
book: sleep. Across Hirsch’s body of work from this
period, sleep is connected to death. In this poem,
the insomniacs are unable to fly “out of the body at
night,” their skeletons are unable to leave their bodies, and they are unable to fall asleep in the empty
coffins carried by the “six pallbearers of sleep.” It
is as though staying awake through the night is the
only way to stay alive. This idea is reinforced in
later poems. In “Leningrad (1941–1943),” Hirsch
makes explicit that the only way to stay alive is to
stay awake: “There are days when dying will seem
as / Easy as sitting down in a warm, comfortable /
Overstuffed chair and going back to sleep.”
The connection between sleep and death is particularly important in “Poor Angels,” in which, late
at night, a tired body listens to the “clear summons
of the dead,” or sleep. Since sleep signifies death,
the soul cannot escape to the heavens until the body
falls asleep. Portrayed as “a yellow wing” and “a
little ecstatic / cloud,” the soul calls out to the “approaching night, ‘Amaze me, amaze me,’” as if the
night were some kind of heaven or afterlife full of
miracles. The soul later “dreams of a small fire / of
stars flaming on the other side of the sky,” which
suggests the existence of a higher power, full of light
and flame, to be reached once the soul is separated
from the body. “The Emaciated Horse” also depicts
heaven as the source of light and suggests that there
is a “celestial power / of that light,” or a God.
Another way that Hirsch suggests the presence
of a God is through the appearance of miracles, as
in the title poem of the collection, “Wild Gratitude.” Here the speaker comes to the realization
that all creatures are miraculous and “can teach us
how to praise,” implying that God should be the
object of this praise. Like “Poor Angels” and “The
Emaciated Horse,” the presence of God is signified
by a “living fire,” or a source of divine light.
Divine light usually appears in the night sky,
such as in “Prelude of Black Drapes” and “In Spite
of Everything, the Stars,” both of which imply that
one should praise God and have faith in him. “In
Spite of Everything, the Stars” suggests that people look up to the sky with hope and faith “Because
the night is alive with lamps!” and that the bright
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Hirsch’s depiction of
God is perhaps better
described as a naturalistic
force working in the orderly
cycles of the seasons to
bring about the necessary
and inevitable aspects
of life.”
stars are the reason that sleepers’ “plumes of breath
rise into the sky.” Hirsch is drawing from the association of sleep with death here, and the imagery
of the rising plumes of breath reminds the reader
of the soul rising toward heaven in “Poor Angels.”
“Prelude of Black Drapes,” meanwhile, stresses
that “it takes all our faith to believe” that the “curtain of ash,” or the drapes that represent the smoky
night as well as the ashes of dead bodies, “will ever
rise again in the morning.” This sounds a great deal
like the passage of a soul to heaven, and the religious meaning of the lines is reinforced by the imagery of the moon, a “faint smudge / of light,”
obscured by the heavy fog but nonetheless a symbol of divine promise and light.
The other major symbol connected to God that
comes up in “Omen” and is then developed more
thoroughly in its companion poems is rain, which
is the central image of “In the Middle of August”
and “Recovery.” In both of these poems, rain is a
source of great hope and promise, a symbol of good
fortune from the heavens that allows people to
move on with their lives. In fact, rain is connected
to the wishes of some greater power even when it
has a more negative connotation; the grandfather
figure of “Ancient Signs” says that “rain is an ancient sign / of the sky’s sadness,” implying that
there is some great figure in the sky who is sad.
The images and symbols examined above suggest the presence of a particular kind of God in
“Omen.” For example, that the moon is a source of
divine light in “Prelude of Black Drapes” supports
the idea that the moon in “Omen” has divine significance. Both poems describe the moon as
“smudge[d],” and in both poems its appearance is
followed by an inexplicable and somewhat eerie
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Hirsch’s collection of poems The Night Parade
(1989) is more autobiographical in its themes
than Wild Gratitude, and it explores the elements
of Hirsch’s childhood alluded to in “Omen.”
• “The Cave of Making” (1965), by W. H. Auden,
is a poem about writing and an elegy for Auden’s friend Louis MacNeice. Another classic elegy by Auden, who influenced Hirsch’s writings
and who is quoted in the epigraph to Wild Gratitude, is “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939).
• Hirsch’s scholarly but readable prose work How
to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
sign from the heavens. This helps to explain why
the “glassy, one-eyed” moon of “Omen” that
“comes out to stare” at the speaker and then “turns
away from the ground” looks down on the speaker
as if it were conscious. Turning away and replacing itself with an omen in the clouds, the moon is
an instrument of a higher power foretelling the
speaker’s friend’s death.
Nowhere in Wild Gratitude does Hirsch identify his idea of God with any particular religion, but
the higher power of “Omen” is not necessarily a
strictly Judeo-Christian God. Hirsch’s depiction of
God is perhaps better described as a naturalistic
force working in the orderly cycles of the seasons
to bring about the necessary and inevitable aspects
of life. The omen of the gathering clouds that forms
when the sky turns “purple, speckled red” is very
similar to the “indigos and pinks, mauves and
reddish-browns” in the sky of “Recovery” that set
the stage for the speaker’s departure, healed and
happy, from the hospital. In both poems, though
their omens signify very different events, the coloring of the sky represents the will of a higher power
that works through the inflexible laws of nature.
The higher power of “Omen,” therefore, is neither cruel nor kind, and it is tied very closely to the
laws of nature. It is a stolid force that creates happiness and sadness depending on the season; the
rules of childhood that summer is boundless and
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(1999) contains a variety of compelling poems
and suggestions on how to approach them.
• Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life
and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954,
by Jeffrey Cartwright: A Novel (1972) is a vivid
and delightful tale of a boy describing his
relationship with a childhood friend who died
very young.
• Sailing Alone around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001), by Billy Collins, contains
some of the best examples of the poet’s funny,
sad, and tender explorations of everyday life.
glorious while fall is confined with “too many
rules” always apply, and this natural cycle shows
no sign of ending. Because fall is the season of dying, it is in the fall that the higher power releases
rain to beat down on the speaker like a hammer,
keeping him indoors and unable to see the hopeful
divine light. Having given the speaker warning of
the inevitable, the higher power lets the “dark sky,”
which is “tilting on one wing” like the soul of “Poor
Angels,” descend on the world, putting the speaker
to sleep and ending his friend’s life. The reader
must wait until later in the collection for the return
of spring and summer, which come in poems such
as “In the Middle of August,” for Hirsch’s idea of
a naturalistic higher power to rain down the “immense” possibilities of survival and regeneration.
Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on “Omen,” in Poetry
for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Patrick Donnelly
Donnelly is a poet, editor, and teacher. His
first book of poems is The Charge. In this essay,
Donnelly discusses the conventions and challenges
of the elegy.
Many readers of poetry do not understand how
hard it is to write a successful lyric poem, never
mind how treacherous it is—artistically speaking—
to attempt an elegy mourning the death of a friend
or loved one. This poetic task is risky because there
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are so many ways to fail. In particular, an elegy
may fail to rise to eloquence while lamenting and
praising the dead person, or it may cross the line
between sentiment and sentimentality. The severalthousand-year history of the elegy is illuminated by
the brilliant achievements of poets who rose to this
challenge—Milton, Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats,
Auden, and Allen Ginsberg, to name a few—and
also littered by the efforts of those who tried and
fell short.
There is no shame in any unsuccessful poetic
attempt: good art of any kind is hard to make. Fortunately for the skillful reader of poetry, there is almost as much to be learned about how poetry works
from studying a not completely successful poem,
as from studying one that is superbly successful.
It is helpful, before turning to Edward Hirsch’s
“Omen” in particular, to review the “rules” or conventions of elegies or elegiac poems in general. Elegies belong to the larger category of lyric poetry, a
form that has as its primary purpose the expression
of strong feeling. In a broad sense, an elegiac poem
mourns the general impermanence or sorrow of life.
But, the usual focus of the elegy is grief for the death
of a particular person. A secondary purpose is to
praise qualities of that person’s life, usually in the
context of lamenting their loss. Some elegies also
praise the departed as part of a larger project of finding consolation in spiritual or philosophical truths
that are felt to be of greater consequence than the
life of any one person.
The “pastoral elegy,” of which Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais” are examples, usually represented the dead person as a shepherd
mourned by mythological figures and the natural
world. Hirsch’s “Omen” makes use of the poetic
device, common in the pastoral elegy, of projecting human emotion onto natural phenomena like
stormy weather and darkness.
Some poets have written “anti-elegies,” which
refuse to proceed in an expected or orderly manner, like Dylan Thomas’s “Refusal to Mourn the
Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and contemporary American poet Diane Fisher’s “The
Mother Has Her Say.” These poems are in fact still
elegies but make rejection of sentimentality or conventional sources of consolation an explicit part of
their poetic projects.
The person doing the elegizing needs to have
been close enough to the person being elegized that
the poem seems justified. If the poet did not actually know the dead person well, there needs to be
some other reason the poet felt a strong connection.
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The elegy has the
difficult poetic task—
perhaps in a sense
impossible—of balancing
the competing losses of the
person doing the elegizing
and the person being
elegized.”
Theodore Roethke acknowledges the expectation
of connection in his poem “Elegy for Jane,” both
in the epigraph “My Student, Thrown by a Horse,”
and in his last lines “Over this damp grave I speak
the words of my love: / I, with no rights in this matter, / Neither father nor lover.”
The elegy has the difficult poetic task—perhaps
in a sense impossible—of balancing the competing
losses of the person doing the elegizing and the person being elegized. The dead person’s loss of life
itself (claims of an afterlife notwithstanding) is permanent and immeasurable. Some might argue that
the loss of the elegizer is actually greater because
that person is still sensible to the pain whereas the
pain of the person who died is over. Conversely it
can be argued that the living have the chance to become happy again, or at least to go on living, which
the dead have lost. Ultimately, the dead person’s
claim for the greater loss would seem to be
persuasive—though certainly good poems can and
have been made asserting the opposite view. The
point is that in order to be successful the elegy has
to struggle with this question of balance, not proceed as though it did not exist. Ideally, the poet
causes the two griefs implicit in the elegy to contend in a way that is productive of eloquence.
Is Hirsch’s “Omen” an elegy? The person
the speaker grieves is still alive during the time the
poem describes. Because the impending death of the
friend is placed in a position so close to the center
of the poem’s project, it virtually forces the reader
to consider the poem an elegy and to compare the
gestures the poem makes with those of other elegies. “Omen” is not so much an “anti-elegy”—the
speaker does grieve in fairly conventional ways and,
arguably, gives over to sentimentality in several
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passages—as it is a “pre-elegy.” Even in that category it is not completely successful, because the
poem does not acknowledge the competing griefs
of the elegy in a meaningful way. Neglecting to do
so undermines the all-important relationship between the speaker of a poem and the reader.
A reader may begin to withdraw sympathy,
trust, and, most importantly, interest from the
speaker of an elegy if that speaker reduces the large
loss of the dead person primarily to an occasion to
direct attention to the speaker himself. There have
been many fine poems with speakers who have
moral flaws yet still retain the speaker’s interest.
There is all the difference, in poetry as in life, between self-absorption (or an extreme subjectivity
such as that caused by grief) and an acknowledgment of self-absorption or extreme subjectivity.
Objectivity is no virtue in poetry, but an admission
of subjectivity can be a very great virtue. As Carl
Dennis has written in Poetry as Persuasion:
Poets whose speakers confess moral failures are usually on safer ground than those celebrating their
moral triumphs. But even a confession, if it is aesthetically effective, will imply certain virtues: the
honesty and humility, say, that confronts inadequacies directly, and the ambition implied by judging
oneself by the highest standards.
When the somewhat unpleasant speaker of
Robert Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour” says, late in
that poem, “My mind’s not right,” he does a great
deal to retain (or regain) the reader’s interest and
sympathy. This kind of acknowledgment of subjectivity is missing from “Omen.” When “Omen”
diminishes the importance of the death of the friend
by juxtaposing it, and seeming to compare it, with
seemingly minor forms of suffering from the
speaker’s past, it cannot help but injure the speaker
in the reader’s eyes.
It is probably the speaker’s description of the
dying friend as looking “boyish and haunted” that
causes the speaker to remember, associatively, the
unhappiness of his own boyhood. The unhappinesses he describes in the sixth and seventh stanzas
of the poem—“stormy clouds, too many rules.” and
“Sometimes I’d wake up / In the middle of a cruel
dream, coughing / And lost, unable to breathe in my
sleep”—do not amount to much when compared to
the friend’s impending death. The juxtaposition of
the friend’s death with the speaker’s memory of
childhood discomfort has the effect of including the
friend’s death on a list of other bad things that have
happened to the speaker without any acknowledgment of the subjectivity of this perspective that
might redeem it in the reader’s estimation.
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The problem with “Omen” is that the relationship between the speaker and the friend is not
clear or compelling. We have no evidence for
friendship but the label, no shared memories, no
history, no details about the dying man to make
him memorable or individual. This is part of what
turns him into a prop on the speaker’s stage.
“Omen” might have been more successful if
the language had risen to genuine eloquence. Eloquence is difficult to define, but in poetry it has
everything to do with freshness (lack of cliché),
precision, compression, and rhythmic authority.
Hirsch has achieved eloquence in other poems like
“Lay Back the Darkness,” or translation/adaptations
like “The Desire Manuscripts.” Passages like “the
nights are getting cold,” “I can’t stop thinking about
my closest friend” and “I know that my closest
friend is going to die” in “Omen” are closer to the
rhythms of everyday prose than poetry and are
emotionally flat. Other passages in “Omen” resort
to generic “poetry-speak” or stock gestures to express fear and grief: “Clear as a country lake” and
“The rain was a hammer banging against the
house, / Beating against my head” are examples of
metaphors that lack surprise or freshness. If the
most important metaphor in “Omen,” which compares the dying friend’s pain to “a mule / kicking
him in the chest, again and again,” had used more
surprising, emotionally charged language, it might
have done much to redress the feeling that the poem
focuses too much on the speaker’s pain. This important metaphor subsides into flat abstraction,
with the deflating explanation “Until nothing else
but the pain seems real.”
In the best poetry, sensual specifics and images
serve to anchor emotion in the reader’s imagination.
Abstractions and nonspecific language do not do
this job as well. Compare this passage from “Omen”
Tonight the wind whispers a secret to the trees,
Something stark and unsettling, something terrible
Since the yard begins to tremble, shedding leaves.
with the following excerpt from Stanley Kunitz’s
poem “Quinnapoxet,” which also projects human
emotions onto nature:
I was fishing in the abandoned reservoir back in
Quinnapoxet, where the snapping turtles cruised and
the bullheads swayed in their bower of tree-stumps,
sleek as eels and pigeon-fat. . . . The sun hung its terrible coals over Buteau’s farm: I saw the treetops
seething.
In Kunitz’s poem, language charged with strong
emotional associations—like “abandoned,” “snapping,” “terrible coals,” and “seething”—creates true
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ominousness. The passage from “Omen” falls short
of the same goal. Both passages use the word “terrible,” but Kunitz’s language embodies terribleness
more viscerally and memorably.
The artistic challenge of writing successful elegies for the next thousand years is that every poet
who attempts the form has to find a way to grieve
an intensely personal loss in a way that acknowledges that the loss is also completely universal.
This complex balancing act is precisely the kind of
challenge for which lyric poetry was invented, but
it requires a poet to call upon every ounce of philosophical, spiritual, and linguistic resources at her
disposal.
Every human has the same primal desires and
fears—wanting and needing love, and fearing death.
Out of these old, old elements new poems will always be made, because love and death are not going to cease being of intense interest to readers.
Poets will continue to exert themselves to express
new truths about love and death, or to express old
truths in language that makes them seem new.
Whether they succeed or not in any given poem,
one should be grateful for every poet willing to take
on this difficult work of casting light on the human
predicament.
Source: Patrick Donnelly, Critical Essay on “Omen,” in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the critic discusses
some highlights of Hirsch’s career.
“I would like to speak in my poems with what
the Romantic poets called ‘the true voice of feeling,’” Edward Hirsch once told CA. “I believe, as
Ezra Pound once said, that when it comes to poetry,
‘only emotion endures.’” Described by Peter Stitt
in Poetry as “a poet of genuine talent and feeling,”
Hirsch has been highly acclaimed for his poetry collections, For the Sleepwalkers and Wild Gratitude.
For the Sleepwalkers was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981, and Wild
Gratitude won the award in 1987. The two books
contain vignettes of urban life and numerous tributes to artists, which, according to David Wojahn
in the New York Times Book Review, “begin as troubled meditations on human suffering [but] end in
celebration.” New Republic contributor Jay Parini
wrote that in For the Sleepwalkers, “Hirsch inhabits, poem by poem, dozens of other skins. He can
become Rimbaud, Rilke, Paul Klee, or Matisse, in
each case convincingly.” “I admire Edward Hirsch,”
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declared Phoebe Pettingell in the New Leader, “for
his mystical vision, for the mastery he has . . .
attained—and for his daring.”
While many reviewers have applauded Hirsch’s
poetry, declaring that it exhibits tenderness, intelligence, and musicality that goes beyond mere technique, they have also recognized in his highly
rhetorical style the propensity to “cross the borderline between effectiveness and excess,” as Stitt
asserted. For instance, Wojahn maintained that
“Hirsch’s tenderness [in Wild Gratitude] sometimes
threatens to become merely ingratiating,” and Hugh
Seidman, in a New York Times Book Review article,
thought that Hirsch’s first work, For the Sleepwalkers, is “a poetry of narcissistic invention employing
exaggerated tone and metaphor,” an excess that Seidman believed is typical of much contemporary
American poetry. Nevertheless, Parini insisted that
Hirsch’s poems “easily fulfill Auden’s request that
poems be, above all else, ‘memorable language,’”
and Carolyn Kizer declared in the Washington Post
Book World that Hirsch’s “great strength lies in his
descriptive powers.” As Hirsch “learns to administer with lighter touch his considerable linguistic fertility,” claimed Stitt, “he will surely grow into one
of the important writers of our age.”
The poems in Hirsch’s third book, The Night
Parade, continue with themes presented in his first
two works, but stray from his stylistic and formal
techniques, perhaps indicating a transitional period.
Hirsch told CA: “Many of these poems are more
meditative and narrative, linking the personal to the
historical, contemplating the nature of family stories and expanding outward from there to consider
the history and development of Chicago as a city.”
He added, “The passionate clarity of [my] style
has not always met with critical approval.” In the
New York Times Book Review, Stephen Dobyns
remarked, “Despite several marvelous poems, The
Night Parade doesn’t seem as strong as his previous book. Too many poems become sentimental or
seem willed rather than to come from the heart.”
Pat Monaghan in Booklist, however, praised
Hirsch’s “sure sense of the line between emotion
and sentimentality.” New York Review of Books
critic Helen Vendler felt that “when Hirsch is not
being historically stagy, he is being familially prosaic, as he recalls stories told by his parents,” but
she also thought Hirsch “capable of quiet, believable poems.” She cited the poem “Infertility” from
Hirsch’s The Night Parade as the most believable
poem of the book, and suggested, “This poem, I
suspect, will turn up in anthologies. It touches a
particular connection between religious longing
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and secular pessimism that belongs both to the hope
and desolation it commemorates and to the moment
of scientific possibility and disappointment in
which we live.”
In his fourth collection of poems, Earthly Measures, Hirsch offers a collection focused on religious
issues and imagery. Hirsch told CA: “If I were to describe [Earthly Measures], I would say that it is ‘god
hungry.’ Earthly Measures is very much about what
the soul does after hungering after God and He does
not come. What does one do to fill the subsequent
emptiness? The book begins in the dark wood with
landscapes of ash and emptiness and hell. Throughout the book are elegies which point toward the loss
of presence, power, and direction. The emptiness
contains infertility but it is not defined by it. About
halfway through the book it takes a turn—not toward celebration exactly, but a sort of agonized reconciliation. The tutelary figures are Simone Weil,
Leopardi, and Hoffmansthal. The poems take the
transformative and even redemptive powers of art
seriously. Art stands against the emptiness. The book
is about a soul-journey. It begins in ‘Uncertainty’
and concludes with an homage to the 17th century
Dutch painters and their feeling for ‘Earthly Light.’
It is a pilgrim’s progress struggling toward the light.”
Reviewers had mixed opinions of Earthly
Measures, with some critics praising the “god hungry” nature of the work and others terming the collection insufficiently nuanced. Writing in the New
York Times Book Review, Patricia Hampl remarked,
“The absence of God and the abundant presence of
human desire reign over his book and form a passionately important inquiry into the nature of worship.” Robert B. Shaw, commenting in Poetry,
likewise praised the poems in the collection for being “accessible in subject, direct in phrasing, open
in their expression of emotion, graced with a finelytuned lyricism.” Yet, Shaw noted, “the neoRomantic tone and coloration makes for a sameness
. . . so that the subjects lose something of their individuality in an all-purpose luminous haze.”
Washington Post Book World contributor Eric Murphy Selinger also lamented the lyrical romanticism
of the poems, declaring that “Hirsch is better off
when his voice has a bitter or critical edge.” Hampl,
though, commended Hirsch for his achievement in
Earthly Measures, concluding, “These are poems
of immense wonder and rigor. To say they are religious poems is only to recognize their grandeur
and generosity, and their heartbreaking longing.”
In the collection On Love, Hirsch takes the
voice of some two dozen poets from the past,
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including such diverse writers as D. H. Lawrence,
Charles Baudelaire, and Jimi Hendrix. He creates
an imaginary conversation between them in which
they discuss the subject of love. The verses in On
Love prove “without question” that Hirsch is “heir
to all the great poets of the past,” in the opinion of
Donna Seaman of Booklist, who added that when
writing about his own life, Hirsch achieves “lyric
poems nearly incandescent in their sensuality.” The
reviewer for Publishers Weekly noted that when
reading Hirsch’s work, “one is always aware of a
formidable intelligence; wide reading, and an ambition to connect the poet’s own achievement with
the great poetry of the past.” While acknowledging the “controlled, precise, formally ambitious”
quality of Hirsch’s verse, the Publishers Weekly reviewer faulted the poet’s use of “a highly artificial
premise, made more so by the incredibly strict
forms.” Yet Thomas F. Merrill in Library Journal
called On Love “often stunning” for its “complex
evocations of the adopted voices as well as Hirsch’s
own insight.”
Hirsch has also written prose works that have
met with critical acclaim. In How to Read a Poem:
And Fall in Love with Poetry, he collected verses
from diverse times and places and then suggested
ways to understand and appreciate the works. “The
book is scholarly but very readable and incorporates
interesting anecdotes from the lives of the poets,”
noted Ellen Sullivan in Library Journal. Booklist’s
Donna Seaman declared: “Hirsch, a truly gifted poet
and scholar, brings the full heat of his literary
passion to this enlightening and deeply moving
journey into the heart of poetry. . . . Hirsch’s magnificent text is supported by an extensive glossary
and superb international reading list.”
Source: “Edward Hirsch” in Contemporary Authors Online,
Thomson Gale, 2003.
Edward Hirsch
with Tod Marshall
In the following interview, Hirsch discusses
a number of subjects, including American poets
through the twentieth century and experimentation
in his own work.
Born in Chicago in 1950, Edward Hirsch was
educated at Grinnell College and the University of
Pennsylvania, where he earned the doctorate in
1979. He has taught at several colleges and universities, and he presently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. His
previous books of poetry include For the Sleepwalkers, Wild Gratitude, The Night Parade, Earthly
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Measures, and, recently, On Love. His most recent
book is How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with
Poetry. He has won many awards, including the Lavan Younger Poets Award, the Delmore Schwartz
Memorial Award, the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts
Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award
(for his collection Wild Gratitude), and, in 1998,
the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award
for Literature. Recently, he was honored with a
MacArthur Fellowship.
Ed and I met at the Sewanee Writers Conference in the summer of 1998. Located on the top of
the Cumberland plateau, the University of the
South has an inspiring Gothic campus, complete
with ivy, gargoyles, and bell towers. After listening to Mark Strand lecture on Andrew Marvell, Ed
and I walked across the campus to the Rebel’s Rest,
a guest house built in 1866 where he was staying.
We talked in the foyer, exchanging comments
across a wide table. During the interview, Ed was
both animated, gesturing passionately as he talked
about poetry, and thoughtful, listening carefully to
my questions and comments before offering his
responses.
[Tod Marshall]: Many poets and critics attribute the beginning of American poetry in the
twentieth century to Ezra Pound. Is this your understanding of American literary history or do you
see someone else as the origin?
[Edward Hirsch]: I suppose that in a historical
way a great deal goes back to Pound and the other
Imagists. It was Pound, after all, who urged American poets to use the language of common speech
with precision, to create new rhythms, to enjoy an
absolute freedom of subject matter. Pound recognized that Yeats was the greatest poet writing in
English at the time and that Eliot had “modernized
himself on his own.” Pound also opened up American poetry with a wide range of voices in Personae. I’m grateful to him for bringing the
Provencal poets into English and for the marvelous
translations of Cathay, his best book. But I dislike
the person he became, and for me it was never The
Pound Era, to employ the title of Hugh Kenner’s
brilliant critical work. It was the Wallace Stevens
and Hart Crane era, the William Carlos Williams
and Marianne Moore era, the Edwin Arlington
Robinson and Robert Frost era.
Describe your attraction to Stevens.
Romantic poetry was somewhat derided in my
education, perhaps because of Eliot’s proscriptions
against it. The first poets I fell in love with were
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I realized that it was
always crucial to me to
bring as much as possible to
whomever one is writing
about. I don’t want to
split off the world between
those who are literary and
those who are not.”
the Metaphysical poets. I loved (and still love) the
way that intellect and feeling come together in the
work of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and others.
I love the wild ingenuity of their best conceits.
George Herbert was also a poet who was important to me. So, my initial reading in high school
and college was not passionately attached to the
Romantic poets.
Later, when I read Stevens and then Crane I
began to see the fore-grounding of imagination as
one of the great projects in poetry. I loved the
grandeur of the poetic line in Stevens, and I intuited that the blank verse line connected Stevens to
something important, to the great poetic lineage of
Romantic poetry, to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Keats. I didn’t have a language for it at the time,
but I was discovering the sublime in poetry.
I understand your attraction to some aspects
of Stevens[’] work; however, Stevens epistemological inquiries—in spite of their magnificence and
beauty—have always left me feeling that he is
someone uncomfortable with the physical world; I
don’t feel that in your work.
Well, both Stevens and Moore are poets I admire, but they can be very cool. Stevens has his
deep passions, but mostly they are suppressed and
have to come steaming to the surface from a long
way down. One of the things I saw as my task was
to add the heat to whatever I learned from his work.
I felt and still feel much closer—in terms of the
passions of poetry—to Keats and to Shelley, who
give such high priority to emotion. Intensity is all.
My reading of the modern poets was that they
offered me wondrously different things, and my
task would be to supply some of the things they
didn’t offer. I felt I had a place at the table. I
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thought, “What if you took some of that discursive
intelligence in Stevens and gave it tremendous
warmth and heat? What would happen if a Stevensian poetry was written with the same kind of passion and intensity as say, others might associate
with a poet like James Wright?” I wanted to keep
the intelligence without losing the emotional affect.
I learned from Stevens a certain way of thinking in
poetry. In terms of emotional temperature, I always
felt closer to Hart Crane.
In terms of the passion that I think you’re talking about, Crane is probably the polar opposite
of Stevens.
I like the way the language moves ahead of the
thought in Crane. Crane is especially important to
me now, and it’s interesting that when I encounter
many young poets, they don’t know how to read a
poet like Hart Crane. He’s too baroque, too rich for
them. When I first fell in love with Crane, what it
meant wasn’t so important. It was how it sounded
that mattered. I heard the great oracular notes of poetry. I heard the prophetic cadences. I still hear them.
I could make almost no sense of “Atlantis” the
first time I read it.
Neither could I, but I felt that glorious upward
striving. I felt the urge toward something large and
grand and transcendental. I didn’t know what it
was, but I heard it in the sound of the words. I felt
that Crane was lifting me toward something.
You’ve written very fondly of Robert Frost
work. How does he fit into this picture?
Frost is one of the American poets who has
meant the most to me. I love the dark side of Frost.
I first discovered the darker Frost when I read Randall Jarrell’s two essays on Frost in Poetry and the
Age. “The Other Frost” and “To the Laodiceans.”
Those pieces were thrilling to me. I’d really thought
of Frost only as the poet of walks and talks in the
woods. I didn’t cotton to the image Frost cultivated
as a Yankee farmer. I didn’t yet know about the
deeper Frost that Lionel Trilling had called a “terrifying” poet. Because of Jarrell I began to discover
the terrifying, the unremitting, side of Frost. I fell
in love with the poem “Desert Places,” which is
still a poem I love very much. Those dark poems
of Frost’s gave me a way to think about a language
that could articulate the extremes of human
feel[ing].
The two poets who best articulated despair
for me—better than I could have articulated it
myself—were Hopkins and Frost. When I read
Hopkins’s late, so-called “terrible sonnets,” and
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when I read “Desert Places,” I felt they had articulated an anguish that I, too, had felt, but didn’t
know how to touch or write about. I began to think
about how the formal cadences of poetry could be
shaped to those feelings. The poet was a maker who
had taken unwieldy feelings and shaped them into
something that was, hopefully, enduring.
When we think of modernity, we might think of
the dissolution of metrical poetry in order to accommodate the new modern sensibility and its fragmentation, anxiety, and such. What you seem to be
speaking to is the ability of the “old ways” to accommodate these changes in sensibility.
I wouldn’t say so much the “old ways” as the
“oldest ways,” the ways of archaic poetry, of Orphic poetry. I am thinking of a poetry that rises
from speech toward song, that builds to a rhythm
of incantation. The devices are just a way of working the magic in poetry. Look: Frost was a great
modern poet and he wrote mostly iambic pentameter. Stevens wrote wonderfully as a “blank
verse” poet and as a free verse poet. I don’t think
I would want to sacrifice either of those methods.
I think that the dichotomy between so-called formal poetry and free verse is a large mistake in
American poetry. Many great poets have used the
full resources of the language to articulate the
world. Pound is a good example, I think. We
wouldn’t want to lose the early Imagist free verse
poems; nor would we want to throw out the strict
meters and rhymes of Mauberly; nor would we
want to “sacrifice” some of the incantatory cadences of The Cantos.
The story that we tell ourselves that Modernism is the breaking loose into free verse and
away from traditional verse is much too simplistic. There’s Marianne Moore writing both a syllabic poetry and a free verse poetry, remaking
syllabics to an American idiom. There’s William
Carlos Williams inventing a new triadic line for
American poetry. At the same time, we have
Stevens and Crane writing eloquent American poems using the blank verse line. We also have the
collage of The Waste Land, which does use the devices of iambic pentameter and rhyming to extraordinary effect only to rupture them. The devices
of poetry are wide-ranging. There are many ways
to the promised land.
It’s true that we’ve had—since Milton began to
loosen poetry from the bondage of rhyme—an increasing strain of a certain kind of freedom in the
versification of poetry. We wouldn’t want to lose
that. Free verse has been an essential American
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mode since Whitman, but it’s not the only American mode. The stories that we tell ourselves about
the history of American poetry are greatly reduced
for some poets’ polemical ends. When we examine
the reality of the different types of poetry that our
great poets have written, then we discover that it is
quite various and often ties us to the “oldest” traditions in poetry much more than one might think.
That makes sense. When you think about the
poets of mid-century—Lowell, Berryman, Sexton,
and Plath—they, too, write in many modes.
There’s a similar dynamic connected to the socalled confessionalism of the poets of the Middle
Generation. Not many people have thought about
the fact that, for instance, the poets of the
Middle Generation were masters of the dramatic
monologue. Berryman, Lowell, Schwartz, Jarrell,
Bishop—all wrote wonderful dramatic monologues.
The story of American poetry moving from the forties and fifties and the mode of high artifice to the
more confessional one of the late fifties and sixties,
written supposedly from a more authentic self, that
story is simply not borne out by the nature of the
work. For example, I think you have to read The
Mills of the Kavanaughs as one of the important
books in Lowell’s development in which he adopts
a whole series of fictive voices, voices that were not
his own. Those voices help teach him how to take
on the voice of a supposed person, “Robert Lowell” in Life Studies. My sense of it is that the range
of American poetry continues to outstrip the narratives that we create about the historical development
of that poetry.
So many manifestos and polemics revolve
around those narratives.
A greatly flawed essay in this regard that’s had
much too much of an effect is Olson’s essay on
projective verse. It’s part genius, part mumbo
jumbo, and it has been badly misused. Olson divides radically between “open” and “closed” poetry. That’s a story that poets and critics have gone
on telling each other ever since—that there’s a
closed or academic poetry and an open or nonacademic poetry. This doesn’t fit the facts at all. It
doesn’t fit the facts of Romantic poetry; it doesn’t
fit the facts of Modernism; and it doesn’t fit the
facts of what poets have done since the fifties. Yet
we go on in a sort of exhausted way, reiterating
these old conflicts. Wars are renewed over these
tired polemics. Friendships are made and destroyed
around this absolutely artificial designation. The
notion of an avant garde in the academy holds absolutely no water at all. I refuse to think in those
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terms. Consider those sonnets of dark love by Garcia Lorca, which are wonderful, openly homoerotic
poems that he wrote before he died. Are we to understand those homoerotic sonnets as traditional or
avant garde? Or take one of the great last poems
by Cesar Vallejo, “Black Stone Lying on a White
Stone.” Are we to think of that as a traditional poem
and not an avant garde poem because it’s a sonnet?
Or are we to think it’s an avant garde poem because of the startling things that Vallejo does with
verb tense and language? Vallejo creates a wild disturbance within the prescribed form. To me, the
terms of description that we often use, these categories, are fairly useless, and yet we keep on repeating them. They’re unhealthy for American
poetry, or what I could call American poetries,
something which is rich, vital, and diverse. I don’t
approve of any restriction that would limit American poetries, especially when it involves throwing
out other aesthetics.
One terrific example in this regard: the female
lyricists of the 1920s. If you look at most literary
histories, you’ll read about Eliot and Pound and
Moore and Williams and Stevens, but you won’t
hear much about Louise Bogan or Edna St. Vincent Millay or Eleanor Wylie. These poets didn’t
write free verse; they didn’t get with the Poundian
program. They continued to write sonnets, and they
were widely popular and widely read, but they, in
effect, have been written out of literary history.
What they were doing is very striking to me; they
ware remaking the love poem, and they were rethinking it from a female perspective, where the female speaker is not the beloved but the ravenous
lover. They engender the sonnet in radically different ways than the sonnet had been previously
engendered. If you look at most of our literary histories, you won’t find them treated in any detail because the primary narrative that we tell is about
Ezra Pound and the success of free verse. The
Poundian strain was crucial, but it shouldn’t be
used to exclude everything else that was written.
Of course, what you’re speaking to isn’t just
part of the narrative about modernity. Today we
have LANGUAGE poets, New Formalists . . .
In 1926 Marina Tsvetayeva said in her essay
“The Poet on the Critic” that “Poetic schools (a sign
of the age!) are a vulgarization of poetry.” I think
the divisions—Neonarrative, Neoformalist, etc.—
are not helpful. Our country is so fragmented that
these “schools” help give people identities and help
them find a way in the world, but to me they are
divisive. The loneliness of poets (remember that
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Richard Howard called his splendidly wide-ranging
critical book, Alone with America) is a sociological phenomenon. I don’t like ways of dividing the
pie that exclude people, and I think that the ethos
of American poetry should be an inclusive one. It
should be open to all kinds of poetry. It’s as if poetry is a piano and most poets know how to play
only the same two notes. Most of the resources of
poetry are lost because of this two-note ethic.
Your work certainly avoids such reduction—
all the different voices and forms and allusions is
astonishing. The poetry is very wide-ranging.
Thank you for saying so. I’ve gotten so much
from so many different types of poetry that I’ve
wanted to respond in kind, to give something back.
In many ways, I feel as if the poet is a vehicle, a
vehicle of responses to different feelings and voices
and people and characters. Keats’s idea of negative
capability has been very important to me. I take seriously the notion that the poet gives up a personal
identity and is saturated by something else. Whitman is wonderfully helpful in this regard because
he moves up and down the ladder of being so fluently. I remember the passage:
Through me many long dumb voices,
Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners
and slaves,
Voices of the diseas’d and despairing and of
thieves and dwarfs,
Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,
And of the threads that connect the stars, and of
wombs and of the father-stuff,
And of the rights of them the others are down
upon,
Of the deform’d, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,
Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.
Whitman understands that the poet is a vehicle
to everything alive. The world is permeable. The
voices of the enslaved and the voices of beetles and
the voices of thieves and dwarfs and the voices of
birds are as important to him as the dominant voices
of history, the voices of the victors. His Orphic calling is a way of speaking back to power.
It seems to me that as a poet I want to be as
open and receptive to the world as possible, to see
the world alive in all its parts. Whitman loved archaic poetry and he loved ballads and he loved folk
songs and opera and he didn’t see any conflict between making poetry new and returning poetry to
the origins of all poetry. He is a great model for us
as American poets because he is so inclusive, because he fuses traditions, because he takes poetry
forward into the future even as he returns it to its
archaic roots. Whitman understood that chants and
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charms and spells and incantations all have various
functions in the world.
In On Love you have many poems that aren’t
quite dramatic monologues and aren’t quite persona poems. How do you understand the voices in
those poems as functioning?
I think that the notions of dramatic monologue
and the notions of persona are too narrow and confining as people usually think of them. This is true
even of poets receptive to their use. Of course, there
are some poets who are opposed to this sort of poem
on principle because they are under the mistaken
notion that they want to speak only in their own
so-called “authentic” voice. In writing programs,
students are frequently given the assignment of
writing persona poems, where you take on the voice
of another. To me, that doesn’t have anything like
the kind of emotional authority and weight that I
think you feel when you believe you are the vehicle of another voice, where another voice seems to
be speaking through you. Where it’s both your own
voice and another voice speaking at the same time.
I believe that in these twenty-five poems with different speakers (from Diderot to Colette) there is
also a lone questing speaker, a lover seeking and
desiring the absent beloved. There’s a dialectic in
the poems between separation and fusion, between
autonomy and blur, between the lover and the
beloved. The voices of the speakers in the poems
are ways to think about love. Each one represents
some aspect of love. The speaker is at the same
time Marina Tsvetayeva or Guillaume Apollinaire
or Tristan Tzara and also me. I don’t think they are
exactly dramatic monologues because I don’t think
you are meant to believe that the previous historical voices are really speaking. I think you see the
poet peeking through the mask, speaking through
the voice. It’s a little like a drag show where you
put on different voices and costumes and they allow you to get at certain feelings and emotions. At
the same time, each one tries to be as true as possible to the voice that the poet is inhabiting. The
poem tries to get as close as possible to the facts
of, say, Tsvetayeva’s life. It tries to bring us as close
as possible to her poetry, her great rapturous feelings in poetry. I don’t know if we have a language
for what it means to be both yourself and another
in a poem. To see yourself as the vehicle for some
other voice that is also your own.
All twenty-five voices together, then, would
offer some kind of encyclopedic portrait of modern love. In this regard, for example, it was important for me to have a radically political thinker,
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such as Bertolt Brecht, in the series. It was important to represent a wildly Dionysian ethic, such as
you get in D. H. Lawrence. It was important to try
to articulate an incredibly witty lesbian ethic, as in
Gertrude Stein. A mythical perspective, as in D. H.
Lawrence. A powerfully homoerotic one with the
dastardly clever Oscar Wilde. You have a strong
feminist argument with the Margaret Fuller poem.
A figure who’s terrifically important to me in this
regard is Emerson because he is such a deep devourer. Emerson believed in the transformational
power of love. He was so receptive, so open to all
kinds of voices and powers.
I should mention that experimentation of this
sort is not, in the body of your work, a new thing.
Yes, this has always been part of my work. I
value it. There have been people who have been
comfortable with one aspect of my work and uncomfortable with another dimension of it. Both parts
of it have always been crucial and integrated. At
least they were meant to be integrated. For instance,
in my first book, For the Sleepwalkers, it was important for me to have waitresses and factory workers and shopkeepers and sweatshop workers and
people that I hadn’t seen appear in poetry often
enough. I wanted to be the vehicle of those voices.
I also wanted to be true to my experience of falling
in love with art itself. I didn’t see any split or difficulty moving between being a waitress in Stonefalls, Arkansas, in one poem and being Paul Klee
in another. It was exciting. Baudelaire speaks to this
when he says that “the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege that he can, at will, be either himself
or another. Like those wandering spirits that seek a
body, he enters, when he likes, into the person of
any man. For him alone all is vacant . . . .”
In these two distinctions, you’re speaking to
different voices than you’re working with or from.
But I can also think of several poems that are personal in a different way, for instance, the elegy
“Fast Break” or the sexual epiphany poem, “The
Skokie Theater.”
I always felt that the “voice” poems were deceptively personal. I think the point of speaking
through another voice is useful and passionate if it
allows you to say things you might not otherwise
get at. The virtue of this other kind of poem—where
the dramatic speaker is clearly someone other than
yourself—is that it allows you to get at material
that you couldn’t otherwise get at. It liberates you.
But do you remember that Emily Dickinson said
that the speaker in her poems was a supposed
speaker, a supposed person? The supposed person
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was “me” in other poems. But I always thought that
there was much heat in the poems spoken through
voices as in those poems. It’s true that, especially
in the move from For the Sleepwalkers to Wild
Gratitude, there is a change. In the later book I
started to use a voice more often that was much
closer to my own. I started to mine my own experience more directly. Instead of, say, speaking from
the point of view of a poet that’s meant a great deal
to me, such as John Clare, I wrote “about” John
Clare from my own perspective.
I tried in a poem called “Three Journeys” to
bring together two diverse elements in my work because I felt they were getting a little schizophrenic—
there were the poems that were elegiac and personal,
like the memorial poem for my dear and beloved
friend Dennis Turner, or the poem about a girlfriend
and our first erotic encounter in “The Skokie
Theater”—and these other cultural and literary interests. I wanted to unite them, as I felt they were
united in me. So in the poem “Three Journeys,” a
speaker some version of myself, follows a bag lady
through the streets of Detroit and then associates her
with John Clare. The poem parallels two journeys—
the journey of John Clare when he escaped from a
mental hospital and walked home across England,
and the journey of a homeless woman as she walked
around the streets of Detroit. In the process of writing the poem, I began to feel that in some terrible
way I was using the homeless woman in order to
say something about the suffering of John Clare,
and I began to make that also my subject, to give
the homeless woman and John Clare exactly equal
weight. One’s sympathy needed to go out to them.
One needed to approach each of them with one’s
full range of human response. That was the discovery. The third journey was my own. After that, I realized that it was always crucial to me to bring as
much as possible to whomever one is writing about.
I don’t want to split off the world between those
who are literary and those who are not.
Since Wild Gratitude, I’ve written many extremely personal poems, poems that are revealing
and try to turn the knife against the self. There are
also a lot of family poems in The Night Parade,
and I tried to place those poems in a larger social
and historical context. I wanted them to reverberate outward. I suppose I’d like my poetry to be
equally personal and impersonal. There is something intimate and literary in the poems about
artists; there is something objective and implacable in the family poems. Joseph Brodsky has a
wonderful piece about Cavafy where he describes
the two main modes of Cavafy’s poetry: one, where
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he writes poems about fleeting, homoerotic encounters of, say, forty years ago, and two, poems
about various minor historical figures some of
whom he has made up, some of whom really existed. Brodsky says that the remarkable thing about
Cavafy is that there is something cold and impersonal in the rapturous love poems, and something
intimate and personal in the poems about minor historical figures. They have a kind of counterweight.
Cavafy is a splendid model in this regard.
In For the Sleepwalkers, you have a short poem
called “Little Political Poem” after Nazim Hikmet.
It reads,
Tonight I saw so many windows
blazing alone, almost blazing together
under a single sky, under so many
different skies all weaving together
through so many different countries . . .
This poems “politics” are so much more subtle and ambiguous than, perhaps, the political poetry of other writers. And yet it certainly has a
didactic element. What is your understanding of the
relationship between poetry and politics?
The poet wants justice. And the poet wants art.
In poetry we can’t have one without the other. I
love Nazim Hikmet, the great Turkish poet. My
poem borrows and adapts one of his images. I picture a single window blazing alone—an emblem of
solitary consciousness—and imagine it somehow
blazing in communion with all the other singular
windows. It’s a daydream of unity, a poem about
identity and difference, about the underlying connection, or near connection, between people. So
close together, so far apart. I love the passionate
openheartedness of Hikmet’s work, but his communist loyalties seem terribly simplistic at this late
date. We can understand how he came to them after all; he spent all those horrible years in jail.
His poem about the life of the pencil . . .
That’s “Since I Was Thrown Inside,” a wonderful poem. So is “Some Advice to Those Who
Will Spend Time in Prison” and “On Living.” He’s
a heartbreaking Whitmanian poet. I associate him
in my mind with Miguel Hernandez, the splendid
poet who ripened to full maturity during the Spanish Civil War. But Hikmet’s politics also seem
naive. He still believed in communism at a time
when it was, perhaps, still possible to believe in it.
But we all know now that he was mistaken in his
faith in communism. He moved to Russia when
he was released from Turkish prison and never
renounced communism. His communism, like
Neruda’s, seems terribly misguided to me. I love
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the sense of brotherhood in Hikmet, and I love that
same sense of brotherhood in Neruda, but I also
think they should have brought a little more skepticism to political realities. I have a democratic
ethos, but I’m skeptical when it comes to didactic
political programs. We don’t have a great political
poetry in America, perhaps because American poetry is so ahistorical. We have a poor sense of history as Americans, and so we have had to look to
other traditions that do have more integrated political poetries. Is it possible to have a poetry that is
humanly involved, politically engaged, politically
skeptical, and quests for justice?
What of Eastern European poets, particularly
the Polish?
I love Polish poetry. I also love much Hungarian and Czech poetry. I hear tonalities in that
poetry I don’t hear in American poetry. When you
read Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz and
Wislawa Szymborska, you begin to feel that political engagement in American poetry is often naive.
These are poets who have truly reckoned with what
it means to live in the twentieth century. It seems
to me that if there is any task or goal for the relationship between poetry and politics, then it’s for
that poetry to be engaged with what it means to live
in this century. I’m thinking of a poetry that doesn’t
turn away from the suffering, the historical calamities, of our century. I’m struck by the fact that the
great Polish poets are, in my opinion, historical poets who wanted to become metaphysical ones. They
don’t want to be mere “witnesses.” They don’t
write the poetry of political “engagement” per se.
Yet they can’t ignore a little thing like the destruction and the occupation of their country.
They’re really interested in getting at the truth behind the facts. They are skeptical of all “isms.”
They want to investigate the nature of reality. I see
a dialectic in Polish poetry between history and
metaphysics, between living inside of time and outside of time. These poets are simultaneously pulled
in two directions—toward the historical world and
toward the transcendental one. They’re compelled
to register the fluctuations of change, they’re interested in the stability of truth.
The dialectic that you’re speaking of made me
think of Milosz’s series of poems “The World,”
written during a period of historical extremity yet
focused on something beyond that horror.
Exactly. “The World” is a perverse poem.
Milosz got a lot of criticism for it at the time because other poets couldn’t understand how he
could write about such things while the world was
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being destroyed. That was the point. I love the
Hungarian poet, Miklos Radnoti, who came to
such a terrible end. In the 1930s Radnoti published
a book called In the Footsteps of Orpheus. It consists of his translations of European poetry—from
Horace and Ovid to Goethe and Heine to Apollinaire. What was Radnoti doing translating this
poetry while the Germans were getting ready to
march into Hungary? I think he was trying to keep
alive an idea of Europe at a time when Europe
was becoming a site of barbarism. He was asserting the ideal of Europe as a place of civility, and
he was doing so against an encroaching darkness.
Sometimes translating poetry can be a brave and
humane act.
It seems to me that some of the interest in the
work of poets and writers like Radnoti who were,
literally, martyred for the word comes out of an
homage to the extremity from which these writers
wrote. Writers in America won’t experience anything on a similar scale . . .
Let’s hope not.
. . . so they lament the lack of “depth” in their
own work and try to assuage this anxiety by praising poets who have died for the word.
We have to watch that. I remember Milosz saying “You American poets would envy the hunchback his hump.” We don’t want to go so far as say
George Steiner has gone and say that poetry flourishes under totalitarianism. I think for example of
all those poets—and potential poets—who died at
the hands of the Germans. I remember a debate between George Steiner and Joseph Brodsky on television. Steiner said that totalitarianism is good for
poetry because poets have to find ways to circumvent it, and they rise to the occasion. But Brodsky
would have none of it. He said that freedom is the
most beautiful thing of all. We shouldn’t forget
the beauty of freedom. And we don’t have to envy
the hunchback his hump. There’s plenty of suffering around us. We live in this century, too.
In your work of the last several years, I’ve seen
a turn toward pursuit of the ineffable; how do you
understand the relationship between poetry and religiosity, poetry and the spiritual?
The sacred is a great subject in poetry. For poetry. I am deeply interested in what you might call
unauthorized testimony. It’s true that in my work
there has been an increasing interest in the divine,
in poetry as a quest for the divine. I always loved
metaphysical poetry, but as a young poet the ineffable didn’t seem like my subject. I saw spiritual
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matters as crucial to poetry, but I didn’t see the
quest for transcendence as part of my own poetic
project. That changed when I began to write the
poems that became Earthly Measures. The figures
in Earthly Measures become vehicles of an argument about transcendence. I think that Earthly
Measures, as a book, is that argument about
transcendence—whether this world is enough or
whether we need some other world. There’s a
tremendous longing for some other world operating in the poems. There’s also a critique of that
longing. I think of the book as a kind of pilgrimage, a search for the divine. At the very end of that
book it turns away from the other world toward this
one. The philosophical and religious thinker who
has meant a great deal to me is Simone Weft. She
thinks so hard about transcendence and the quest
for it. She links the quest for transcendence to the
suffering of people around her. There’s a tremendous social consciousness and sympathy running
through her work. I was moved to poetry by two
particular elements in her life and work. One is the
year she worked in a factory. The other is her three
mystical contacts with Christianity.
She was driven to her knees.
A thrilling experience. She had such a deep
spiritual hunger. It was matched only by her formidable intellect. I wanted to see if I could dramatize those three experiences in a poem. Simone
Weil’s mystical contacts are the far end—one end
point—of Earthly Measures. The thing that troubles me most about Weil is her hatred of the body,
her turning away from earthly concerns. I don’t critique that element of her in my book of poems, but
I critique it insofar as it is present in myself. I love
Weil’s notion that unmixed attention is prayer. In
the last poem of Earthly Measures, “Earthly Light,”
the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century are
held up as a model of an art that turns not to the
otherworld, but to this one.
Because this world, too, needs our unmixed
attention, because it is not heaven
but earth that needs us, because
it is only earth limited, sensuous
earth that is so fleeting, so real.
The argument in my other books has much more
to do with affirmation and despair. Each book raises
the question of whether or not it is still possible to
affirm in spite of all the evidence. I love the statement of Roethke’s that “despite the dark and drek,
the muck and mire of these poems, I want to be one
of the happy poets.” In Wild Gratitude I make it pretty
clear that I, too, want to be one of the joyous poets;
I want to affirm. But I don’t want to do it naively,
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O m e n
by turning away from the sufferings of the world.
The argument about affirmation and despair continues to run through The Night Parade. I see these
books as journeys, as undergoings, as my own dark
nights of the soul. The question of affirmation and
despair takes on a religious dimension in Earthly
Measures. The end of “Earthly Light” turns to earthly
love, to eros. It led me to the poems of On Love.
Chatterton, Thomas. “Mr. Smith Is Dead,” in The Stuffed
Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, New York Review Books,
2003, pp. 109–10.
Here we are at the end of the twentieth century; do you think that the affirmation you were
pursuing is possible? Are you a “happy poet”?
Eimers, Nancy, “Edward Hirsch,” in Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Vol. 120, American Poets since World War II,
Third Series, edited by R. S. Gwynn, Gale Research, 1992,
pp. 128–32.
Well, praise and lamentation are two of the
deepest impulses in lyric poetry. The earliest poems
we have—the Egyptian pyramid texts, the ancient
Hebrew poems, or the earliest Greek poems—all include poems of lamentation and poems of praise. To
me, the two elements go hand in hand. I wouldn’t
want a poetry of praise that doesn’t take up the countertruth of lamentation, and I wouldn’t want a poetry of lamentation that doesn’t remember the gifts,
to praise. Rilke says something like this in The Duino
Elegies—praise walks in the land of lamentation.
Simone Weil’s “gravity” and “grace.”
That’s a glorious way of putting it: the descent
of gravity, the ascent of grace. Both things live in
us. I find the impulse to praise in the earliest poems, in the great archaic poems of people everywhere, in Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman and
Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’s one of the deepest and
strongest impulses in poetry. I’d love to be a poet
of praise. So, too, the poetry of grief and lamentation is one of the deepest and most long-standing
elements in poetry. The elegy is one of our necessary forms as we try to come to terms with the fact
that people around us die, that we, too, will die. We
need the ritual occasion, ritual making of the elegy.
That dimension of poetry is fundamental. I would
very much like to see myself as part of both traditions. To me, the two greatest impulses in poetry
are elegy and praise. I would love to write a poetry
that brings those two impulses together.
Source: Edward Hirsch with Tod Marshall, “The Question
of Affirmation and Despair,” in Kenyon Review, Vol. 22,
No. 2, 2000, pp. 54–69.
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Sources
Dennis, Carl, Poetry as Persuasion, University of Georgia
Press, 2001, pp. 171–72.
Guillory, Daniel L., Review of Wild Gratitude, in Library
Journal, Vol. 111, No. 1, January 1, 1986, pp. 88–89.
Gwynn, R. S., “Second Gear,” in New England Review
and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 1, Autumn 1986,
pp. 113–21.
Hirsch, Edward, Wild Gratitude, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996,
pp. 3–7, 10–11, 15–18, 24, 40–1, 45, 57, 63, 71.
Kunitz, Stanley, “Quinnapoxet,” in The Collected Poems of
Stanley Kunitz, W. W. Norton, 2000, pp. 190–91.
Lowell, Robert, “Skunk Hour,” in Selected Poems, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1998, pp. 95–96.
Roethke, Theodore, “Elegy for Jane,” in The Collected
Poems of Theodore Roethke, Anchor Books, 1975, p. 98.
Further Reading
Boyle, Kevin, “An Interview with Edward Hirsch,” in
Chicago Review, Vol. 41, No. 1, 1995, pp. 19–28.
Boyle provides a useful interview with Hirsch in
which the poet discusses topics such as the impact of
his father’s absence and the poets he admires.
Szatmary, Peter, “Poetic Genius,” in Biblio, Vol. 4, No. 4,
April 1999, p. 38.
This article provides a biographical analysis of
Hirsch’s career.
Whelan, David, “Poet’s Winding Path Leads to a Job as
a Foundation President,” in Chronicle of Philanthropy,
Vol. 15, No. 1, October 17, 2002.
Whelan’s article discusses Hirsch’s recently acquired
role as the president of the John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. It includes an overview of
Hirsch’s career and a brief interview with the poet.
P o e t r y
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S t u d e n t s
On the Threshold
“On the Threshold” is a short lyric poem by the
Nobel Prize–winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale. It was written in 1924 and published in 1925
in Italy as the first poem in Montale’s Ossi di
seppia (The Bones of Cuttlefish, 1983). The poem
is also available in Montale’s Collected Poems:
1920–1954 (1998), translated and annotated by
Jonathan Galassi; in Eugenio Montale: Poems
(2000), edited by Harry Thomas; and in Cuttlefish
Bones: 1920–1927 (1992), translated by William
Arrowsmith.
Taking some of its imagery from the Ligurian
landscape of Montale’s youth, “On the Threshold”
is a poem about the need to live more fully and
with greater freedom in the present, rather than be
trapped in the stifling influence of the past. It is not
only a plea for personal and spiritual freedom but
perhaps also a call for a new type of poetry independent of the forms of the past. The poem is pessimistic in tone, however. While the poet urges his
companion to make the leap to freedom, he appears
unable to do so himself.
Eugenio Montale
1925
Author Biography
Eugenio Montale was born October 12, 1896, in
Genoa, Italy, the youngest of five children born to
Domenico (a merchant) and Giuseppina (Ricci)
Montale. Montale spent much of his childhood and
adolescence at the family villa on the Ligurian
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Eugenio Montale
coast, south of Genoa, a landscape that provides the
setting for much of his early poetry. Montale attended schools in Genoa but did not pursue a university education. He voraciously read Italian and
French literature, studied philosophers such as
Arthur Schopenhauer and Henri Bergson, and began to write poetry. Montale also aspired to be an
opera singer and took voice lessons from a retired
baritone, Ernesto Sivori. During World War I,
Montale served as an infantry officer on the Austrian front and later commanded a prisoner-of-war
camp. In 1923, after the death of Sivori, Montale
abandoned his singing ambitions. Two years later,
his first collection of poems, Ossi di seppia (The
Bones of Cuttlefish, 1983; republished in a new
translation as Cuttlefish Bones: 1920–1927, 1992),
was published, which includes the poem “On the
Threshold.” At this time, Montale also began to
write literary essays for various publications.
In 1927, Montale moved to Florence, where
he worked for a publishing house. The following
year, he was appointed curator of the Gabinetto
Vieusseux Library, a position he held until 1938,
when he was fired because he was not a member
of the Fascist Party. After this, Montale made his
living as a freelance writer, translator, and critic.
His volume of poetry Le occasioni (The Occasions,
1987) was published in 1939. Montale translated
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into Italian such writers as William Shakespeare,
T. S. Eliot, Herman Melville, Eugene O’Neill,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and others.
After World War II, Montale moved to Milan,
where he became editor of Corriere della Sera, an
influential daily newspaper. During the 1950s, he
wrote over a hundred articles a year, also becoming music and opera critic of Corriere d’Informazione in 1954. He reportedly never missed an
opening night at La Scala, an opera house in Milan. In 1956, Montale published another book of
poems, La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Poems, 1978; translated by Arrowsmith as The Storm
and Other Things, 1986).
In 1958, Montale married Drusilla Tanzi, his
companion of nearly thirty years. She had been in
ill health for a long time and died in 1963.
In 1967, President Giuseppe Saragat deemed
Montale a member-for-life of the Italian Senate. A
collection of five poems, Satura, was published in
1962, and expanded in 1971 as Satura: 1962–1970.
Montale also published diaries, Diario del ’71 e del
’72 (1973) and Diario di Quattro Annini (1977). In
1975, Montale won the Nobel Prize in literature.
He also received honorary degrees from the University of Milan, the University of Rome, Cambridge University, Basel University, and Nice
University. He was made an honorary citizen of
Florence in 1977. Montale’s L’opera in versi was
published in 1980 (Collected Poems, 1920–1954,
1998), a year before his death. Montale died September 12, 1981, of heart failure, in Milan.
Poem Text
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Poem Summary
Stanza 1
“On the Threshold” is addressed to an unnamed interlocutor, “you,” in a walled orchard or
garden. Montale later wrote that the companion he
addressed was a woman, although this is not apparent in the poem itself. The poem begins with the
speaker telling his companion to “Be happy” if
there is a wind in the orchard that carries with it
“the tidal surge of life.” The wind is a metaphor (a
word or phrase used in place of another word or
phrase, suggesting a likeness between the two) for
a fresh wave of life, untainted by the past. Otherwise, the orchard is just a “dead web / of memories” that is not really a garden at all but a
“reliquary.” A reliquary is a small box or chest in
which relics are kept and shown, and a relic is
something from the past that is kept as a memento
or souvenir. The orchard becomes a symbol of an
enclosed, imprisoning kind of life, and the stanza
as a whole conveys the idea of being trapped in the
deadness of the past. Some new influx of life is
needed in order to lift the poet and his companion
beyond the past.
Stanza 2
This stanza takes up the idea of the wind as a
metaphor for creativity and life. The whirring
sound the person in the garden is hearing is not
“flight” (that is, not something in the orchard moving away) but something “stirring” from within the
“eternal womb”—a breath of new life, unconnected
to the dead web of the past. This new breath of life
has the power to transform the orchard, now described as a “solitary strip of land.” The word “solitary” conveys a sense of being isolated from the
rest of life. The new breath of life has the power
to “transform” the strip of land “into a crucible.”
A crucible is a vessel that can resist extreme heat
and is used for melting ores and metals. The word
“crucible” can also mean, as it does in the poem, a
severe test or trial. The nature of that trial is explained, or at least hinted at, in the next stanza.
Stanza 3
The speaker describes what is beyond the steep
or sheer wall of the orchard as a “fury.” He does
not elaborate, but the word fury means a violent
anger or wild rage. It likely refers to the tempestuous nature of life itself, with its potential for great
destruction. The speaker goes on to say that if the
person within the garden manages to “move forward,” out of the deadening web of sterile memo-
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ries and, presumably, into the fury, he or she may
be “save[d]” by an encounter with a “phantom.” The
speaker gives no details of what this phantom might
be, or of what the person might be saved from, other
than, in a general sense, the destructive, imprisoning aspects of life. The process appears to be a mysterious, even supernatural one. In line 4, the speaker
suggests that this moment is of pivotal importance
for human life: “histories are shaped here.” In other
words, such moments of transformation have the
power to determine future events. The last line of
the stanza seems to strike a note of pessimism.
Whatever deeds are done as a result of the encounter
will not survive for long because “the endgame of
the future will dismantle” them. This suggests a kind
of historical determinism in which the future will
eventually undo whatever positive actions humans
are able to achieve.
Stanza 4
In the last stanza, the speaker gives three firm
instructions to the person he is addressing. This person must look for a way out of the “net” of the past
that “binds” not only him or her but the poet too
(and, presumably, everyone else). The word “net”
in this stanza refers back to the “web” of stanza 1.
The task is obviously not going to be easy, since
the net binds tightly, and the person must “burst
through” it and “break free,” which seems to call
for great effort. Line 3 continues with the simple
instruction, “Go,” as if the speaker is issuing an order. The speaker then says he has prayed that the
person may be able to escape in this way. He seems
to believe that for himself no escape is possible,
but he will feel less bitter and angry knowing
that this special person, whose relationship to the
speaker is never specified, has succeeded in
escaping.
Themes
Imprisonment and Freedom
Although the orchard could, geographically
speaking, be anywhere, in many of the poems in
the collection Cuttlefish Bones, Montale drew on
the landscape close to his family villa, which was
situated in a very secluded spot on the Ligurian
coast. Montale spent long summer holidays at the
villa, and he is quoted by editor Jonathan Galassi
in Montale’s Collected Poems: 1920–1954 as saying that the seclusion he experienced there led “to
introversion, to an imprisonment in the cosmos.”
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Do people tend to focus more on the past and
the future than on the present? How can people
live more spontaneously in the present? Write
an essay supporting your answers.
• Write a paragraph or two about an experience
you have had in which you felt completely free.
What were you doing? Do you associate such
experiences with childhood or adulthood?
• Read “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe
Shelley and compare it with “On the Threshold.” Write an essay comparing the similarities
or differences in structure, mood, diction, and
content between the poems.
• Research the poetry from a certain literary
period—for example, the English Renaissance,
the Victorian period, or the postmodern period—
and report on the following questions: How did
people in that time period perceive poetry? Why
did they write poetry and why did people read
it? What did poetry contribute to life that might
otherwise have been overlooked? What place did
poetry and poets have in that society?
This comment provides a clue to the theme of the
poem, as does the fact that Montale intended this
poem to sum up, or possibly act as an overture to,
the collection as a whole. Also relevant is the fact
that the original title of the poem was “Liberty.”
The theme of imprisonment and freedom can
be understood at several levels. The poet may be
making a plea for freedom from the restraints of
old poetic forms. The goal of breaking through the
“net” and the “dead web” would then be part of a
search for a new and original poetic language,
something Montale was seeking at the time he was
writing the poems in Cuttlefish Bones. He wanted
to respond to earlier Italian poets such as Gabriele
D’Annunzio, who in a collection published in 1903
also wrote about the Ligurian coast, but used very
different language and themes.
The poem is also an appeal for personal and
spiritual freedom. The speaker feels that he is
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imprisoned in a condition of stasis, unable to act in
a free manner, unconditioned by the oppressive
weight of the past. He longs to be free of this stasis, which he equates with being condemned or
damned, in contrast to the salvation he believes is
possible—at least for his companion. According to
George Talbot, in a note to “On the Threshold” in
an Italian edition of Montale’s Selected Poems, salvation is “an ambiguous term which . . . would
seem to connote a capacity to enjoy a fulness of
life, undisturbed by doubt and uncertainty.” This is
no doubt true, but the term also seems to require a
more metaphysical explanation. The poem states
that salvation may come through an encounter with
a mysterious “phantom.” The phantom appears to
represent a moment of experience beyond time and
space, beyond the net of history or of personal and
collective experience. It cannot be described in
terms any more concrete than this insubstantial
phantom, but it is a moment in which life is completely altered: the static, inward-looking garden
becomes a dynamic, transformative crucible that
opens up new possibilities for human experience.
The poet implies in the final stanza that in
order to experience such a moment, diligence,
persistence, and effort are required. The net of conditioned, limited existence that binds people has
gaps in it (“flaws”); these must be searched out, for
within the texture of such gaps lies, it would appear, a freer state of being. The process of becoming free does not appear to be an easy one, given
the image of the crucible in stanza 2. It is as if humans must pass through the fire in order to assert
or gain their freedom.
For himself, the speaker appears to have given
up hope of freedom; he can only wish it for his
friend (or perhaps, for the reader, to whom the
“you” in the poem might also refer). This gives the
poem a pessimistic flavor. Although a state of freedom can be envisioned, it seems to involve the renunciation of life by one person in favor of another.
Style
Form and Structure
One of the problems a translator faces is how
to preserve in a new language as much of the form
and structure of the original poem as possible. Often the task is virtually impossible, especially with
the use of rhyme. In the original Italian, “On the
Threshold” is consistently rhymed. In the first
stanza, for example, at the end of line 1, pomario
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(orchard) rhymes both with morto (dead) at the end
of line 3, and with reliquiario (reliquary) at the end
of line 5. The other stanzas also have distinctive
patterns of rhyme. But the rhymes cannot easily be
translated into English, and the translator makes no
attempt to do so. The result is that the English version reads like a poem written in free verse.
However, other aspects of the original poem
are preserved, including meaning, line and stanza
length, and punctuation. As in the original, the
poem is made up of four stanzas. Stanzas 1 and 3
are five lines each, and stanzas 2 and 4 are four
lines each.
The poem is notable for its use of grammatical
imperatives. An imperative is the mood of a verb
that expresses a command or exhortation, as in “Be
happy” in the first stanza, and “Look,” “burst
through,” “break free,” and “Go” in the last stanza.
There is also some use made of alliteration
(repetition of initial consonants) and assonance
(repetition of vowel sounds) in the English version
that is not present in the Italian original. In stanza
1, for example, the monosyllabic phrase “dead
web” falls with an appropriate thud, which is
helped by the assonance of the successive “e”
sounds. In stanza 2, “whir” is linked through alliteration to “womb” in the next line, which reinforces
the meaning of the lines. In line 3, the alliteration
of the “s” sounds in “solitary strip” brings attention to the garden seen in yet another light.
Historical Context
Hermeticism
According to Joseph Cary in Three Modern
Italian Poets, there was a “national poetic renaissance” beginning in the 1910s in Italy, associated
with the work of Umberto Saba and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and later with Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo. Ungaretti was the leader of what came to
be known as the hermetic school of poetry. It was
so named because the poets of this school wrote in
an obscure style, using highly symbolic and subjective language that others found hard to penetrate.
(The term “hermetic” derives from alchemy and
refers to something that is completely sealed.)
The roots of hermeticism lie in the French symbolist poetry of Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery,
but some of the obscurity is in part because in the
1920s and 1930s in Italy, the Fascist Party controlled
literary and artistic expression, which meant poets
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were not always able to openly speak their minds in
their work. Glauco Cambon, in his introduction to
Eugenio Montale: Selected Poems, notes that Montale’s poems written in the 1920s “register political
despondency, though they do so by mere implication.” Because the poems were written “under the
shadow of tightening dictatorship . . . they denounce
this predicament by seeing through the official buoyancy to a threatening paralysis,” writes Cambon.
Montale himself was quietly antifascist, and in the
late 1920s in Florence, he associated with writers
and intellectuals who were involved with the antifascist journal Solaria. Although Montale was labeled a hermetic poet by critics in the 1930s, he
denied that he cultivated obscurity and that he was
a member of any poetic school.
As a result of the difficult nature of their work,
the hermetic poets were not widely known outside
Italy. Cary notes the term “hermeticism” is of little importance anyway. He argues in Three Modern Italian Poets that it survives “as an ironic
banner for admirers, a catch-all for literary historians.” Certainly, after World War II, each of the
three poets chiefly associated with hermeticism—
Ungaretti, Montale, and Quasimodo—developed
distinctive styles and themes that had little in common with one another.
Modernism
During the 1920s, the literary movement
known as modernism gathered strength. The roots
of modernism are found in the late nineteenth century, a period during which established beliefs about
religion and society were questioned. This process
was accelerated by World War I. The war dealt a
death blow to complacent beliefs in human progress
and undermined the sense of order and stability in
Western culture. It seemed to many as if the fundamental values that Western civilization had stood
for were breaking up. Because of this new mood of
disillusionment, writers felt compelled to make a
radical break with the past. They rejected the traditional and conventional and experimented with new
forms and styles. In poetry, the fragmented structure of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) was
representative of modernism, as was the work of
Ezra Pound. In novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses
(1922) undermined traditional narrative continuity
by employing a stream-of-consciousness technique,
as did Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Many modernist writers felt themselves to be members of an avant-garde whose task it was to subvert
bourgeois conventions and force readers into questioning their basic assumptions.
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1920s: Europe is still recovering from the devastation of World War I. The Fascist movement
is on the rise in Italy, where Benito Mussolini
takes power in 1922. In 1926, Mussolini solidifies his power, bans opposition, and establishes
a single-party dictatorship. In 1932 in Germany,
Adolf Hitler leads his Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, for which he receives a nine-month prison
sentence. During his imprisonment, he writes his
famous book Mein Kampf (1925).
Today: Germany and Italy have long overcome
their totalitarian past and are democratic nations.
They are both members of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO; the Western military alliance) and the European Union (founded
to enhance political, economic, and social cooperation among European nations).
• 1920s: The League of Nations, founded after
World War I, aims to enforce the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war; to prevent new wars
from breaking out; to promote disarmament; and
to deal with international problems such as
refugees and infectious diseases. The league has
only limited success since powerful nations often feel free to defy it.
Today: The United Nations is the much larger
successor of the League of Nations. Founded in
1945, after World War II, the United Nations,
which began with 51 members in 1945, has 191
Critical Overview
Montale’s collection Cuttlefish Bones, in which
“On the Threshold” appears, was an immediate critical success on its Italian publication in 1925. Leading Italian literary critics hailed Montale as an
important new poet. According to Rebecca J. West,
writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography:
The young poet’s muted yet powerful “countereloquence” . . . met with widespread approval, especially at that moment in Italian culture, when Fascist
bombast proliferated and the spiritual malaise of
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members as of 2002. Its purpose is to maintain
international peace and security; to achieve international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems; and
to promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Like the League of Nations,
the United Nations has had only limited success
in preventing wars or bringing them to an end.
• 1920s: There is widespread pessimism regarding the foundations of Western civilization and
culture following the unprecedented scale of
slaughter during World War I. The belief in inevitable progress through science and technology is shattered. The new mood known as
modernism is expressed by poets and writers
such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra
Pound, who experiment with new forms and
styles to express the contemporary confusion
and disorder.
Today: Modernism has been superseded by postmodernism, a term applied to works written
after World War II that subvert modernist techniques that had themselves become conventional.
Postmodernists mix styles and genres and often
eliminate the distinction between high and low
culture. Some postmodernism is based on the idea
that it is impossible to find meaning in life. Even
language is indeterminate and cannot yield absolute meaning. Postmodernists take the view that
there are no moral or ideological absolutes.
many was being smothered by declarations of certainty, prosperity, and optimism.
Recognition and appreciation of Montale’s
work in the English-speaking world came more
slowly. Although the first translation into English
of a poem by Montale was published in T. S. Eliot’s
journal Criterion in 1928, it was not until the 1960s
that English translations became widely available.
During the 1970s, a marked increase of critical essays on Montale’s poetry could be seen. This trend
was further stimulated by Montale’s Nobel Prize in
literature awarded in 1975.
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“On the Threshold” has often attracted interest since critics see it as embodying in seed form
many of the themes that Montale elaborated
throughout his poetic career. This is noted by
G. Singh in Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of
His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism. Singh writes of
“On the Threshold,” “The typically Montalian
landscape is outlined with dynamic vividness.”
Singh mentions the symbolism associated with the
images of wind, wall, garden, and net. “The wall,”
Singh notes as an example, “is a recurrent feature
in the Montalian landscape, symbolizing something
predetermined, static, and unchangeable, just as the
wind and water symbolize change, movement,
transformation, and occasionally salvation.” Another critic, Joseph Cary, in Three Modern Italian
Poets, discusses the unpredictable, random nature
of the salvation described in stanza 3 of “On the
Threshold”: “the verb imbattersi means ‘bump
into’ or ‘fall in with’ and suggests, augmented by
the adverb forse (perhaps, maybe), mere happenstance.” Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry, in Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry,
also comment on Montale’s concept of salvation.
They point out that in “On the Threshold” the poet
delegates the responsibility for salvation to his interlocutor, designated as “you.” Almansi and Merry
interpret this “you” as the reader
who has to find a way out from the white space at
the end of a poem. The adventure begins in the types
that form the printed composition, but the final solution lies beyond them.
Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry.
In this essay, Aubrey discusses how other poems in
Montale’s book Cuttlefish Bones shed light on the
themes of “On the Threshold.”
Montale is generally regarded as a difficult,
rather obscure poet who does not make interpretation easy for his reader. “On the Threshold” is no
exception to this rule. It is a mysterious poem that
hints at much more than it explains but, fortunately
for the reader, whose interest is piqued by this
glimpse into Montale’s interior world, Montale
tends to repeat his themes (imprisonment/freedom,
salvation, memory) and images (wall, water); a
reading of the other poems that make up the collection Cuttlefish Bones sheds considerable light on
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If the speaker cannot
redeem himself, he can, as
compensation, participate in
a mysterious cosmic trading
of blessings and curses,
whereby the self-sacrifice of
one can allow another to
live or to feel joy.”
the poetic universe that Montale inhabited in the
early stages of his long poetic career. It is easy to
see why “On the Threshold” is so often seen as an
introduction to the collection as a whole.
The resigned, pessimistic tone of “On the
Threshold,” in which the speaker’s passion is
roused only by the prospect of someone else’s escape from a seemingly dead, enclosing world, is
typical of Montale’s stance in many of these poems. Montale seems passive, almost frozen into inactivity by the weight of the oppression he feels
and the fear of the consequences of any positive
activity. He also feels set apart from others. As he
writes in “Mediterranean”:
I was different: a brooding man
who sees the turbulence of fleeting life
in himself, in others—who’s slow to take
the action no one later can undo.
The last line suggests a determinism that is also
apparent in “On the Threshold” (“deeds / the
endgame of the future will dismantle”), the feeling
that whatever action is taken now not only cannot
be offset or modified by any future action but also
has no power to alter the eventual outcome, whatever that might be.
In this severely circumscribed, almost tortured
universe (“bleak limbo of maimed existences” from
“Mediterranean”), the image of a forbidding wall
keeps appearing, suggesting the barrier that separates such fractured beings from whatever they
might otherwise be. In the short lyrics that compose the “Cuttlefish Bones” section of the collection appear these lines addressed to an unidentified
interlocutor: “Sit the noon out, pale and lost in
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present: A
Bilingual Anthology (1981), edited by Lawrence
R. Smith, is a substantial anthology featuring the
most important Italian poets since World War II.
• A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and
Politics, 1943–1988 (2003), by Paul Ginsborg,
has been hailed by reviewers as the best single
work on postwar Italian history. It comprehensively covers a period of unprecedented economic, social, and demographic change in Italy.
• The Cambridge History of Italian Literature
(1999), edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile,
is a comprehensive survey of hundreds of years
of Italy’s literary tradition. All quotations are
translated into English, and the book includes
maps, chronological charts, and up-to-date bibliographies.
• T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) was published at about the same time as Montale’s Cuttlefish Bones, and the two poets are often
compared. The Waste Land expresses the sense
of dislocation and spiritual aridity that followed
the shock experienced by Western civilization
as a result of World War I.
thought / beside a blistering garden wall.” Later in
the poem, Montale continues:
feel with sad amazement
that all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in the top.
The wall in this passage recalls the “sheer
wall” of the orchard in “On the Threshold.” There
does not seem to be much chance of escape from
a world such as this, and the speaker often seems
resigned to his stern fate as a man permanently and
irrevocably out of harmony with his environment.
This deeply entrenched pessimism cannot wholly
beat out the imagined possibility of some transforming event—epiphany would be too strong a
word—coming along to smash down, at least for a
moment, the wall that encloses and stifles the heart.
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Something in the constitution of the speaker will
not allow him to remain entirely dormant, passively
accepting the imprisoning status quo. The moment
when this impulse of life asserts itself seems to be
quite beyond his conscious willing; it happens
when it happens and that is all that can be said about
it, at least from the evidence of this lyric poem from
the “Cuttlefish Bones” section of the collection:
My life, I ask of you no stable
contours, plausible faces, property.
Now in your restless circling, wormwood and
honey
have the same savor.
The heart that disdains all motion
occasionally is convulsed by a jolt.
As sometimes the stillness of the country
sounds with a rifle shot.
Whatever the burden it bears, human life cannot be entirely squashed. The inert heart that unexpectedly receives a jolt that brings it back to life is
a parallel to the creative wind that the speaker hopes
will cause some movement in the static garden of
“On the Threshold.” In both cases, the possibility
of revival reasserts itself when all seems dead.
Montale often refers to this moment when new
life streams in, against all the odds, as the “miracle.” It is the moment referred to in “On the Threshold” in terms of encountering the apparition or
“phantom.” Montale did not mean the word “miracle” in the religious sense; for him, the miracle
was when something wholly unexpected, beyond
what could have been predicted in that “restless circling” of the wheel of life, disturbs the mundane,
time-space world and opens up some entirely new
way of perceiving:
Maybe one morning, walking in dry, glassy air,
I’ll turn, and see the miracle occur:
nothing at my back, the void
behind me, with a drunkard’s terror.
A profound perceptual shift is envisioned here,
as the world for a moment disappears altogether,
and the speaker has an experience—a very unsettling one—of the “void” that lies behind all temporal phenomena. It is as if a person watching a
film sees for the first time the white screen on
which all the images that normally hold his attention are projected. Montale takes up the image of
the movie screen in the following verse from the
poem quoted above. After the moment of the miracle passes, “as if on a screen, trees houses hills /
will suddenly collect for the usual illusion.” The
speaker will at least have seen that the way he usually perceives the world is not the only way, and
that the “void” is somehow truer than the illusions
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of so-called normal perception. It should be noted
here that the speaker is not recording an experience
he actually had; he is merely imagining that at some
point he may experience something of this nature.
Montale is not a mystic or a seer; he is no William
Blake, living in worlds far more exalted than those
of ordinary men. He is, at least in his poetic persona, largely confined to the prison of everyday
perception and the conditioned rather than the free
life. There is always something tentative about his
attempts to “burst through” the net that binds, as
he put it in “On the Threshold.” Clodagh J. Brook,
in The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio
Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence, has commented on the uncertainty of salvation (which is linked to Montale’s concept of the
“miracle”) in Montale’s poems. It is often qualified
by the word “maybe,” or “perhaps,” as in “On the
Threshold.” In each case the Italian word is forse,
and Montale’s use of this word, Brook points out,
“is confined to a putative metaphysical world that
cannot be directly perceived by the senses and
which is thus covered in a blanket of doubt, its
existence removed from positive assertion and
certainty.”
Perhaps most revealing for an elaboration of
themes hinted at in “On the Threshold” is the poem
“Chrysalis,” which was written in the same year
(1924) as “On the Threshold.” Like so many of Montale’s poems, “Chrysalis” is addressed to an absent
female companion who inspires the speaker, and for
whom he wishes a salvation that is not available for
himself, or which he renounces in her favor. He
imagines the moment in which such salvation will
happen; it is a moment beyond time and memory:
Now you stare down at the soil;
an undertow of memories
reaches your heart and almost overwhelms it.
A shout in the distance: see, time plummets,
disappears in hurried eddies
among the stones, all memory gone; and I
from my dark lookout reach
for this sunlit occurrence.
Memory always seems to have negative connotations in Montale’s poems, as in “On the Threshold,” in which the “dead web / of memories” sink
and are annihilated by the “tidal surge of life.” It is
as if salvation consists in the mind emptying itself
of all past and present content. Although Montale
never formulates the concept in exactly this
Buddhist-sounding manner, he was familiar with
the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, the nineteenthcentury German philosopher whose major work The
World as Will and Representation (1819) was heavily influenced by Buddhist and Hindu concepts.
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Also to be noted about the above quotation
from “Chrysalis” is the fact that the images that occur in “On the Threshold” are repeated: there is a
contrast between water, which flows, and stone,
which is hard and opaque and which suggests
the ubiquitous Montalian wall, now broken and
breached by the “hurried eddies” of water, the
equivalent of the “tidal surge of life” in “On the
Threshold.”
This is only an imagined experience for someone else; the speaker himself remains in darkness,
and as “Chrysalis” continues, the pessimism deepens. The image of the wall returns and even the
possibility of freedom seems to be denied, although
once again Montale’s characteristic use of the word
“maybe” gives the deterministic statement a speculative rather than a definitive air:
Ah chrysalis, how bitter
is this nameless torture that envelops us
and spirits us away—
till not even our footprints last in the dust;
and we’ll go on, not having moved
a single stone in the great wall;
and maybe everything is fixed, is written,
and we’ll never see it come our way:
freedom, the miracle,
the act that wasn’t sheer necessity!
From this state of bleak resignation, Montale
can envision only one hope. Speaking of the “pact”
he wants to make with “destiny,” Montale restates
the ideal of renunciation that runs consistently
through his poetry:
to redeem
your joy through my condemning.
This is the hope that still lives in my heart;
after which all motion ceases.
And I think of the unspoken offerings that prop up
the houses of the living; of the heart that abdicates
so an unsuspecting child may laugh;
If the speaker cannot redeem himself, he can,
as compensation, participate in a mysterious cosmic trading of blessings and curses, whereby the
self-sacrifice of one can allow another to live or to
feel joy. Underlying this is the notion of limitation,
of lack of abundance. There is not enough joy to
go around. It must be carefully rationed out, as if
it were food in a famine. If one person has it, another may be deprived of it, like scarce goods in a
struggling economy. In Poet in Our Time, Montale
writes a telling comment, in the context of technological progress, about the emotional resources
available to humans: “every gain, every advance
made by man is accompanied by equivalent losses
in other directions, while the sum total of possible
human happiness remains the same.” Given this
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context, Montale’s poetic act of self-abnegation—
allowing another to attain what he cannot attain for
himself, however much he desires it—becomes a
noble sentiment, as well as being a kind of personal
fulfillment by proxy. It is entirely consistent with
the limited, enclosed, imprisoning nature of Montale’s poetic world.
Finally, there is the poem “House by the Sea,”
which like many other poems in Cuttlefish Bones
draws on the landscape of the Ligurian coastline to
create an internal world full of sadness and a sense
of frustrated hope. The poem also recapitulates the
now familiar themes of renunciation and escape in
a tone that is every bit as pessimistic as “Chrysalis.”
The central metaphor in “House by the Sea” is
that of a journey that has been completed, ending
on a beach. Images of the dead heart and the prison
of endless time give way to a description of the
mist that shrouds the view, blocking out the islands
of Corsica and Capraia. The speaker then addresses, as in “On the Threshold” and “Chrysalis,”
his female companion, who on this occasion seems
to be physically present at the scene, rather than
merely imagined by the speaker. Although the biographical details are not especially important,
Montale scholars identify this female figure as having been inspired by a young woman named Anna
degli Uberti (1904–1959), whom Montale knew
during the summers of 1919–1923.
The companion inquires of the speaker
whether the world of time is all that exists. In response, the speaker gives his most explicit description of both the clash between hope and reality
and his reaction to it, to which he has alluded in so
many other poems, such as in his poem “Chrysalis.”
The final two lines of this poem suggest another
layer of sad irony. The female figure to whom the
speaker speaks does not hear him. The very one for
whom Montale’s poetic persona would make what
for him would be the ultimate sacrifice has her attention elsewhere. It appears that even communication with the dearest one is doomed to failure.
But the speaker tries to make the best of it, lifting
himself to an optimism about her fate that he cannot feel for his own: “Maybe your nearby heart that
doesn’t hear me / already has set sail for the eternal” (“Chrysalis”).
The watery image of setting sail for the eternal
recalls the “tidal surge of life” in “On the Threshold,” a poem which, in light of the foregoing, is well
described as an overture to Cuttlefish Bones. “Perpetually on the threshold” is a phrase that accurately
describes this poet in whom pessimism struggles
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with hope, who waits for the miracle that never
comes, at least not for himself. For Montale, miracles are only for others. He must continue to live in
his prison and try to “see through the bars”
(“Chrysalis”).
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “On the Threshold,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the author discusses
Montale’s career.
Despite the fact that Eugenio Montale produced only five volumes of poetry in his first fifty
years as a writer, when the Swedish Academy
awarded the Italian poet and critic the 1975 Nobel
Prize for Literature they called him “one of the most
important poets of the contemporary West,” according to a Publishers Weekly report. One of
Montale’s translators, Jonathan Galassi, echoed the
enthusiastic terms of the Academy in his introduction to The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of
Eugenio Montale in which he referred to Montale
as “one of the great artistic sensibilities of our
time.” In a short summary of critical opinion on
Montale’s work, Galassi continued: “Eugenio
Montale has been widely acknowledged as the
greatest Italian poet since [Giacomo] Leopardi and
his work has won an admiring readership throughout the world. His . . . books of poems have, for
thousands of readers, expressed something essential about our age.”
Montale began writing poetry while a teenager,
at the beginning of what was to be an upheaval in
Italian lyric tradition. Describing the artistic milieu
in which Montale began his life’s work, D. S. CarneRoss noted in the New York Review of Books: “The
Italian who set out to write poetry in the second
decade of the century had perhaps no harder task
than his colleagues in France or America, but it was
a different task. The problem was how to lower
one’s voice without being trivial or shapeless, how
to raise it without repeating the gestures of an incommodious rhetoric. Italian was an intractable
medium. Inveterately mandarin, weighed down by
the almost Chinese burden of a six-hundred-yearold literary tradition, it was not a modern language.”
Not only did Italian writers of the period have to
contend with the legacy of their rich cultural heritage, but they also had to deal with a more recent
phenomenon in their literature: the influence of
the prolific Italian poet, novelist, and dramatist,
Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose highly embellished
style seemed to have become the only legitimate
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mode of writing available to them. “Montale’s radical renovation of Italian poetry,” according to
Galassi, “was motivated by a desire to ‘come closer’
to his own experience than the prevailing poetic language allowed him.”
Montale explained his effort to cope with the
poetic language of the day and the final outcome
of this struggle in his widely-quoted essay, “Intentions (Imaginary Interview),” included in The Second Life of Art. “I wanted my words to come closer
than those of the other poets I’d read,” Montale
noted. “Closer to what? I seemed to be living under a bell jar, and yet I felt I was close to something essential. A subtle veil, a thread, barely
separated me from the definitive quid. Absolute expression would have meant breaking that veil, that
thread: an explosion, the end of the illusion of
the world as representation. But this remained an
unreachable goal. And my wish to come close
remained musical, instinctive, unprogrammatic. I
wanted to wring the neck of the eloquence of our
old aulic language, even at the risk of a countereloquence.”
For Montale coming close meant a private focus in his poetry that caused many critics to label
his work as obscure or hermetic. He is often named
along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo as one of the founders of the poetic school
known as hermeticism, an Italian variant of the
French symbolist movement. Montale himself denied any membership in such a group, and observed
in his essay “Let’s Talk about Hermeticism” (also
included in Galassi’s anthology): “I have never purposely tried to be obscure and therefore do not feel
very well qualified to talk about a supposed Italian
hermeticism, assuming (as I very much doubt) that
there is a group of writers in Italy who have a systematic non-communication as their objective.”
Whether hermetic or not, Montale’s poetry is
difficult. Noting the demanding quality of Montale’s
work, Soviet poet and critic Joseph Brodsky stated
in a New York Review of Books essay that the “voice
of a man speaking—often muttering—to himself is
generally the most conspicuous characteristic of
Montale’s poetry.” Many of Montale’s poems are
undiscernible to most casual readers, just as the
meaning of the words of a man talking to himself is
difficult for another to grasp. Problems in comprehension arise because Montale, in an effort to eliminate in his verse what Parnassus: Poetry in Review
contributor Alfred Corn called “the merely expository element in poetry,” sought not to talk about an
occurrence in his poems but to simply express the
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Whether hermetic or
not, Montale’s poetry is
difficult.”
feelings associated with the event. According to
Corn, “this approach to poetic form allows for great
condensation and therefore great power; but the poems are undeniably difficult.” Montale’s chief interpreter in recent years, Ghan Singh, examined
Montale’s poetic complexities in Eugenio Montale:
A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism,
remarking: “Of all the important twentieth-century
Italian poets Montale is the one in whose case it is
most difficult to proceed by explicating, through definite formulations and statements, what a particular
poem is about. In other words, what comes out
through the reading of the poem and what was in the
poet’s mind when he wrote it, seldom lend themselves to a condensed summary.”
In Three Modern Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, Joseph Cary echoed the thoughts of other critics on Montale’s verse in general while pointing in
particular to the obscurity of Montale’s The Occasions. “As Montale himself has written,” Cary observed, “it is a short step from the intense poem
to the obscure one. We are not talking of any
grammatical-syntactical ellipsis here but of the nature of the poet’s dramatic methods, his procedural
assumptions. To be plunged, with minimal or no
preparation, in medias res, which is to say, into the
midst of an occasion dense with its own particular
history, cross-currents, associations and emotional
resonances, seems to me to be a fair description of
the difficulties typically encountered in certain of
the Occasioni poems.”
Corn and Carne-Ross regard Montale’s group
of twenty brief poems, “Motets” (originally included in the collection, The Occasions), as a leading example of Montale’s condensed form of
poetry. “Even a hasty reading,” wrote Carne-Ross,
“reveals their singular formal mastery (they have
been compared to Mallarme’s octosyllabic sonnets); even a prolonged reading is often baffled by
these impenetrable little poems. The images are always sensuously lucid . . ., but they often point
back to some ‘occasion’ which it is impossible to
reconstruct, and as a result we do not know how to
relate the images to each other or to the poem as a
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whole.” Montale’s technique in “Motets” is comparable to that used in the poetic sequence “Xenia”
(included in the English translation of Satura:
1962–1970), written after the death of the poet’s
wife in 1963. Brodsky contended that in these later
poems “the personal note is enforced by the fact
that the poet’s persona is talking about things only
he and [his wife] had knowledge of—shoehorns,
suitcases, the names of hotels where they used to
stay, mutual acquaintances, books they had both
read. Out of this sort of realia, and out of the inertia of intimate speech, emerges a private mythology which gradually acquires all the traits appropriate
to any mythology, including surrealistic visions,
metamorphoses, and the like.”
The image of a man talking to himself can be
used not only to allude to the opaque quality of
Montale’s verse but also to refer to what, according to critics, is a dominant characteristic of his poetry, that of the poet talking to an absent other. So
frequently did Montale address his poems to a
female—named or unnamed—that John Ahern observed in the New York Times Book Review that the
reader could “surmise that for Montale life, like art,
was quintessentially speech to a woman.” “Motets”
and “Xenia,” for example, are addressed to absent
lovers; the first to Clizia, the second to his dead
wife, known as “la Mosca.” Glauco Cambon studied the similarities and differences between the two
sequences of poems in his Books Abroad essay on
Montale in which Cambon referred to “one central
feature of Montale’s style, the use of a sometimes
unspecifiable Thou to elicit self-revelation on the
part of the lyrical persona.” Elsewhere in the same
piece Cambon commented: “Obviously la Mosca
fulfills in Xenia a function analogous to that of
Clizia in ‘Motets’ and in various other poems from
Le Occasioni and La Bufera: to provide a focal Thou
that draws the persona out, to conquer his reticence
about what really matters, to embody the unseizable
reality of what is personal. Distance, absence, memory are a prerequisite of such polar tension, as they
were for Dante and Petrarch. In Clizia’s case distance is geographic, while in la Mosca’s case it is
metaphysical, being provided by death.”
Cambon is only one of many critics who made
a comparison between Montale and the great early
fourteenth-century Italian poet, Dante. Singh, for
example, observed “Montale’s use of Dante’s vocabulary, style, and imagery,” but also noted that
“if while deliberately using a distinctly Dantesque
word or phrase, Montale succeeds in making it do
something quite different, it is because his thought
and sensibility, his mode of analyzing and assess-
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ing his own experience, and the nature of his explorations into reality are as profoundly different
from Dante’s as they are characteristically modern.”
Both Arshi Pipa, who wrote a book-length study of
Montale’s resemblance to Dante entitled Montale
and Dante, and Galassi concluded that one of the
ways Montale was able to break with tradition and
renovate Italian literature was by actually paying
homage to that same tradition. “Montale’s solution
to the problem of tradition, certainly one of the most
successful solutions achieved by a poet in our century,” Galassi explained, “involved an innovative
appropriation of the Italian literary past to serve his
own very personal contemporary purposes. To Pipa,
who sees Montale’s relationship to Dante as the central issue in understanding this aspect of Montale’s
achievement in renewing Italian literature, ‘he has
continued tradition in poetry by recreating it, and
this he has done by going back to its origin, where
he has established contact with one who may well
be called the father of the nation.’”
When parallels are drawn between Montale
and writers outside the Italian tradition, they are
most often between Montale and T. S. Eliot. “Comparison between the two poets is inevitable,” according to Galassi, “for both turn to a re-evaluation
of tradition in their search for an authentic means
of giving voice to the existential anxiousness of
twentieth-century man.” A London Times writer
observed that both poets possessed similar styles
and “a common predilection for dry, desolate, cruel
landscapes.” This tendency is evident in the poem,
“Arsenio” from The Bones of Cuttlefish, for example, which Carne-Ross called “in a real sense
Montale’s Waste Land,” referring to one of Eliot’s
best-known poems. “Arsenio,” like much of Montale’s early work, depicts the rugged, tormented
Ligurian coastline of Cinque Terre, the part of the
Italian Riviera where Montale was born and to
which he returned every summer of his youth. The
starkness of the area can be seen in Mario Praz’s
translation of the first lines of “Arsenio,” which appears in The Poem Itself: “The whirlwinds lift the
dust / over the roofs, in eddies, and over the open
spaces / deserted, where the hooded horses / sniff
the ground, motionless in front / of the glistening
windows of the hotel.” Praz maintained that the
book’s suggested “the dry, desolate purity of
[Montale’s] early inspiration: white cuttlefish
bones stranded on the margin of the beach, where
the sea casts up all its drift and wreckage. The white
cuttlefish bones lie helpless among the sand and
weeds; a wave every now and then disturbs and
displaces them, giving them a semblance of motion
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and life.” In this description of perceived motion
or life amidst symbols of death critics find another
relationship between “Arsenio” and “The Waste
Land.” While both poems are filled with desolate
description, they both also embrace a desire for redemption or rebirth.
Other critics, such as Singh and Wallace Craft,
see more differences between the two poets than
similarities. In a Books Abroad essay on Montale
published shortly after the poet won the Nobel
Prize, Craft recognized that with similar intent
Montale and Eliot both described nature as a series
of fragmented images. The critic then went on to
examine the dissimilarities between the two writers. “Both Eliot and Montale explored this fragmented world,” observed Craft, “in order to fathom
the mystery of human life. It must be pointed out,
however, that Eliot emerges from his existential
wilderness or wasteland to find resolution in the
framework of Christianity. Montale’s quest, on the
other hand, never leads to final answers. The fundamental questions regarding life, death and human
fate posed in the early poetry are deepened, repeated but not resolved in later verse.”
Although his poetry was largely responsible
for Montale’s worldwide fame, he received considerable critical attention in the United States with
the posthumous publication of Galassi’s translation
of a compilation of his essays, The Second Life of
Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale. Even
though in the last three decades of his life Montale
came to be regarded—mainly due to his position
as literary editor for Milan’s Corriere della Sera
—“as the Grand Old Man of Italian criticism,” according to a London Times writer, this book of essays was one of the first collections of the Italian’s
critical prose to appear in English. Galassi saw theses essays as both “selections from an unwritten
intellectual autobiography” of Montale and “the
rudiments of a context in which to view Montale’s
greatest work, his poetry.”
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. . . it is soon
recognizable as a literary
garden not only because the
topos inevitably comes to
mind but because the poet
himself invests it with
multiple transforming and
transformed indentities;
garden to reliquary to
crucible.”
Source: “Eugenio Montale,” in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2003.
Rebecca J. West
In the following essay excerpt, West explores
the literary space of the garden in “On the Threshold” (“In limine”).
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Source: Rebecca J. West, “The Marginal Readings of
the First Voice,” in Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge,
Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 13–17.
Sources
Almansi, Guido, and Bruce Merry, Eugenio Montale: The
Private Language of Poetry, Edinburgh University Press,
1977, pp. 6–7.
Brook, J. Clodagh, The Expression of the Inexpressible in
Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 99.
Cambon, Glauco, “Eugene Montale: An Introduction,” in
Eugenio Montale: Selected Poems, New Directions, 1966,
p. xiii.
Cary, Joseph, Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti,
Montale, New York University Press, 1969, pp. 235–329.
Galassi, Jonathan, ed., “Notes,” in Collected Poems:
1920–1954, by Eugenio Montale, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1999, p. 443.
Montale, Eugenio, Poet in Our Time, translated by Alastair
Hamilton, Marion Boyars, 1976, p. 22.
Singh, G., Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry,
Prose, and Criticism, Yale University Press, 1973, pp. 19–20.
Talbot, George, ed., “Notes,” in Selected Poems, by Eugenio
Montale, UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 2000, p. 40.
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West, Rebecca J., “Eugenio Montale,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 114, Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, First Series, edited by Giovanna Wedel De Stasio,
Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano, Gale Research, 1992,
pp. 135–48.
Further Reading
Becker, Jared, Eugenio Montale, Twayne’s World Authors
Series, No. 778, Twayne, 1986.
Becker’s introductory study surveys the entirety of
Montale’s work. It includes a chronology and an
annotated bibliography.
Cambon, Glauco, Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s Presence, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 3–33.
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This is an analysis of Cuttlefish Bones, emphasizing
Montale’s poetic attempt to reclaim the lost bliss
of childhood. In the book, Cambon sees Montale
as “wavering between utter disenchantment and
glimpsed ecstasy.”
Huffman, Claire de C. L., Montale and the Occasions of
Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1983.
This study of Montale’s poetry emphasizes The Occasions, Montale’s second volume, as a lens through
which to understand the whole of his work. Huffman
also includes a comparison between Montale and
T. S. Eliot.
Montale, Eugenio, The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays
of Eugenio Montale, edited and with an introduction by
Jonathan Galassi, Ecco Press, 1982.
This is the most comprehensive collection in English
of Montale’s prose works.
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The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love
Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love” fits perfectly into the poetic genre of
the period. Poets of the Elizabethan age used poetry as a way to express their wit and talent. It is
likely that Marlowe’s poem would have been
passed around among his friends long before its
publication in 1599 in England, six years after the
poet’s death. Few Elizabethan poets published their
own work, especially one as young as Marlowe,
and so it is fairly certain that the poem was wellknown long before its publication. The composition date is thought to be about 1588, and probably
it generated many responses well before its publication nearly a dozen years later. Among these responses was Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s
Reply to the Shepherd” (date unknown, but thought
to be about 1592), which provides the woman’s response to Marlowe’s shepherd. Marlowe’s poem
also inspired several other notable works that were
similar in tone and content, including John Donne’s
“The Bait” (1633), which also relies upon wit and
sexuality to entertain the reader.
Christopher Marlowe
1599
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is written in the pastoral tradition that originated with Theocritus in Greece during the third century B.C. The
pastoral tradition is characterized by a state of contentment and of innocent and romantic love. Rural
country folk are presented in an idealized natural
setting, while they contemplate their perfect and
peaceful world that is absent the worries and issues
of crowded city life. As was common of Elizabethan
poets, Marlowe plays with the traditional pastoral
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who would find solace in the soothing atmosphere
of country life. Marlowe tweaked the traditional,
transforming it into a more dynamic piece. As a result, Marlowe’s poem remains a long lasting and
important example of the Elizabethan poet’s talent.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is included
in most literature anthologies published for academic use, including the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature.
Author Biography
Christopher Marlowe
formula. He introduces sexuality and includes images that make the shepherd’s plea seem ridiculous
rather than ideal.
The speaker in “The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love” is a shepherd, who pledges to do the impossible if only the female object of his desires will
accept his pleas. The poem is static in time, with
no history or clearly defined future. Only the present matters. There is never any suggestion that the
poet is asking the woman for a long-term commitment; there is no offer of marriage nor does he offer a long-term future together. Instead, he asks her
to come and live with him and seek pleasure in the
moment. The use of “passionate” in the title suggests strong emotions, but may also refer to an ardent desire to possess the woman sexually, since
there is never any declaration of love. The shepherd makes a number of elaborate promises that are
generally improbable and occasionally impossible.
The woman’s response is never heard, and she is
not present in any way except as the object of the
shepherd’s desire.
Prior to the composition of “The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love,” early English Renaissance
poetry had been most concerned with romantic love.
These poems, which included poems by Sir Thomas
Wyatt and Henry Howard, were traditional love poems, characterized by the pleas of a rejected suitor
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Many scholars believe that had Christopher Marlowe lived longer, he might have become a greater
dramatist than William Shakespeare. Marlowe was
born only a few months before Shakespeare, on
February 6, 1564, to John and Catherine Marlowe
of Canterbury, where the senior Marlowe was a
shoemaker. Marlowe received a bachelor of arts degree from Corpus Christi College at the University
of Cambridge in 1584. He then continued his studies, using a clergyman’s scholarship for funding.
Scholars generally agree that Marlowe probably
never had any intention of joining the clergy, but
he was willing to say that he might enter the clergy
in order to continue with his studies. When Marlowe was finally awarded his master of arts degree
in 1587, after a great deal of controversy and amid
charges that he was secretly planning on becoming
a Catholic priest (Catholics could not receive degrees from Cambridge during this time, and priests
were widely suspected of plots to overthrow the
queen), he was ranked 199 out of 231 students.
After leaving Cambridge, Marlowe moved to
London, where he is reported to have had frequent
problems with authorities. He was briefly jailed for
murder, although later found to have acted in selfdefense. He was also charged with atheism and
blasphemy, and was awaiting trial for these offenses when he was killed in a brawl, supposedly
over an unpaid dinner bill, on May 30, 1593, in
Deptford, England. Marlowe’s death, from a stab
wound to his forehead, remains controversial, since
some scholars argue that his death was not really
the result of a dispute but was more likely an
assassination.
Marlowe’s first play, The Great Tamburlaine,
Part I (c. 1587), was produced shortly after he left
Cambridge, although scholars think that Marlowe
probably wrote Dido Queen of Carthage (c. 1583–
1584) even earlier. The first production of The
Great Tamburlaine, Part I was so popular with the
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public that Marlowe followed it with a sequel, The
Great Tamburlaine, Part II (c. 1587).
Marlowe was the first playwright to use blank
verse in a play; previously the standard had been
rhyme, which Marlowe condemns in the prologue
to The Great Tamburlaine. Marlowe’s The Jew of
Malta, which was produced in 1589 or 1590, was
followed by The Massacre at Paris circa 1590. The
Massacre at Paris was never published, and the
only known copies are based on an undated and unreliable octavo edition. Edward II (c. 1592) is considered to be the first great English history play,
though most scholars consider Dr. Faustus (c. 1589)
to be Marlowe’s greatest work. Dr. Faustus was
not performed until after Marlowe’s death and was
probably unfinished when the playwright died.
Marlowe also wrote poems during his short
life, at least one of which inspired later poets to try
to best him in talent and wit. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Marlowe’s most famous short
poem, was not published until 1599, six years after the poet’s death. It is notable for having inspired
Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the
Shepherd” (date unknown, but thought to be about
1592), as well as John Donne’s “The Bait” (1633).
Poem Summary
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Media
Adaptations
• A recitation of “The Passionate Shepherd to His
Love” is included in the 1995 film Richard III,
directed by Richard Loncraine and starring Ian
McKellen and Annette Bening. In an early sequence of the film, Marlowe’s poem is set to
music and sung in a 1930s big-band rendition.
Since so many early Elizabethan lyrical poems
were meant to be sung, setting Marlowe’s poem
to music is in keeping with its poetic origin. The
film is available in VHS or DVD format.
twenty-first-century reader: the female is being invited to come and make love. “Valleys, groves,
hills and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountains” are
some of the places the shepherd suggests where the
woman might yield to him, and where they might
both find pleasure. The overt sexuality of this
stanza is a departure from the traditional pastoral
writings and romantic love poems of Marlowe’s
contemporaries, which were not so bold.
Stanza 1: Lines 1–4
In the first stanza of “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love,” Marlowe’s speaker, an unidentified
shepherd, pleads with an unidentified woman that
if she will come and live with him, then all pleasures will be theirs for the taking. The shepherd
opens with the invitation: “Come live with me, and
be my love.” He is not asking her to marry him but
only to live with him. The offer is simply put, and
his ease in offering it implies that the woman
should just as easily agree. However, since the
shepherd is forced to continue with a succession of
promises, the reader can assume that the shepherd’s
initial offer was not well received.
The shepherd promises the woman pleasures
they will experience in all of the pastoral settings
that nature can supply. Since he promises that the
couple will experience these pleasures in a variety
of locations, it appears his expectation is that the
pleasures of the world are principally sexual. He is
asking the woman to live with him, and for the Elizabethan poet, “Come live with me, and be my love”
has the same connotations it would have for a
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Stanza 2: Lines 5–8
The second stanza suggests a time of year for
the lovers’ activity, which is likely spring or summer, since they would be outdoors and the shepherd imagines it is pleasant enough to sit and watch
the flocks being fed. He proposes that other shepherds will feed his flocks, since with his mistress
by his side, he will now be an observer. The shepherd mentions listening to the “Melodious birds
sing madrigals.” The singing of birds is often suggestive of spring, since the return of singing birds
signals the advent of the new season. Because the
first stanza makes clear that the shepherd wants the
woman to become his lover, the shift in the second
stanza to sitting upon rocks—“And we will sit upon
the rocks”—suggests they might partake of the second stanza’s activities after they have made love.
This second stanza, if taken by itself, exemplifies the traditional pastoral theme of the restful
shepherd watching his flocks, enjoying in quiet repose the countryside and all it offers. It is the idealization of the pastoral form, in which nature is
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benign and safe, filled with “shallow rivers” and
“melodious birds.” In the early pastoral tradition,
the shepherd would be alone, daydreaming about
the woman he loves and whom he wishes to court.
But in Marlowe’s poem, the introduction of sexual
desire inserts the woman into the scene; she too
will witness the flocks feeding and enjoy the peacefulness of country life. The isolation of the shepherd is thus removed in Marlowe’s poem.
In the final line of stanza 2, the shepherd invokes “madrigals” as accompaniment for the
lounging couple. The madrigal was an Italian import to late sixteenth-century English music. In
Elizabethan England, a formal, more complicated,
Italian aristocratic style of song was replaced with
a lighter, more romantic tone and content—the
madrigal. Thus the shepherd’s inclusion of the
madrigal provides a promise of romantic entertainment that completes the image of gaiety and
light romance the woman will enjoy if she agrees
to accept the shepherd’s pleas.
Stanza 3: Lines 9–12
In the third stanza, the shepherd offers the first
of many promises he will keep if the woman agrees
to come and live with him. He promises to make
her “beds of roses.” One bed is not enough; she is
deserving of more than one bed, although certainly
the couple would have no need for more than one
bed. In addition, the shepherd promises “a thousand fragrant posies.” In essence, the shepherd is
promising the impossible, but he is representative
of any eager lover who turns to hyperbole (gross
exaggeration) to entice a beloved. In this case, the
woman would be buried in “posies,” or flowers,
which creates an image more silly than romantic.
It is worth noting that Elizabethans often composed
short epigrams that were also known as “posies.”
These short poems were often used as tokens of
love. If Marlowe’s shepherd is using “posies” to
refer to written texts and not a floral tribute, then
barraging the woman with love poems is a romantic idea, although still an impractical one.
The shepherd is so eager for his love to join him
that he even promises to dress her. He will clothe
the woman in “a cap of flowers” and in a “kirtle”
covered “with leaves of myrtle.” The myrtle flower
was a sacred flower to the goddess Venus and was
considered an emblem of love. A kirtle was the outermost garment that an Elizabethan woman would
wear; it was a sleeveless bodice with eyelets for ribbon that laced up the front. It would have been worn
over a shirt or blouse, or even a dress, and it would
have had a skirt attached to it. The kirtle would have
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been the dressiest part of the woman’s garment, and
so the shepherd’s plan to decorate the woman’s kirtle would have been in keeping with Elizabethan custom, since the kirtle would have customarily been
adorned with some embellishment.
Stanza 4: Lines 13–16
In the fourth stanza, the shepherd continues his
promises to clothe the woman. Her “gown” would
be made of the “finest wool.” Rather than simply
shearing the sheep, which was the common procedure, the shepherd would “pull” the wool from the
“pretty lambs.” This image transforms the intense
hard labor of shearing into a gentle “pulling” of the
wool, a more graceful and romantic activity. The
“slippers” he will make for the woman will be “fair
lined.” By the sixteenth century, women were commonly referred to as the “fair sex,” and so the use
of “fair” to describe the slippers might also refer to
the woman whose feet the slippers would adorn.
The buckles of these slippers would be of “the
purest gold,” since the shepherd’s mistress would
deserve all the riches he could provide.
Stanza 5: Lines 17–20
By the fifth stanza, an image of the shepherd’s
newly adorned mistress begins to emerge. Line 17
adds a straw belt and “ivy-buds” to a costume that
is adorned with “coral clasps” and “amber studs,”
which serve as buttons. The woman is dressed from
head to foot and immersed in “posies.” If the
woman takes the poet’s promises quite literally, she
would look like a huge floral bush that glitters with
gold, coral, and amber.
In the final two lines of the fifth stanza, the shepherd reiterates his plea that the woman consider his
offer. He first reminds the woman that he promises
her pleasures, which he hopes will convince her to
agree to his wishes. The shepherd then restates the
first line of the poem, inviting her to come and live
with him and be his love. There is no need to repeat
all the many promises of endless love, of sweet beds
of roses, or of the clothing he would fashion for her.
Instead, he assumes she will remember his promises
and if she finds them satisfactory, she will choose
to join him. The repetition of the first line makes
clear how easy and simple the woman’s choice
would be to join the shepherd in love, but, just in
case she needs more persuading, he uses the final
stanza to offer a few more incentives.
Stanza 6: Lines 21–24
In the sixth and final stanza, the shepherd uses
one last opportunity to seal the deal and convince
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the woman to give up her chastity to his entreaties.
If the woman will agree to be his love, the shepherd promises his “swains” shall dance and sing.
“Swain” was a common word for shepherd, and in
the sixteenth century, the two words were used interchangeably to create a more favorable image of
shepherds. The shepherd’s life was one of hard
work, and describing him as a swain, which might
also refer to a gallant lover, conjures a more romantic image.
So, the idyllic nature the shepherd has thus described is further enhanced by the image of swains
who will dance and sing each morning for his
lover’s entertainment. The time now is firmly set
in May, during spring, nature’s traditional mating
time. The poet has included a variety of images
from nature, including the setting, the bed, and the
clothing, all of which remind the reader that nature
is primarily focused on reproduction. If the woman
will come and live with him, every day will be
happy and filled with laughter, song, and dance.
In line 23, the shepherd repeats line 19 with a
slight but important modification. Rather than pleasures to convince her, the emphasis is on the “delights” he has led her mind to imagine. All of his
promises have been the imaginings of a hopeful
lover. He has hoped to convince her mind, not her
heart. The shepherd has described an imaginary
world that he hopes will persuade the woman to
join him through her use of reason, if not through
her heart. The final line is a repetition of the opening line, reinforcing the relative ease the woman
should face in making her decision. The decision
is as simple as the shepherd’s monosyllabic words:
“live with me, and be my love.”
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“beds of roses” suggests the couple will make love
outside and without shelter. Additionally, the “beds
of roses” would probably include a significant
number of thorns, which are guaranteed to reduce
the shepherd’s passion. In the twenty-first century,
the average temperature in England in May is 59
degrees Fahrenheit, with rain at least half the days
of the month, and it is likely the weather was similar during Marlowe’s time, so lying outdoors without shelter might have been rather wet and cool.
The nights would be cooler still than the days, especially in the “hills,” the shade of the “woods,” or
the higher elevations of a “steepy mountain.”
The shepherd also promises to supply his mistress with “A gown made of the finest wool,” wool
that he would “pull” from “pretty lambs.” An adult
sheep can weigh between 150 and 200 pounds, and
even a lamb old enough to be sheared would be quite
heavy. The job of using the tools of the time to shear
even one lamb would have been hard work, to say
nothing of “pulling” the wool with your hands.
Anther promise the shepherd makes is that
“The shepherd swains shall dance and sing / For thy
delight each May morning.” With the need to protect the sheep from predators, the shearing of the
lambs, the herding of the flock to fresh pastures, and
the often unpleasant weather, shepherds would have
no time for dancing and singing for the mistress’s
entertainment each morning. And though the shepherd is concerned to clothe his mistress in wool, he
provides no thought to feeding his love. What is she
to eat? The shepherd never considers food, because
in his imaginary world, food is not necessary. His
courtship is the fanciful musing of a lover who seeks
only to fulfill his passion with no thought to the real
necessities of life. Marlowe creates a pretty picture
of nature, but it is far from the reality of hard work
and danger that shepherds often faced.
Static Time
Nature Idealized
In “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,”
Marlowe paints a picture of idyllic nature without
any of the real dangers that might be present. There
are no responsibilities in this imaginary life, as the
shepherd imagines the couple will watch other
“shepherds feed their flocks,” while making no
mention of his own flock for which he is responsible. There is also no mention of any wolves or
predators that might prey upon the flock.
The shepherd then invites his mistress to experience all the pleasures the couple might enjoy
in the countryside in May. That they will lie in
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“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is static. There is no movement of time in the piece, no
past and no future. The shepherd is not suggesting a
long-term arrangement when he asks the woman to
“Come live with me, and be my love.” There is no
offer of marriage and no suggestion that they will establish a home together. The shepherd will cover his
mistress in “a thousand fragrant posies,” but once
picked, the flowers will begin to die. Within minutes
they will begin to wilt, their stalks drooping more
with each moment that passes. The same fate awaits
the “belt of straw and ivy-buds,” which will also disintegrate quickly after their creation. The activities
that the shepherd describes are of the moment. It is
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love” is a pastoral poem. Using the information you now have about pastoral poetry,
write your own pastoral poem. As Marlowe did,
invoke the traditional elements, such as the rural
countryside and the shepherd, but try also to create a new tradition by including an element that
will make the pastoral style uniquely your own.
• Research the life of a shepherd in sixteenthcentury England and compare it to the life of a
shepherd in the twenty-first century. Which life
would you prefer and why?
• Both Sir Walter Raleigh and John Donne composed replies to Marlowe’s poem. Pretend you
are a young Elizabethan woman; write your own
response to Marlowe’s poem. What reasons can
you supply to either accept or decline the shep-
some time in May, and he is not looking forward to
a summer together or the fall and winter that will inevitably follow. There is only the moment in which
they will be together. Eventually, however, the realities of life would intrude. The couple would need
food to eat and housing in which to live, children
would be born, and life would be constantly evolving. The notion of the inevitability of time passing
and life changing is missing from the shepherd’s plea.
Style
Argument
The argument in any work of literature is the
author’s principle idea. The shepherd’s argument
in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” reveals
the efforts of the shepherd to convince the unseen
woman that she should become his mistress. The
shepherd submits a number of arguments designed
to be convincing, but the central argument is that
all pleasure will be theirs for the taking.
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herd’s offer? Remember to structure your reply
in verse form.
• Religious conflict between the Catholic Church
and the various protestant factions created a great
deal of tension and occasional danger in Elizabethan England. Research this conflict and, in a
carefully written essay, explain the nature of the
conflict and the ways in which this divisiveness
affected the Elizabethan writers of the late sixteenth century. For instance, the popularity of
pastoral poetry was enhanced by the comforting
safety that an imagined countryside suggested.
You might take this topic one step further and
consider how safe, or dangerous, religious conflict made the countryside. However, you are not
limited to just this one approach. Your research
may suggest additional topics for you to consider.
Couplets and Rhyme
Couplets are two consecutive lines of poetry
with the same end-rhyme. Traditionally, the couplet was a two-line stanza expressing a selfcontained thought, but the form has evolved. It is
no longer strictly defined as iambic pentameter, as
it once was, and the lines need not be identical in
stressed and unstressed syllables. Many of the individual lines in “The Passionate Shepherd to His
Love” are eight syllables, but several others are not,
and so Marlowe is moving away from traditional
poetic structure, even as he deviates from other formulas that guide content, such as those discussed
in the pastoral poetry section below.
In “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,”
Marlowe uses a simple rhyme scheme of couplets.
Each pair is a different rhyme, except for lines 19
and 20 and lines 23 and 24, which repeat the rhyme
of the opening lines. One problem with using couplets is that the ongoing alternating rhyme can
become tiresome for the listener, especially in a
lengthy poem.
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Imagery
Imagery refers to the “mental pictures” created
by the text. The relationships between images can
suggest important meanings in a poem, and with
imagery, the poet uses language and devices such
as metaphor, allusion, and even alliteration to create meaning and texture. For instance, the line “I
will make thee beds of rose” suggests a romantic
image that is not in keeping with the reality of roses
with thorns. Because the image is so strong and because most readers would associate roses with an
image of love, readers probably never stop to consider how unromantic a bed made out of thorny
roses would be. Effective imagery in poetry allows
the reader to enter into the poem and experience it
with all their senses.
Pastoral Poetry
The Greek poet Theocritus first created the
pastoral poem when he wrote poems representing
the life of a Sicilian shepherd. Theocritus produced
a picture of quiet peace and harmony among shepherds who lived in an idealized natural setting. His
shepherds were characterized by a state of contentment and friendly competition among friends.
Love for these shepherds was a romantic longing
and not sexual in any way. Theocritus was then
copied by the Roman poet, Virgil, whose elegies
had a strong influence on early English Renaissance poets. Virgil added some darker elements, including the grief the shepherd feels at the death of
another shepherd. Virgil also included suggestions
of contemporary problems and created a stronger
contrast between the rustic country life and the dangers of city life.
Marlowe probably studied the pastoral poets
during his classical education at Cambridge, but he
was not the first English poet to adopt the pastoral
tradition. Edmund Spenser initiated the Elizabethan
trend in 1579 with The Shepheardes Calender, and
was quickly joined by Sir Philip Sidney and Robert
Greene, who created their own pastoral works.
Marlowe, however, made the pastoral his own poetic form by inserting sexuality and by exaggerating the images. Before Marlowe, the shepherd
engaged in romantic, though innocent, love affairs
and the pastoral was conventional, with artificial
language and shepherds who spoke the courtly language of an aristocrat. Marlowe bent the rules by
introducing sexuality, creating his own pastoral tradition. The tone of “The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love” suggests a parody of the pastoral tradition. Marlowe’s shepherd asks the woman to imagine an idyllic life that not only is impossible but
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even ridiculous in many ways. In exaggerating and
creating these absurd images, Marlowe suggests
that the pastoral tradition should not be taken too
seriously.
Historical Context
Young Women’s Lives in
Sixteenth-Century England
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” presents an image of courtship that does not have much
grounding in reality, but like most poetic works, it
reflects some of the issues of the period in which
it was created. Young women in Elizabethan England were taught they must obey their parents without question, and when they married, they were
expected to obey their husbands absolutely. They
were also taught that a good marriage, a wellmaintained house, and the raising of children were
their primary roles in life. The daughters of aristocrats were educated in how to manage a household,
in gardening and needlework, and in religion. Few
women were formally educated, but all young
women were familiar with their role as obedient
daughters or wives. The clergy used Sunday sermons to reiterate the obligation of every girl and
woman to be obedient to father and husband.
There were no schools for women, who, if they
were educated at all, were taught at home either by
the clergy or by a tutor hired by the family. For the
daughters of the wealthy, marriages were often
arranged by their parents, while the lower classes
sometimes could marry for love. Very often, however, young women were married for property or
for political reasons. Frequently, it was a young
girl’s father, or if he was deceased, her brother or
uncle, who determined the choice of bridegroom,
and a girl’s family was expected to pay a dowry.
The more money or land that was available for a
dowry was far more important than her appearance
or her demeanor in determining how marriageable
she might prove to be.
There was no minimum age at which a young
girl might marry, and in the middle of the sixteenth
century, girls as young as fourteen were often married. By the end of the century, however, the average age for a bride was twenty-three. Marriage
agreements were sealed with a contract, not a wedding ceremony, and brides were considered married
after the couple consummated the agreement (made
love). Young women were expected to be chaste before marriage, so with regard to Marlowe’s poem,
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1500s: In 1582, the Gregorian calendar is introduced in Catholic countries. This calendar is
designed to replace the Julian calendar, which
contains a ten-day discrepancy. The new calendar provides a more consistent and unified way
to manage days, weeks, months, and the passing of years, since it is based on a close approximation of the actual length of time it takes
the earth to revolve around the sun.
Today: Although many countries continue to
maintain different religious and cultural calendars, the Gregorian calendar has become the universal tool by which all countries note the cycle
of the seasons.
• 1500s: The Spanish king, Phillip II, attempts to
invade England in 1587, after the execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots. The conflict between
England and Spain is largely due to the animosity of the Catholic Spanish for the Protestant English. However, the Invincible Armada,
as the king named his fleet of ships sent to attack England, was defeated by the English in
1588. More than half of the ships in the armada
were lost at sea, either in battle or due to storms.
Today: Although religious differences continue
to be an excuse for war in many locations, except
for intermittent strife in Ireland, Catholics and
Protestants coexist in peace throughout Europe.
• 1500s: In 1549, the Book of Common Prayer becomes the centerpiece of uniform Protestant services in England. Queen Mary I returns England
to the Roman Catholic religion in 1555 and
many Protestants are persecuted, including more
than 300 who were burned at the stake. After
Mary I dies in 1558, her sister, Queen Elizabeth
I, returns the country to the Protestant faith and
officially sanctions the end of religious persecution. However, it is not until 1563 that the official Anglican Church is established.
Today: Even during the twenty-first century,
some early restrictions that were placed on Roman
Catholics are still maintained in England. For
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instance, no Catholic can be crowned queen or
king of England.
• 1500s: In 1552, church parishes are required to
register the poor so that official records can be
maintained. This regulation is followed by a
compulsory poor tax designed to make providing for the poor a local responsibility.
Today: In 1997, the Labour Party government
commissions a study on child poverty in Great
Britain. A six-year study completed in 2003
finds that 45 percent of British children are living in poverty and that government intervention
has in fact increased the poverty rate for children. While the government expresses concern
about this widespread poverty, they have not yet
determined how best to solve the problem.
• 1500s: In 1580, the English manage to repress a
Spanish-supported rebellion of the Irish. The rebellion ends when the rebels are starved to death.
Today: Starving opponents during a rebellion is
considered barbaric by most standards. When
the Irish Republican Army (the IRA) stages attacks in the late 1990s, the British government
passes restrictive anti-terrorist legislation. The
new laws, combined with a series of arrests of
IRA leaders and recent elections in Ireland, have
helped to control the rebellion.
• 1500s: Along with Marlowe, the other notable
poets of the period are Philip Sidney, Edmund
Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne,
each of whom will emerge as significant literary figures during England’s golden age of literary creativity, during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I.
Today: More than 400 years after Marlowe’s
death, his poetry and that of many other Elizabethan poets remains pivotal to the study of British
literature. Some of the best-known British poets
of the twentieth century include W. H. Auden,
William Butler Yeats, A. E. Housman, T. S. Eliot,
Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney.
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few women would have been so impractical as to
heed the shepherd’s pleas.
Elizabethan Women’s Apparel
Marlowe’s shepherd devotes significant description to how he might dress his love if she
agrees to be his mistress. Although the shepherd
would dress her in a cap of flowers, a kirtle embroidered with myrtle, a gown of finest wool, and
slippers with gold buckles, dressing the Elizabethan
woman was a bit more complicated than the
shepherd suggests. Women in sixteenth-century
England dressed in a variety of styles, just as
twenty-first-century women do. A woman’s choice
in clothing might depend on her social status, her
age, where she lived, the weather, the activity
planned for any given day, and her personal
preference.
Most Elizabethan women wore several layers
of clothing. The first garment was a simple shift,
which served as an undergarment. A woman would
also wear socks, although the shepherd does not
plan to clothe his mistress in socks. An Elizabethan
woman might wear wool socks, although, if she had
the money to spend, she could choose to wear silk
stockings. Her socks would rise to just above her
knees. The shepherd’s mistress would also need a
corset, since the fashion of the day called for a flat
bodice. A corset was worn over a woman’s shift and
was designed to suppress and support her breasts.
The Elizabethan woman also wore a hoop
skirt, called a farthingale, when she dressed more
formally. Since the shepherd plans on outdoor activities, the woman would also need to put on a
wool petticoat under her farthingale or she would
be cold. If she really wants her skirt to stick out at
the hips, she could add extra padding at the waist,
called a bumroll. Finally the sought-after-mistress
could put on the kirtle the shepherd offers her. A
kirtle is the outermost garment an Elizabethan
woman would wear; it was a sleeveless bodice with
eyelets for ribbon that laced up the front. It would
have been worn over a shirt or blouse, or even a
dress, and it would have had a skirt attached to it.
The kirtle would have been the dressiest part of the
woman’s garment, and so the shepherd’s plan to
decorate the woman’s kirtle would have been in
keeping with Elizabethan custom, since the kirtle
would have customarily been adorned with some
embellishment.
The woman’s final layer would be a gown that
goes on top of all these other layered garments. She
might choose to add ruffs for her neck and wrists,
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jewelry, and probably some makeup. Since many
Elizabethan women also wore elaborate wigs, some
time would have to be allowed for dressing and
placement of the wig, after which elaborate netting
might be added to the wig as decoration. If it were
raining, as it often was in May, the shepherd’s love
might also wear a cloak to protect her.
The shepherd apparently fails to realize that
the average Elizabethan woman would need help
putting on all this complicated apparel each day.
The length of time spent dressing and undressing
would perhaps cool the shepherd’s passion.
Critical Overview
Since poetry of the English Renaissance was not
reviewed, the best way to understand the impact of
Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
is to consider its place within Marlowe’s body of
work, its place within the literary canon, and its influence on other poets. Translating Latin texts to
English was a common pastime for Elizabethan poets, and Marlowe is credited with several translations, including The First Book of Lucan (c. 1582)
and Ovid’s Amores (c. 1582). Marlowe also wrote
seven plays, but his published poems number far
fewer. In addition to “The Passionate Shepherd to
His Love,” he wrote a longer poem, “Hero and Leander” (unfinished at the time of his death), and
two shorter poems, “Dedicatory Epistle to Mary,
the Countess of Pembroke” and “Epitaph on Sir
Roger Manwood.” Of Marlowe’s shorter poems,
only “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” has
received widespread study.
Anthologies of English literature such as the
Norton Anthology of English Literature generally
include only one Marlowe play, Dr. Faustus; his
longer poem, “Hero and Leander”; and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” More generalized
literature anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature and The Norton Introduction
to Literature include only “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Its inclusion in anthologies offers an important indication of the influence of this
Marlowe poem, since it is often the sole representation of his work to be included.
The importance of “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love” might also be judged by its inclusion
in a 1995 film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s
Richard III. In this Richard Loncraine film,
Marlowe’s poem is set to music and sung by a
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1930s-style big-band singer. The singing of Marlowe’s poem occurs near the beginning of the film
and provides a backdrop to the introduction of the
principle characters. As the song is being sung,
characters are greeting one another and dancing as
they celebrate the new king’s victory over Henry
VI. This setting provides a prominent role for “The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” since it also sets
the stage for Shakespeare’s famous opening lines:
“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious by this son of York.” This opening soliloquy
establishes Richard’s dissatisfaction with his new
peacetime role and makes clear that he is “subtle,
false, and treacherous.”
There is one other way to judge the significance of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
and that is by evaluating its influence on other poets. Several poets wrote poems responding to Marlowe’s poem. One of the best known of these poems
is Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the
Shepherd.” In Raleigh’s poem, the speaker is the
shepherd’s mistress, who makes clear that time will
soon wither all the posies the shepherd promised;
the promised gown, cap, and kirtle will eventually
rot; and the passing of time will intrude on the shepherd’s promises of endless love, since youth will
soon pass. Raleigh’s poem was widely circulated,
just as Marlowe’s had been.
John Donne later continued the cycle with his
own poem “The Bait,” which opens with an identical line to Marlowe’s poem, but which provides a
fishing metaphor that suggests a fish is wise enough
to resist bait, even if a lover is not. Still another example of the influence of “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love” is found in William Shakespeare’s The
Merry Wives of Windsor, when Sir Hugh Evans, the
Welsh parson, recites Marlowe’s poem—though it
emerges a bit mangled in this recitation.
Raleigh’s and Donne’s responses, which set in
motion a later poem by Andrew Marvell, “To His
Coy Mistress,” when combined with Shakespeare’s
use and the continued appearance in anthologies
and study of “The Passionate Shepherd to His
Love,” suggest Marlowe’s poem has a timeless
quality that renders it a classic.
Criticism
Sheri E. Metzger
Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama
at the University of New Mexico, where she is a
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lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this
essay, Metzger discusses the silent voices of the
women who inhabit Elizabethan seduction poems.
A quick reading of Christopher Marlowe’s
poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” offers a brief though descriptive argument that the
shepherd hopes will convince the object of his
affections to agree to come and live with him. If
the reader considers merely the projection of the
woman who is only seen through the shepherd’s
imaginings, she is reduced to little more than a caricature, ridiculously clothed in floral tributes. Of
course, the shepherd cares little for this problem,
since the emphasis of the poem is only on his “passionate” desire to possess the woman. The woman,
who has no name and no identity, also has no voice.
She exists only within the shepherd’s plea. Marlowe’s poem, which was derived from the Greek
pastoral tradition and was inspired by a legend recounted by first-century Roman poet Ovid in his
Metamorphoses, prompted a number of responses,
including an anonymous poem, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” which is usually attributed to
Sir Walter Raleigh, and John Donne’s poem “The
Bait.” Marlowe and his responders viewed their
shepherd poems as an excellent opportunity to
demonstrate their talent as witty and clever poets.
As a result, their poems are focused almost solely
on displaying the talents of the writer. The women
in these poems, who are only nominally present as
objects, or in Raleigh’s case, seemingly as a responder, are silent voices in a courtship dialogue
that excludes the very object of the courtship.
The absence of the woman’s voice in early English poetry is an issue that was observed nearly a
century ago by Virginia Woolf. In A Room of One’s
Own, Woolf tells the story of how she went to the
British Museum Library in an effort to determine
the different fates of men and women who had lived
in England during the past several centuries. In the
histories she pulled from the shelves, she found little mention of women. The brief observations she
did find referred either to women’s roles as whores
or wives. This was not true of the women in literature, whose presence appeared to contradict their
historical reality. Woolf pointed out in her text that
while women seemed to have made no real mark in
English history, they “have burnt like beacons in all
the works of all the poets from the beginning of
time.” This observation is especially true in the love
poetry of the Elizabethan period. This poetic tradition relied upon women as the impetus for the poet’s
creation. Although England had a woman ruler,
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power for women did not filter down to other
women. In fact, just the opposite was true, since
women were generally more oppressed under Elizabeth I than they had been under her father’s, Henry
VIII’s, reign. And yet while women may not have
been the stimulus for political and social change,
they were crucial to the poets’ work. As she
searched through historical accounts for stories of
women’s accomplishments, Woolf recognized the
contrast between the images of women in fictional
texts and that of women in historical texts. She concluded, “Indeed, if woman had no existence save in
the fiction written by men, one would imagine her
[to be] a person of the utmost importance.” The illusion advanced in Elizabethan poetry that women
had important roles created a false impression of
women’s reality. Literature posed no exception in a
society that valued women only as wives and mothers. Most poets were men and only a few Elizabethan women composed poetry; women were
instead the objects of poetry and drama, as they had
been in centuries past.
The tradition of the wooing or invitational lyric
was already well established before Marlowe took
up the formula. Ovid’s Metamorphoses offers a
model with which Marlowe would have become familiar during his education at Cambridge. In Book
XIII of Metamorphoses, the cyclops, Polyphemus,
woos the sea nymph, Galatea. Polyphemus is the
frightful monster who eats men and who Odysseus
blinded in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.
Polyphemus has moved to Sicily and fallen in love
with Galatea, who does not return his affection.
Galatea loves Acis as much as she hates Polyphemus. To win her love, the Cyclops first praises
Galatea’s beauty, and then he tells her that he has
a cave that will provide shelter for them, as well as
“apples weighing down their branches, grapes yellow as gold on the trailing vines, and purple grapes
as well. Both these and those I am keeping for your
use.” The monster also promises strawberries, cherries, plums, and chestnuts, if only Galatea will
agree to marry him. Polyphemus also promises a
flock so great he cannot count the total; milk to
drink; and pets with which to play. None of his
many promises move the maiden to agree. Though
his promises are more practical than those of Marlowe’s shepherd, they are no more effective. The
Elizabethan poets looked back to classical Greek
and Roman literature for their inspiration, and a
close reading of many of the great Elizabethan texts
reveals a reliance on these earlier works. Although
Marlowe borrows a story from Ovid, he makes crucial changes. The shepherd is no longer a fright-
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The women in these
poems, who are only
nominally present as
objects, or in Raleigh’s case,
seemingly as a responder,
are silent voices in a
courtship dialogue that
excludes the very object of
the courtship.”
ening monster, and the reader does not learn if the
woman’s affections have already been promised to
another lover. One of the most important aspects
of Ovid’s story that Marlowe does not borrow is
that, in Ovid, the woman has a voice; indeed, it is
she who tells the story to Scylla. Just as Marlowe
ignores the woman’s voice, so too do most of the
responses to his poem.
Most replies to Marlowe’s poem are constructed in a parallel lyrical style that mirrors the
original text. Raleigh’s answer to Marlowe, “The
Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” is constructed in
rhyming couplets, but the simple and direct lines
mirror Marlowe’s style. The first line establishes
that the woman does not see time as a limitless opportunity for the shepherd and his love to enjoy one
another. Instead, the female speaker begins with the
qualifying statement, “If all the world and love
were young,” which reminds the shepherd that time
is not static; the world and love are no longer
young, since even love inevitably grows old. The
second stanza begins with the word “Time,” which
once again counters Marlowe’s shepherd, who
would claim that all the pleasure was theirs for the
taking. Raleigh’s speaker reminds readers that even
pleasure must eventually come to an end. Rather
than the optimism of Marlowe, Raleigh infuses his
female speaker with a darker, more realistic tone
that recognizes that “flowers do fade” and that the
clothing he promises and the “beds of roses” will
“Soon break, soon wither, soon [be] forgotten.” In
Raleigh’s poem, Philomel, the nightingale, replaces
the melodious birds of Marlowe’s poem. Nightingales sing only in the spring during the breeding
season. Their song is not infinite, nor is time.
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Christopher Marlowe’s lengthy narrative work
“Hero and Leander” (c. 1593) is a mythological
erotic poem that tells the story of two tragic
lovers. It can be found in Christopher Marlowe:
The Complete Poems, published in 2000 by
Everyman.
• Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (c. 1592), which is a response to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd
to His Love,” can be found in The Poems of Sir
Walter Raleigh (1951), as well as in numerous
anthologies and on many online sites.
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written about 8 A.D., is
an epic that contains a story of the creation of
the world and links together many early myths
and legends. Filled with stories of gods, goddesses, and mere mortals, Metamorphoses is
often described as one of the most beautifully
written texts in existence. It was also a source
for many writers who followed, including Marlowe and Shakespeare.
recitation of Marlowe’s poem by a Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans. The Arden Third Series
edition, published in 1999, contains a comprehensive selection of notes that will aid any
reader not familiar with Shakespeare’s texts.
• Diane Ackerman’s poem “A Fine, A Private
Place” is a modern seduction poem. It can be
found in her collection Jaguar of Sweet Laughter (1991). As a sequel to Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress,” Ackerman’s poem brings the poetic
tradition begun by Marlowe into the twentieth
century. Ackerman’s poem is available in several anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
• Dr. Faustus (c. 1589) is Marlowe’s best known
and most frequently performed play. This play
focuses on a doctor who sells his soul to the
devil in an attempt to learn all the knowledge
known to man.
• William Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry
Wives of Windsor (1597) contains a mangled
• A Dead Man in Deptford (1996), by Anthony
Burgess, is a fictionalized account of Marlowe’s
life that emphasizes the dramatic events, including the accusations of murder and espionage
that circulated while Marlowe was still alive.
Burgess also explores the rumors of assassination and political intrigue that surrounded Marlowe’s death.
Raleigh’s pragmatic female speaker ends the poem
with the observation that she would willingly come
and be his love, if only “could youth last” indefinitely. Although Raleigh employs a female speaker
to respond to Marlowe’s shepherd, the reader does
not hear the female voice. Instead the voice is that
of Raleigh pretending to be a woman. The unheard
woman of Marlowe’s poem remains a missing witness to the shepherd’s pleas.
Donne’s poem “The Bait” actually repeats the
first two lines of Marlowe’s poem, adding only that
this shepherd has “new pleasures” to experience.
Where Marlowe’s poem inhabits an imaginary
world, Donne’s speaker describes a very real world.
Where Marlowe’s shepherd offers enticements to
convince the woman—beds of roses, posies to envelop her, and clothing to cover her—the speaker
in Donne’s poem invites the woman to remove her
clothing and go skinny dipping in the river with
him. Where Marlowe offers the artificial and idyllic world of the pastoral poem, Donne embraces the
eroticism of love poetry. If she “wilt swim in that
live bath,” the fish “will amorously to thee swim.”
The sexual suggestion is much more obvious and
more real than in Marlowe’s poem, where the suggestion to come and live with the shepherd is subtly woven into the “pleasures prove” of the entire
countryside. These are the “new” pleasures that
• Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”
(1681) appears in Andrew Marvell, published in
1990 by Oxford.
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Donne’s speaker promises; his is the real world
where the couple swims nude in the river. The male
speaker concedes control to the woman, to whom
even the fish pay homage:
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.
Donne’s speaker even promises the woman
that if she does not wish to be seen by other observers, she might darken the sun or moon, since
he needs “not their light, having thee.” Donne’s
speaker does not waste his time on pleas for the
woman to come and enjoy the “valleys, groves,
hills and fields” of Marlowe’s shepherd, and he has
no need to promise elaborate beds or clothing to
entice her. The reason for the lack of promises becomes evident in the final two stanzas, in which
the speaker says that the woman does not need the
fancy silks that are often used to “Bewitch poor
fishes’ wand’ring eyes.” The woman is herself
“thine own bait,” and the “fish that is not catched
thereby, / Alas, is wiser far than I.” Donne’s poem
challenges the notion that it is the woman who is
being wooed; she is the one who is in control. Although the woman’s voice is silent, her strengths
are recognized; however, it is worth pointing out
that her strength lies primarily in her ability to seduce the man with her nude body. This is clearly
not an intellectual victory.
It would be easy to study Marlowe’s poem,
Raleigh’s answer, and Donne’s response and limit
the focus of these poems to the witty exchanges of
the male poets, which many scholars argue were often written to impress other male poets. Except as
object or in the case of Raleigh’s male-pretendingto-be-female persona, these poems are not about
women, and only in the Donne poem is the woman
even present. There is nothing within the poems,
themselves, that might suggest a female audience. A
different way to read these poems is suggested by
Ilona Bell’s research. In Elizabethan Women and the
Poetry of Courtship, Bell examines the role of
courtship poetry and argues that much of this poetry
was written as part of the courtship process and was
intended to be a part of the courtship formula. Bell
suggests, “The great Elizabethan lyric sequences
typically begin by identifying the poet’s mistress as
the primary lyric audience.” This premise contradicts many of the ideas about Elizabethan seduction
poems, in particular, which, while nominally about
women, were usually thought to appeal to a male
readership. Bell is concerned that the female object
is being displaced by twentieth-century critics who
examine the Elizabethan poets’ exchanges of man-
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uscripts and see, in that friendly poetic exchange,
only male authority and a female reader who has virtually disappeared from the poem.
Readers might wonder if the female object in
Marlowe’s poem was real. The reader of this poem
only notes the absence of name or genuine identifiers, and since so much of the poem is based on
improbabilities, it might seem reasonable to assume
that an actual mistress is just as unlikely to exist.
However, Bell cautions against envisioning the
shepherd’s woman as only a rhetorical device, as a
“shadowy figment of male imagination.” Bell suggests the male poet has an expectation that the
woman will respond to his wooing and that this expectation is suggested within the poem itself. Bell
points out that “many of these poems also contain
traces of a private lyric dialogue between a male
poet/lover and a private female reader/listener.”
According to Bell,
[T]he male lyric voice is inflected by the expectation
of the female reader’s answering response. The
poet/lover is always trying to anticipate or influence
her response, but he neither writes her script nor directs her performance.
Although Bell’s evidence is at times quite
compelling, in the case of Marlowe’s often speculated homosexuality, her argument weakens. Since
it is unlikely that Marlowe would have used “The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love” to court a
woman, it is reasonable to assume that the purpose
of the poem is to display both Marlowe’s mastery
of the pastoral tradition and his wittiness in remaking that same tradition. At the same time, the
poem issues a challenge to his male readers, to
whom he would have circulated the manuscript, to
further improve upon the shepherd’s invitation.
Raleigh’s and Donne’s responses, therefore, are
more likely to be a part of the male poet’s attempt
at witty repartee than any actual courtship process.
The Elizabethan poetic tradition of love poetry
did not meet with universal approval. Sir Philip
Sidney’s lengthy prose work, The Defense of
Poesy, is Sidney’s effort to defend the work of poets to the Puritan writer Stephen Gossett, who in
his School of Abuse argues that poetry is a waste
of time, that it is composed of lies, and that it
teaches sinful practices. Sidney’s response to these
claims argues that the role of literature in a civilized society is to educate and to inspire those who
read literature to ethical and virtuous actions. In
writing about lyrical poetry—especially those
works he labels as poems that “come under the banner of irresistible love”—Sidney suggests these
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poems, “if I were a mistress would never persuade
me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery
speeches.” Thus Sidney refutes the argument that
the readers of these poems would be swayed to believe in their reality; instead they would be entertained, which Sidney thought was an essential
component for educating the mind. Readers of Marlowe’s poem would not believe the shepherd’s exaggerated claim that the delights of eternal spring
are available just for the taking; nor would readers
believe the shepherd’s offer to clothe his love in
an endless layering of flowers. But readers would
learn something about pastoral poetry, and they
would be entertained by the poetic responses from
Marlowe’s contemporaries.
In reading Marlowe’s poem and the responses
that followed, what readers learn is that women appear in these poems not only as silent objects but
also as prey for the male seducer. The image in seduction poems is that of the male seducer of a silent
or absent female. Mary Anne Ferguson suggests in
her introduction to the first edition of Images of
Women in Literature that the image of women in
literature “is the opposite of the all-powerful seductress,” which Elizabethan men were often
warned to avoid. Instead of the threatening image
of woman as seductress that the clergy attacked in
their church sermons, the poetry of the period transformed the image of the dangerous and seductive
woman into a voiceless sex object whose primary
function was the fulfillment of fantasies and as
man’s prey. However, this was an image that also
had limitations. Ferguson argues, “It is difficult for
a woman to be viewed in this single role [as sex
object] for a long time.” Inevitably, the realities of
day-to-day life, the bearing of children, the nursing of the sick, and the duties of running a household simply intruded on the artificial image of
women in any role as limiting as that of either seductress or sexual object. Marlowe seems to recognize this fact, since he makes the shepherd’s
desire only a transitory one. Sidney knew that there
were “many things [that] may be told which cannot be showed—if they know the difference betwixt reporting and representing.”
In Marlowe’s poem, he is not reporting on reality; in its place he is representing an image that
does not exist in Elizabethan life. Although his
woman is objectified and silent, Marlowe never
pretends that she is real. As a result, Marlowe fulfills one of the tenets of poetry that Sidney thought
important—the obligation to “that delightful teaching which is the end of poesy.” Marlowe, Raleigh,
and Donne created poetry that transforms and
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reworks the traditional art of poetry into something
new and exciting. Their readers can only benefit
and learn from these poetic lessons.
At one point in Woolf’s essay, she imagines
what life might have been like had Shakespeare had
a sister, Judith, who was his equal in genius. Woolf
concludes that genius could not have been born to
women, whose limited existence and opportunities
began “almost before they were out of the nursery,
who were forced to it by their parents and held to it
by all the power of law and custom.” Marlowe’s poems and the best-known of the responses are all the
compositions of men. With few exceptions, women
in the Elizabethan poetic tradition were restricted to
the role of nameless, voiceless objects. Woolf believed that the power to claim that voiceless woman
as her own was the duty of twentieth-century women.
Perhaps the next response to Marlowe’s invitation
will be that of a twenty-first-century woman poet who
will once again transform the poetic tradition.
Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” in Poetry for Students,
Thomson Gale, 2005.
M. Thomas Hester
In the following essay, Hester examines literary circles in late-Elizabethan England and John
Donne’s motivation in writing “The Baite,” his response to Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd.”
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In this sense, most
important to an
understanding of Donne’s
‘impulses’ in response to the
poems of Marlowe and
Raleigh—but especially to
Marlowe’s ‘Passionate
Shepheard’—is their
ideological center.”
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Susanne Woods
In the following essay, Woods examines various early printings and origins of “The Passionate
Shepherd” to determine which should be the standard text.
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I argue, then, that
the transmission of these
poems was largely aural
rather than scribal. The
poems were songs, and
evidently popular songs.”
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Louis H. Leiter
In the following essay, Leiter explores mythological references to the celebration of the Goddess in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
Every reader of Marlowe knows that he had a
double objective in writing poetry, “to tell the story
. . . of lovers and to load every rift with mythological ore” (Christopher Marlowe, F. S. Boas). But not
every reader understands the organic relevance of
Marlowe’s aesthetic manipulation of myth. Nor is it
quite so clear that in addition to the overt uses of
mythological figures he often employed submerged
allusions which obliquely point to the classical
world. In “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,”
he seems to have faith that his readers would delight
in covering and reconstructing the organic relevance
of these mythological shards. One is forced to furnish from his own cultural heritage the entire myth
elicited by the given segment. Such fragmented
mythology, functioning much as allusion does, gives
the poetry a great density of reference by identifying the world and activities of men with those of the
gods, or by erasing the barriers between them, much
as a Wallace Stevens might do in “Sunday Morning.” The responsibility of the reader to rebuild the
myth even increases its effectivenes.
These submerged mythic fragments, if viewed
in detail and in the dense context of the poem—
context of action and tone, of sound and structure—
can lead to a new awareness of Marlowe’s poem
of which Boas remarks that it is “the one lyric that
we can identify from his pen . . . more notable for
its associations man its content, though it has its
own silvery charm.”
The first stanza is a kind of preparation for an
elaborate ritual enrobement that will eventually
transform and deify the mistress who will then be
celebrated as the Goddess Flora in the final stanza.
Yet at the outset there are hints of this change and
the magical power it will give the lovers. The shepherd says, “Come live with me and be my love, /
And we will all the pleasures prove / That valley,
groves, hills, and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields.” After rehearsing “Valleys,” “groves,”
“hills,” Marlowe revises and repeats that pattern,
forcing the words to perform again, but now
changed: “fields,” “woods,” “steepy mountain.”
This new view of the landscape in its repetition,
variation, and expansion of the first landscape, defines poetically the pleasurable enlargement of experience contingent upon living and loving. Love
for Marlowe’s human beings results in a projection
of human vitality into nature as though, she had
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expanded in sympathetic imitation of the lovers’
“living and loving.” The second pattern mimes the
pleasurable enlargement and expansion of Being
that love’s landscape “yields”: when you and I live
and love, all nature grows with us. This transformed
landscape imagery yields an expanded quantity and
altered quality of love’s pleasures as though nature
and lovers were mutually charged with their vitality: not cultivated “groves,” but wild “woods,” not
low “hills,” but “steepy mountain.” Even the general “valleys” becomes “fields,” implying, among
other things, a harvest, as the rest of the poem shows
in its flowers and lambs. Then what is only implied
here is projected into the pastoral imagery in stanzas three and six, the latter defining the beloved as
a floral goddess, or Flora herself, the object of a fertility ceremony, in which, decked in flowers and
wearing the myrtle-leaf gown (also identified with
Venus), she is celebrated by other lovers.
This sudden emerging of an emotionally
charged landscape is conveyed not only through the
expanding descriptive details but also through a
double use of language whose very ambivalence
catches some of the tension of love itself. For example, the word “fields” plays wittily on the word
“feels,” suggesting an actual response from the
landscape, as we should expect in a mythic representation of natural and human vitality. The word
“woods,” impassioned madness, appears in an important initial position in the line. In this company,
“mountain” yields a play on “mounting,” the very
expansion of feeling I have been describing.
“Steepy” defines the experience more exactly: the
feeling of love is not only lofty but precipitous—
paradoxically capable of mounting or declining as
will be emphasized in the “falls” of stanza two.
The experience of “feeling” love, the transformative or expansive effect of passion on human beings has permeated the seemingly simple pastoral
landscape. What might have commenced as an
Ovidian stance, flares into individualistic poetic
power when Marlowe reaches the pun on “fields.”
He has discovered the enormity of his subject, its
inclusiveness and power to force nature to yield
pleasures to lovers, while becoming a landscape in
extension of their passions, and made passionate
because they are passionate. Transformation is archetypically sounded here, a sudden quickening of
human excitement and an accompanying vitalizing
of nature, a process usual in Marlowe’s work.
Stance becomes ritual because immediately Marlowe commences to describe the experience of human passion, he presses that description into
transforming his lovers into vital cosmic powers.
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The first stanza is a
kind of preparation for an
elaborate ritual enrobement
that will eventually
transform and deify the
mistress who will then be
celebrated as the Goddess
Flora in the final stanza.”
In the first line of the poem, Marlowe establishes what might be called the meaning of the “l”
sound for the poem: exactly what “live” and “love”
make it mean. The vitality of the lovers’ passion
will also be conveyed by sound. The initial “l’s”
are then pulled into the words “valleys” and “hills,”
and made triumphantly to sound in the “yields” that
appears in an important position at the end of the
stanza. This strategy is to make dynamic with “life”
and “love” such aspects of pastoral scenery as
“hills,” “fields,” and “falls,” to make “will all,”
“pleasures,” and “yields” assume symbolic nuances
even when living and loving are not literally mentioned. The symbolic, dynamic sound of the “l”
forces a metamorphosis of the pastoral images in
support of the strategy I have suggested.
Some such idea of vitalizing nature through its
imitation of human love is then introduced into the
tableau of the lovers sitting on rocks, the unity and
harmony of man and animal, bird, water, and earth
in the second stanza: “And we will sit upon the rocks,
/ Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, / By shallow rivers to whose falls / Melodious birds sing
madrigals,” Here the shepherd defines further a certain quality of love with which he wishes to entice
the beloved. The lovers on the durable rocks suggest
not the intoxication of passion, bur the perdurable
quality of the Passionate Shepherd’s love (strengthened by the double “ll” in “will”). The “l” in “shallow rivers” carries “live and love” into the waters.
The “falls” to which the birds sing madrigals defines
that precipitousness of love announced in “steepy
mountain,” and the “madrigal” suggests a song to
the complexities of a many-sided, passionate experience, and thus to the lovers themselves. Admittedly
it might still seem odd to have birds sing to falls,
unless we knew that a “madrigal” literally means “an
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everlasting.” If “falls” with its double “l” implies the
possibility of the passing of love, the living birds
sing in counteraction a song of permanence. At the
same time, “madrigal” with its “l” defines all lovers
singing in harmony of the durability of love or the
eternal return of the celebration of passion like that
suggested in the yearly May ceremonies of songs
and dance of the Goddess Flora in Stanza six. There
is also a hint in the “Shepherds feeding their flocks”
that the Passionate Shepherd defines love as a
mutual nourishment, watchfulness, and protection,
ideas dramatized in stanzas three, four, and five. The
“flocks” of this one furnish the “kirtle” of three and
the “woolen gown” of four and five. But this is a
process of transformation from sheep’s wool to finished gown, something like the change involved in
the “melodious birds” who naturally are transformed
into “singing shepherds’ swains” in stanza six.
Natural vitality and transformation are further
dramatized in the promise of stanza three: “And I
will make thee beds of roses / And the thousand
fragrant posies, / A cap of flowers, and a kirtle /
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. . . .” Here
metamorphosis of the beloved mistress becomes
overt, and the power of passion dramatically creative
and transformative. The lover creates a ritual enrobement to transform the beloved into a goddess of
nature: Flora, the goddess of spring, flowers, flock,
birds, and life itself. By a slight extension, she becomes the goddess of the blossom of youth and its
pleasures—those pleasures they will prove in stanza
one, and those that move them in the final stanza.
What seems to be offered in a few details in this
stanza is a form of the festival of Flora in Rome. The
men celebrants were called upon to deck their animals in flowers, especially roses, and the women
wore the usually forbidden gay dresses, as apparently
the mistress in the poem will. At these festivals, the
Romans represented the goddess crowned with flowers and holding a horn of plenty. We notice correspondences in the poem: the shepherd’s beloved will
wear a cap or crown of flowers, like Flora, and then
will put on a “kirtle” covered with leaves from the
“myrtle”—the tree sacred to Venus, Goddess of
Love, but also included within Flora’s circle of
influence. (Flora in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is a
good example). The beloved’s beds—not one, but
several—suggest her vital office, her vitality; and
they are made of roses and a plenitude of other flowers. This invitation to the beloved is then an offering
to become Flora through participation in a miniature
adornment ritual in which human passion, divine passion, and natural vitality flow together to quicken
landscapes, human beings, and beds.
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The Shepherd’s beloved, lying on beds of roses
and posies, sacred to Flora and Venus, wearing the
cap of flowers identified with both goddesses, and
dressed in leaves from the myrtle tree, will, because
she dared to live and love passionately, be deified as
Flora and embodied as Venus in her multiple aspects.
Marlowe revitalizes two mythic fragments by
fusing them when Flora, or natural vitality, puts on
the gown of Venus, or human love. This is not confusing if we recall that to the Neoplatonists there
were several Venuses: Venus Urania (Heavenly
Love), Venus Felix (Pleasurable Love), Venus
Dione (Vitality of Nature), etc. We now notice that
the “melodious birds” of the former stanza are
linked to the doves, swans, and sparrows sacred to
Venus. The “woods” and “mountain” of stanza one
are related, as in one version of the myth, to Venus’s
“being obliged . . . often to visit the woods and solitary retreats of Mount Ida” to love the shepherd Anchises. The Passionate Shepherd’s obligation create
the “kirtle” are probably linked to Venus’s famous
“girdle,” which gave “beauty, grace, elegance, excited love and rekindled extinguished flames.”
The word “will,” by this time symbolic of the
overwhelming determinative power of the Shepherd’s love, continues to carry and enlarge the
sound symbolism of “l.” “L” is caught up then in
“flowers.” And the “l’s” in Flora-Venus’ “myrtle
leaves” reinforces this. “All” with its double “ll”
suggests the magnitude of the transformation, the
real extent of the “myrtle leaf” coverage—not hills
of passion, but mountains of fertility.
Marlowe’s adornment ritual moves forward
then as the deified beloved. Flora-Venus, moves
further into her metamorphosis: “A gown made of
the finest wool / Which from our pretty lambs we
pull, / Fair lined slippers for the cold, / With buckles of the purest gold. . . .” The “Myrtle leaf Kirtle” is transformed from natural to human product,
from leaves to wool, while “wool” and “lambs” associated with the beloved identify her with Flora
whose province included sheep as well as flowers.
The sensuous pulling of wool from lambs suggests
a further transformation from lamb-like innocence
to maturity, the crowning gift of love. The adornment rite has been fulfilled in physical nature because the “flocks” of stanza two have yielded
“lambs” here. Thus ritual birth into maturity and
initiation into the community are celebrated in the
final stanza by dancing and singing swains, servants all and lovers too.
Once dressed in wool, the beloved will personify the goddess of the fertility of flocks. She
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personifies too what nature in stanza one, and the
“flocks” of stanza two yield: a part of the process
of change which passion entails. Still another gift
of love, the “fair lined slippers,” which are “for the
cold,” symbolize the protection and beauty which
love offers. The phrase “Buckless of purest gold”
goes on to suggest both the unitive quality of love
and its value. Marlowe elaborates this in the
following stanza with the “belt,” “clasps,” and
“studs,” which symbolize much the same thing.
With fairly strict coherence the “l” symbolism
pulls all other meanings into this stanza. “Live” and
“love” now are linked to “wool” as a product of
love’s vitality on the level of the animal, but transformed to the level of the human and divine in the
enrobement rite. “Lamb” validates this by suggesting the progeny of love, the continuation of life,
and the source of woolen gowns. “Lined slippers”
are love as warmth, protection, or comfort, and oppose “cold,” as the “l” opposes “life” to death. Then
“buckles of gold” links “slippers” to the unity and
value of the experience of passion.
This process of deification, of defining passion
and its effects on the human being, continues in the
following stanza, where the beloved is to be adorned
with “straw,” “ivy,” “coral,” and “amber.” “A belt
of straw and ivy buds, / With coral clasps and amber studs; / And if these pleasures may thee move,
/ Come live with me, and be my love.” Variously
interpreted in the Renaissance, “ivy” could symbolize attachment, undying affection, fidelity, and
eternal life, though it might also, like the ambiguous word “steepy,” be deadly. Yet this is still another aspect of Marlowe’s definition of passion.
“Coral” extends the passion until it permeates the
seas, achieving what the pun on “fields” achieves,
the response of nature to the shepherd’s love. In pictorial art, coral symbolized protection against evil,
presumably because identified with the Star of the
Sea, the Virgin Mary. Used with “belt,” “clasps,” it
is identified with their meanings: protecting, locking in, holding up, embracing. The stanza ends
where the first one began, but true to his theme of
transformation, instead of “pleasures” that “prove”
Marlowe substitutes “pleasures” that “move.”
This bait, as John Donne so wittily wrote in
mockery, is symbolic of the transformation of a mere
shepherd lass into Flora-Venus, with all that deification entails of protection, worth, spiritual, and material rewards. Included in the deification is the
worship or celebration announced in “madrigals”
and carried out in the song and dance of the following stanza. In this fifth stanza, Marlowe seems
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to emphasize and strengthen the symbolic power of
the sound of “l.” For here the sound is identified with
that protection embodied in quickening love, and,
through the words “belt,” “choral,” “clasps”—an aural and visual montage—it is further identified with
something like order, harmony, binding, even
beauty. “Pleasures,” with its “l” validates the initial
“pleasures” the lover will prove. The proof of
“prove” has been the gradual deification through active experience in passion. The stanza ends with the
key words that identify the “l” of stanza one: “Live
with me and be my love,” as though recurring here
to strengthen the symbolic meaning of the sound.
Movement is very important in the poem. It
appears complacently in “come,” “prove,” “make,”
“pull,” and powerfully in the word “move,” which
appears twice. It suggests dynamic change. The water falls, being movement, and coming immediately
after the first stanza which contains the invitation
to movement, signal that the process of deification
is under way, and this is probably one reason why
the melodious birds sing their songs to the falls.
This movement is a kind of tableau of the ritual
process of enrobement for deification which the
beloved would undergo if she were moved to “live
and love.” The movement is implicit in the expanding amplitude of the mountain, the melodiousness of everlasting songs, the leafing of the
myrtle, the celebration in spring, all punctuated
with the power of the poet-mover himself.
Marlowe emphasizes this in the stanza when
“move” is projected into a new context. No longer
appearing with “pleasures,” it is now linked to
“mind,” which I read as a Platonic shift from the
purely emotional “pleasures” that one would prove
early in a relationship to movement more in keeping with deification—those of “mind,” of what one
thinks, rationally considers, and is intelligent about.
Moved by all this, the beloved would have been
completely transformed. The next step, then, suggested in “Madrigals,” is her celebration by worshippers as the goddess of natural vitality: “The
shepherds” swains shall dance and sing / For thy delight each May morning: / If these delights thy mind
may move / Then live with me and be my love.”
The celebration of Flora took place during the first
week of May and ended in dancing, singing, and
feasting. Special crowns of flowers, usually roses,
were worn, special dresses sported, and special license granted to hunt in the forum. Here Marlowe
creates something resembling that celebration. The
beloved will be the one for whom the “Shepherds’
swains shall dance and sing.” The transformation
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completed, the goddess of natural fertility will receive homage to “delight her mind” and to move her.
How much of “light” is rocked away in the play on
“delight” is impossible to measure, though in Platonic reasoning light is an analogue of intelligible
reality; light to the eye is as truth to the mind.
The poem ends where it began with the third
repetition of the “live . . . love” formula, and the
delights the Passionate Shepherd hopes “may
move” his beloved in order that she will be celebrated with “delight each May morning.”
Transformation being reciprocal for lovers,
Marlowe hints at its effect on the Shepherd himself:
he is a maker, a seer, a puller, a mover, an animator, sad most importantly, a lover, a worshipper, as
the various verbs reveal his gradual metamorphosis.
For the new Flora, a congregation of shepherd
swains dance and sing of gratification, of joy, of
pleasant satisfaction and delight in life. Music and
dance now symbolize the harmonious spiritualization and unity of shepherd, shepherdess, gods, goddesses with the swains—of man’s continuity with
his gods, animals, land, and sea. Even this communal identification is appropriate, for the Passionate
Shepherd alone was his beloved’s worshipper before
deification. Now with her congregation of shepherds
singing and dancing in ritual harmony, she is what
Jane Harrison says (Themis) of primitive gods: they
are “collective enthusiasms uttered, formulated.”
Source: Louis H. Leiter, “Deification through Love: Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,’” in College
English, Vol. 27, No. 6, March 1966, pp. 444–49.
Sources
Bell, Ilona, “Elizabethan Poetics of Courtship,” in Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, Cambridge
University Press, 1998, pp. 15–32.
Donne, John, “The Bait,” in John Donne’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, edited by A. L. Clements, Norton
Critical ed., Norton, 1966, pp. 22–27.
Ferguson, Mary Anne, “Introduction to the First Edition,”
in Images of Women in Literature, 2d ed., Houghton
Mifflin, 1977, p. 13.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2d ed., Vol. 2, Harvard University
Press, 1984, pp. 281–89.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, “Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” in
Selected Writings, edited by Gerald Hammond, Fyfield
Books, 1984, pp. 31–32.
Shakespeare, William, Richard III, Arden Third Series ed.,
edited by Antony Hammond, Routledge, 1994.
Sidney, Sir Philip, The Defense of Poesy, Ginn, 1898,
pp. 49–52.
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Woolf, Virginia, “A Room of One’s Own,” in A Room of
One’s Own and Other Essays, Folio Society, 2000, pp. 51–56.
Further Reading
Cheney, Patrick, The Cambridge Companion to Christopher
Marlowe, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
This book contains essays by sixteen different scholars who comment on Marlowe’s life and his texts, as
well as his influence on later writers.
Clay, Christopher, Rural Society: Landowners, Peasants, and
Labourers, 1500–1750, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
This book details the social and economic history of
rural England during the period from 1500 to 1750.
There is information about wages and profits associated with estate management, as well as details about
the lives and status of laborers.
Cole, Douglas, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance
of Tragedy, Praeger, 1995.
Cole examines the major literary traditions of Marlowe’s era and how he transformed them into themes
fitting his own purpose.
Kuriyama, Constance Brown, Christopher Marlowe: A
Renaissance Life, Cornell University Press, 2002.
This biography of Marlowe examines Marlowe’s life
by placing him in a cultural context. Rather than just
focus on dates and facts, the author examines the
English education system and the politics and society in which Marlowe lived.
O’Hara, Diana, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the
Making of Marriage in Tudor England, Manchester University Press, 2002.
This text provides a study of courtship in sixteenthcentury England. Much of O’Hara’s source material
is taken from church records and from legal documents and wills. The book is an interesting source of
information about social customs and the economics
of courtship.
Picard, Liza, Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London, St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
This text provides a picture of London life at the time
when Marlowe walked the streets. There are descriptions of the buildings and gardens, the shops and
palaces, the theatres and streets of the city. Picard
also includes details about domestic life, the city’s
water supply, and diseases common to Londoners.
Riggs, David, The World of Christopher Marlowe, Henry
Holt, 2005.
In a book that the publisher describes as a “definitive biography,” Riggs examines Marlowe’s life, the
period in which he lived, and the mystery of how and
why he was killed.
Stretton, Tim, et al, eds., Women Waging Law in Elizabethan
England, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
This text examines how women were involved in lawsuits in Elizabethan England. There is a history of
women’s legal rights, including information on how
marriage or widowhood affected women’s legal rights.
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Pineapples
and Pomegranates
Paul Muldoon’s “Pineapples and Pomegranates”
was first published in his collection Moy Sand and
Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2003. Muldoon’s poem recalls the speaker’s
first encounter with a pineapple, as a thirteen-yearold boy growing up in Northern Ireland. The
speaker muses on the pineapple’s significance as
a symbol of generosity or “munificence.” The
speaker then comments on the difference between
“munificence” and “munitions” and expresses a
wish for peace somewhere on the planet. The poem
concludes with the speaker’s assertion that he is
talking about pineapples and not pomegranates.
Muldoon dedicated the poem to the memory of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who died in 2000.
Although the poem is partly about the difference between two fruits, it also alludes to the ongoing conflicts in Muldoon’s native country of
Northern Ireland and in Amichai’s home of Israel.
Like other Muldoon poems, “Pineapples and
Pomegranates” addresses the slippery quality of
language, as well as the elusive nature of peace. In
this poem, Muldoon also employs a deft and unique
use of rhyme, word-shifting, and repetition to emphasize his themes. The fourteen-line poem can
also be considered a version of the sonnet.
Paul Muldoon
2002
Author Biography
Muldoon was born June 20, 1951 in Portadown,
County Armagh, Northern Ireland. The son of
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Muldoon’s other writings include translated works,
children’s books, plays, and his lectures on Irish
literature.
From 1973 to 1986, Muldoon worked as a radio and television producer in Belfast for the British
Broadcasting Company. Since 1987, he has lived
in the United States, where he is a professor of humanities and creative writing at Princeton University. Muldoon has received many distinguished
awards, including the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize; a 1996
American Academy of Arts and Letters award in
literature; a 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry and 2003
Griffin International Prize for excellence in poetry
for Moy Sand and Gravel; a 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award; and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. Muldoon is married to novelist Jean
Hanff Korelitz and has two children.
Poem Summary
Paul Muldoon
Patrick Muldoon, a laborer and market gardener,
and Brigid Regan, a schoolteacher, Muldoon grew
up Catholic in the mostly Protestant town of Collegelands near a village called the Moy. As a young
teenager, Muldoon studied the Gaelic language and
Irish literature at St. Patrick’s College, where he
also began writing poetry. He also studied literature and philosophy at Queen’s University in
Belfast, where he met and worked with a number
of prominent Irish writers who later became known
as the Ulster Poets. This group of writers included
Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, who became Muldoon’s tutor
at the university and who encouraged Muldoon to
write poetry.
In 1971, Muldoon published his first collection of poems, Knowing My Place. In 1973, he
published New Weather, which was praised for
its verbal virtuosity and which established Muldoon’s reputation as an innovative force in contemporary Irish poetry. Muldoon went on to publish
other poetry collections, including Meeting the
British (1987), The Annals of Chile (1994), Poems
1968–1998 (2001), and Moy Sand and Gravel
(2002), in which “Pineapples and Pomegranates”
appears. He has also edited several anthologies, including The Faber Book of Beasts (1997) and The
Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986).
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Lines 1–2
Muldoon begins “Pineapples and Pomegranates” as a personal anecdote or story by recalling
the speaker’s first encounter with a pineapple, at
the age of thirteen. The poet emphasizes the sense
of touch in recalling this experience as he writes,
“I would grapple / with my first pineapple.” These
two lines establish the pattern of rhyming the last
words of every two lines, as in the full rhyme of
“grapple” with “pineapple.” Throughout the poem,
Muldoon continues to use rhymed couplets,
rhyming every two lines.
Lines 3–4
In the next two lines, the speaker further describes his memory of the pineapple, noting, “its
exposed breast / setting itself as another test.” The
metaphor in line 3 personifies the fruit by likening
the pineapple to a female body part. By describing
the pineapple in this way, Muldoon emphasizes the
fruit’s exoticness and its seductive qualities. In
these lines, Muldoon uses the exact end-rhyme of
“breast” and “test.”
Lines 5–6
In lines 5 and 6, the idea of the pineapple as
an object of temptation is further reinforced, as the
speaker explicitly states that the pineapple is a test
“of my willpower.” However, the speaker also
notes that even then he knew “that it stood for
something other than itself alone.” This quality of
standing for something else seems to add to the
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pineapple’s mystery for the boy. This line also begins the speaker’s musings on things other than the
pure memory of the pineapple.
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marked by the beginning of increased civil strife in
Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles.
Lines 11–13
Lines 7–8
In these two lines, the speaker claims that he
had “absolutely no sense / of its being a worldwide
symbol of munificence.” Muldoon overtly points
out the pineapple’s function as a symbol of munificence, or generosity, while contrasting this adult
awareness with his former naiveté. By using the
word “symbol,” Muldoon also emphasizes the
speaker’s position not only as an adult, but as a literary person and, presumably, a poet.
Notably, in line 8, Muldoon also finally concludes the sentence he began at the start of the
poem. The length of this sentence creates a sense
of fluidity, reflecting the speaker’s free associations
from the initial recollection of an adolescent experience. In running the sentence across the first
seven lines, Muldoon uses enjambment, rather than
stopping sentences where the lines end. This long
sentence also makes up the first eight lines of the
poem, which form an octave. Traditional sonnets
often begin with an octave that establishes a situation or question, which is then resolved, or answered, in the ensuing six lines, or sestet.
From the end of line 10 through line 13, the
speaker expresses a desire for peace as he continues to muse on the meanings of the words “munificence” and “munitions”: “As if the open hand
/ might, for once, put paid / to the hand grenade /
in one corner of the planet.” The act of munificence
or generosity is expressed by the metaphor of the
extended open hand, which the speaker wishes
would put to rest the munitions represented by the
hand grenade. In addition to using end-rhyme again
in lines 11 and 12, Muldoon also repeats the word
“hand” in these lines. By repeating the word in different contexts, “open hand” and “hand grenade,”
the poet again emphasizes how easily a shift from
munificence to munitions (and back) can occur.
The phrase “in one corner of the planet” highlights the fact that violent conflict is a worldwide
phenomenon. Muldoon dedicated the poem to the
memory of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. In addition to strife in Northern Ireland, Muldoon is likely
referring to Amichai’s home of Israel, another site
of continual conflict, where permanent peace has
remained elusive.
Lines 9–10
Line 14
In line 9, Muldoon follows the long first sentence with a very short one: “Munificence—right?”
The brevity of the sentence expresses the interruptive quality of this new thought, which departs from
the speaker’s previous musings on the pineapple.
The em dash and the question “right?” also introduce an element of doubt, as the speaker shifts from
thinking about the pineapple to thinking about the
word “munificence.” Muldoon follows this sentence with, “Not munitions, if you understand /
where I’m coming from.”
The shift from “munificence” to “munitions”
is striking, as the two words sound similar but
convey radically different meanings. “Munitions”
refers to armaments or weapons, particularly explosives such as bombs or grenades. By slipping
from “munificence” to “munitions,” Muldoon subtly expresses how easily and quickly words and
ideas can change from benevolence to violence.
The end of the sentence reinforces this idea of the
slippery slope to violence. The casual figure of
speech “if you understand / where I’m coming
from” also refers to the poet’s country of origin,
Northern Ireland, a place marked by violent conflict. Muldoon’s adolescence during the 1960s was
Muldoon concludes the poem with one endstopped sentence: “I’m talking about pineapples—
right?—not pomegranates.” In this line, the poet
again invokes a shift from one word to another
similar-sounding word, “pineapples” to “pomegranates.” Although the words sound similar, the
symbolic meanings of the two fruits contrast
sharply. The poet has already stated that pineapples are a symbol of generosity. Pomegranates,
however, are a symbol of temptation that literally
lead to hell. In Greek myth, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the goddess of agriculture), is consigned to live six months of every year in the
underworld because she ate six pomegranate seeds,
given to her by Hades, king of the underworld. By
comparing pineapples and pomegranates, Muldoon
again shows how quickly things can shift from
beneficence to destruction.
Muldoon’s second use of the question “right?”
interrupts the final line and conveys the speaker’s
sense of doubt about what he is saying. Rather than
confidently offering the hope that peace is achievable, the poet-speaker doubts whether or not he
even knows about what he is talking, and the poem
concludes on an uncertain note.
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Research the history of the conflict, or Troubles,
in Northern Ireland from the 1960s through the
present day. Create a time line of events. Then
give an oral report discussing the nature of the
conflict, the parties or groups involved, and what
conditions have nurtured peace between opposing factions.
• After coming upon pineapples in the West
Indies, Christopher Columbus wrote about the
fruit, which was consumed as food and used in
wine-making. Imagine that you are Columbus
encountering the pineapple for the first time, and
write a short essay or a poem that describes the
fruit’s properties and your reactions to tasting a
pineapple for the first time.
• Research the history of pineapple cultivation in
Hawaii and its impact on the region. Write and
perform a play that shares this history, perhaps
The poem began as a personal recollection of
an innocent and mostly enjoyable adolescent memory. However, rather than offering a definitive answer to the octave, the poem’s last six lines, or
sestet, contrast with the first eight lines by focusing on adult doubts and preoccupations with world
violence. The short sentences, rhymes, repetitions,
and word shifts in the last six lines bolster the sense
that memory and reality are hard to pin down.
focusing on plantation laborers or the activities
of the Dole Company.
• Research how pineapples are grown on modern
plantations using mulch paper and other methods. Prepare and deliver a presentation that explains how pineapples are cultivated. Use charts,
photographs, and other graphics to aid you in
your presentation.
• According to Greek legend, Persephone, the
daughter of the goddess of agriculture, was forced
to spend half of every year in the underworld because she had eaten six pomegranate seeds. Research the legend of Persephone and then write
your own version of the tale as a play, a song, or
a poem. As you draft your piece, feel free to change
details such as how many seeds Persephone ate,
her motives, or the outcome of her action. Then
give a reading of your version of the legend.
that the fruit was a “worldwide symbol of munificence.” This largely sweet memory is soon overlaid
with references to the memory of civil violence,
which marked the poet’s later adolescence in Northern Ireland. Muldoon makes the transition from positive memory to disturbing memory by invoking a
series of similar sounding words, starting with “munificence” and “munitions.”
Mutability/Impermanence
Themes
Memory and Reminiscence
The poem begins with the poet-speaker’s recollection of his first encounter with a pineapple, as
a young adolescent of thirteen. He recalls the excitement he felt, and the fruit’s seductive and exotic
qualities. The speaker also remembers realizing that
part of the fruit’s seductive appeal lay in its mystery and in its symbolic importance. He notes too,
however, that as a young person he did not know
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Throughout the last six lines of the poem,
words mutate or change, as the speaker free associates from one idea to another. This happens first
with the shift from “munificence” to “munitions” in
line 9. Although the words sound similar and share
the first four letters, they bear very different meanings, as “munificence” refers to generosity and “munitions” refer to explosives. By juxtaposing these
words, Muldoon emphasizes the mutability of
words, and the idea that words, ideas, and perhaps
even things can shift with startling ease. This sense
of mutability is reinforced by the final word shift
from “pineapples” to “pomegranates” in line 14. In
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this final pairing, the shift is again from something
positive (the munficent pineapple) to something
more menacing, as pomegranates symbolize temptation that leads to time in the underworld.
Struggle and Conflict
The poem alludes to the violent conflict that took
place during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which
intensified during the 1960s and 1970s. Muldoon alludes to the conflict when he uses the word “munitions” while reminiscing about his youth. He refers to
the Troubles again when he adds, “if you understand
/ where I’m coming from,” since he literally comes
from Northern Ireland. Muldoon follows this sentence
with another that expresses a wish for peace, an end
to munitions such as “the hand grenade / in one corner of the planet.” The last part of this sentence may
also allude to the Arab-Israeli conflict in the homeland of Yehuda Amichai, to whose memory Muldoon
dedicates the poem. Throughout the late twentieth
century, both Northern Ireland and Israel were the
sites of ongoing violent conflict and struggle.
Doubt and Uncertainty
Muldoon conveys a sense of general uncertainty
by repeating the question “right?” in lines 9 and 14.
This questioning phrase undercuts the speaker’s confidence. The sense of doubt is reinforced by the mutability or shifting of words throughout the poem.
Nothing in the poem seems entirely stable or fixed,
and this instability generates a sense of anxiety.
Rather than expressing the confident hope that peace
is possible, the speaker concludes the poem by
doubting that the object about which he thought he
was musing—the pineapple—is not in fact something entirely different.
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“Pineapples and Pomegranates” also differs
from traditional sonnets in its meter. Strict or traditional sonnets use iambic pentameter, which
means that each line consists of ten syllables that
form iambs, or unstressed-stressed syllable pairs.
In this poem, the number of syllables varies from
line to line, so that some lines, such as line 3, have
only four syllables, while others, such as line 14,
have fourteen syllables. The varying line lengths
help create a sense of fluidity and movement within
the structure of “Pineapples and Pomegranates.”
Rhyme and Word Shifts
Muldoon is known for his unusual use of rhyme
and pairings of similar sounding but very different
words. In this poem, similar sounding words mutate
so that “munificence” becomes “munitions,” “pineapples” slides into “pomegranates,” and the last two syllables of “pomegranates” also echo “grenade” from
an earlier line. This highlighting of the slippery quality of words reinforces the ideas of mutability or how
things change, particularly from positive associations
in “pineapple” and “munificence” to violent or ominous ones in “pomegranates” and “munitions.”
As mentioned, Muldoon uses rhymed two-line
pairs, or couplets, throughout “Pineapples and Pomegranates.” These rhymes are mostly full rhymes,
which are easy to hear, such as “bones / alone” or
“paid / grenade.” By using these exact rhymes in most
of the poem, Muldoon sets up a dependable structure, which creates a sense of security. However, as
also mentioned, the word “pomegranates,” while
rhyming with “planet” as expected, also echoes the
sounds of “grenade” in line 12. This unexpected Muldoonian fuzzy-rhyme disrupts the formal pattern and
thus creates a sense of instability, which reinforces
the theme of doubt in the poem.
Repetition
Style
Sonnet
Muldoon’s poem is a variation on the sonnet
form. The English or Shakespearean sonnet consists of fourteen lines, which follow a pattern or
rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. (The rhyme
scheme refers to the rhyming of the last words of
each line.) “Pineapples and Pomegranates” departs
from the traditional sonnet form by using rhymed
couplets or two-line pairs throughout, making its
general rhyme scheme aa bb cc dd ee ff gg. The
first or “a” rhyme is “grapple / pineapple.” The second or “b” rhyme is “breast / test,” and the rhymed
couplets continue in this manner.
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Muldoon also makes the poem cohere by repeating certain words, such as “munificence” in
lines 8 and 9, “hand” in lines 10 and 12, and
“right?” in lines 9 and 14. Although these repetitions create a tone of doubt, they also hold together
disparate ideas, creating a sense of wholeness in
the face of uncertainty.
Historical Context
Although the poem is ostensibly about two different fruits, Muldoon alludes to the political context
of his youth in lines 9 and 10, when he writes, “Not
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munitions, if you understand / where I’m coming
from.” During the era in which the poem is set, tensions escalated between the pro-British Protestant
majority and the large Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, resulting in increased violence from the
late 1960s through the 1990s, during a time period
known as the Troubles. The conflict was both religious and political, as Catholics tended to favor
union with the Republic of Ireland, while Protestant Loyalists wished to remain united with Great
Britain.
In 1968 and 1969, civil rights marches to
protest the treatment of Catholics were brutally broken up by Protestant Loyalist (pro-British) forces.
In 1972, violence increased further after “Bloody
Sunday,” when British paratroopers killed thirteen
people in Derry, Northern Ireland. Throughout the
1970s and 1980s, the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
or Catholic forces bombed and killed several
British elected officials. The Northern Ireland
Muldoon refers to was a site of ongoing political
violence, with bombings, riots, and civil warfare
continuing for decades as peace agreements between the warring factions failed to take hold.
Throughout the Troubles, both innocents and combatants on both sides were killed in the violence.
By the time Muldoon wrote “Pineapples and Pomegranates,” however, much of the violence had settled down as cease-fires between IRA and Loyalist
forces began to succeed in the 1990s.
Given that the poem is dedicated to the memory of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, the poem probably also alludes to ongoing violence and the failure
of peace treaties in the Middle East. As with the
Troubles in Northern Ireland, Israel has been the
site of terrible political violence throughout the late
twentieth century.
Critical Overview
The collection in which “Pineapples and Pomegranates” appears, Moy Sand and Gravel (2002),
has received considerable critical acclaim as one of
Muldoon’s finest books of poetry. The book won
the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, as well as the
2003 Griffin International Prize for excellence
in poetry.
Critics have praised Muldoon’s remarkably
adept use of rhyme and other verbal techniques, his
wit, and his unique engagement with personal and
historical themes. A critic reviewing Moy Sand and
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Gravel for Publisher’s Weekly notes, “This first
full volume since Muldoon’s monumental Poems
1968–1998 reveals one of the English-speaking
world’s most acclaimed poets still at the top of his
slippery, virtuosic game.”
Although Muldoon has sometimes been criticized for merely being clever, most critics have delighted in his inventive use of form and word play
to address serious topics, such as the Troubles in
Northern Ireland, in fresh and unsentimental ways.
In her Moy Sand and Gravel review in Library
Journal, Rochelle Ratner writes, “Munificence is
juxtaposed with munitions [in “Pineapples and
Pomegranates”], while aunts is rhymed with taunts
and fuss with orthodox [in other poems in the collection], almost daring readers to roll and twist the
words in their mouths.”
Criticism
Anna Maria Hong
Hong earned her master of fine arts in creative
writing at the University of Texas Michener Center for Writers and is a writer-in-residence at
Richard Hugo House. In the following essay, Hong
discusses Muldoon’s use of word-shifting, rhyme,
and repetition to generate complex associations
that delve beneath the surface of apparent meaning.
Like many Muldoon poems, “Pineapples and
Pomegranates” is not quite what it first appears to
be. The title indicates that the poem’s subject is
fruit, and the poem begins as a personal anecdote
with the speaker recalling his first experience with
the pineapple. In the long opening sentence, the
speaker muses on the fruit’s exotic appeal, its
seductiveness to his thirteen-year-old, relatively
naive self. However, Muldoon’s associations soon
lead the reader away from the familiar world of objects to more complex and disturbing issues below
the surface of daily life. Muldoon makes this transition from one mode to another seamlessly, by employing his distinctive use of rhyme, word-shifting,
and repetition.
A master of poetic technique known for his
verbal virtuosity and odd, ingenious rhymes, Muldoon also frequently uses association to juxtapose
divergent ideas. In this poem, the speaker begins
free-associating in lines 6–8, as he recalls that even
as a young adolescent, he knew the pineapple
“stood for something other than itself alone / while
having absolutely no sense / of its being a worldwide
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symbol of munificence.” These lines contrast the
innocence of a younger boy with the informed, literary consciousness of the adult, poet-speaker. Although the tone is casual and confiding, the contrast
hints at more ominous things to come.
In the next line, the shift to more complex and
disturbing concerns begins. As the speaker continues to free-associate from his initial memory of the
pineapple, he begins to muse on the words that arise,
stating “Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you
understand / where I’m coming from.” The association seems believable, as the two words “munificence” and “munitions” sound similar. However,
these words convey very different meanings, as
“munificence” refers to generosity and “munitions”
are explosive armaments. This typically Muldoonian word-shifting juxtaposes two divergent ideas,
which are held together by sound. By invoking this
word-shift, Muldoon ushers in the theme of mutability, of things quickly and almost imperceptibly
morphing from one thing into another.
These types of shifts continue throughout the
last part of the poem, and in “Pineapples and Pomegranates,” this movement tends to go from good intentions to something more sinister. Sometimes the
word-shift involves the repetition of a word, as in
lines 10–12, when Muldoon writes, “As if the open
hand / might, for once, put paid / to the hand
grenade.” The word “hand” is repeated but in entirely different contexts, as the generous, peaceextending “open hand” becomes the explosive
munitions “hand grenade” two lines later. In these
lines, the speaker expresses a desire for peace, but
that wish is undermined by the word-shifting. As
with the fluid transition from “munificence” to
“munitions,” the verbal closeness of the two
phrases “open hand” and “hand grenade” indicates
how easily one thing can become another and vice
versa. Muldoon’s slippery use of language emphasizes how porous the borders can be between two
opposing modes.
A final instance of word-shifting occurs in the
poem’s last line, as the speaker concludes, “I’m talking about pineapples—right?—not pomegranates.”
After all the free-associating in the poem’s first thirteen lines, the speaker returns to the idea of the fruit
that sparked the chain of associations in the first
place. He immediately interrupts himself by comparing the subject to another fruit, one that sounds
somewhat similar, as both multisyllabic words begin with the “p” sound. Once again, the two similarsounding words convey very different ideas, and the
shift is from positive to ominous. The expressed
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Words and their
meanings become more
complex in the world of
Muldoon’s poem, because
the poet’s word-shifts
encourage the reader to
question first-glance
meanings. In this poem as
in others by Muldoon,
definitive, black-and-white
definitions disintegrate in
the face of word-play,
creating a sense of
uncertainty.”
symbolism of the pineapple is generosity, whereas
the pomegranate recalls a descent into hell.
In Greek legend, Persephone, the daughter of
Demeter, eats six pomegranate seeds and thereafter
must live in the underworld for six months of every
year. In Muldoon’s poem, both the pineapple and
the pomegranate are, like the apple in the Garden
of Eden, symbols of temptation. The pineapple is
associated with adolescent sensual longing, as in
the first five lines, in which the speaker compares
the first pineapple to a breast. This relatively innocent desire contrasts sharply with the temptation
associated with the pomegranate, which leads to
life in the underworld. Or does it?
The pineapple’s function as a “worldwide
symbol of munificence” may not be as nice as
it first seems to be. “Munificence” is a very liberal
giving or bestowing. Gifts can be double-edged,
and while the pineapple is symbol of generosity, it
is also a symbol of empire and colonialism.
Christopher Columbus first encountered the
pineapple when he “discovered” the West Indies,
bringing European domination to the New World.
Like Muldoon, Columbus wrote about the fruit,
helping to spread its proliferation throughout the
planet on plantations that often exploited laborers.
In Muldoon’s poem, the juxtaposition of pineapples
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Muldoon’s collection Poems 1968–1998 (2001)
contains his eight previous volumes of poetry.
Ireland from several of the acclaimed writer’s
collections.
• Muldoon edited The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry (1986), which features a number of other prominent Irish poets, including
Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Michael
Longley, and Seamus Heaney.
• The Longest War: Northern Ireland’s Troubled
History (2002), by Marc Mulholland, explores
the issues and debates about the Troubles in
Northern Ireland.
• To Ireland, I (2000) includes Muldoon’s lectures on Irish literature.
• Selected Poems 1966–1987 (1990) comprises
poems by Muldoon’s early mentor, the Nobel
laureate and fellow Northern Irish poet
Seamus Heaney.
• The anthology Modern Irish Drama (1991) features plays by several Irish writers, including
W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, and
Samuel Beckett. The collection also includes essays and criticism about Irish drama.
• William Trevor’s The Collected Stories (1993)
contains stories about life in contemporary rural
with the ominous pomegranate incites the reader
to reconsider the connotations of the first fruit.
Similarly, the slip from “munificence” to “munitions” leads the reader to think about the less
benevolent aspects of gift-giving associated with
the first word.
Words and their meanings become more complex in the world of Muldoon’s poem, because the
poet’s word-shifts encourage the reader to question
first-glance meanings. In this poem as in others by
Muldoon, definitive, black-and-white definitions
disintegrate in the face of word-play, creating a
sense of uncertainty. Muldoon’s poem is not the
usual personal anecdote ending in a reassuring realization about the self. As Clair Wills notes in her
introduction to her book-length study Reading Paul
Muldoon, “Rather than a subjective journey of discovery, or a drama of consciousness, the poems offer an arena in which layers of meaning, image,
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• Translated from Hebrew into English by Bloch
and Chana Kronfeld, Open Closed Open: Poems (2000) is Yehuda Amichai’s final collection and magnum opus.
• American poet Heather McHugh’s collection
Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993 (1994) features poems lauded for their verbal ingenuity.
Muldoon selected this collection as one of his
favorites.
• Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland
(1997), by Peter McDonald, tackles the question
of Northern Irish poetry and politics through close
studies of a number of important writers, including Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Louis Mac
Neice, Derek Mahon, Paul Muldoon, and others.
story jostle one another, and slip into one another,
mutating and transforming in the process.” With all
the shifting of words and meanings, the reader may
feel that there is no firm ground on which to stand
in Muldoon’s poem.
Muldoon compounds the sense of uncertainty
by using another repetition. He has the speaker use
the questioning phrase “right?” twice, once in line
9 and again in the middle of the final line. This
phrase serves to undermine the speaker’s confidence. In line 9, the phrase immediately precedes
the first disturbing word-shift to “munitions.” In
line 14, the phrase enables the shift from pineapples to pomegranates. Rather than ending the poem
on a declarative hope or wish for peace, Muldoon
has his speaker question whether or not he even
knows what he is talking about. This sense of persistent doubt seems to stem from the musings
on munitions, grenades, and pomegranates, which
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harken back to the violence of the Troubles in
Northern Ireland during Muldoon’s teen years and
adulthood. The whimsical word-play leads to serious and distressing memories, which lay beneath
the surface of the innocuous-seeming recollection
of the pineapple.
In spite of the feelings of doubt and anxiety
inspired by the instability of both words and peace
in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, to which Muldoon alludes, the poet does not leave the reader
hanging in the poem. In the face of this instability,
Muldoon meticulously creates structure. This poem
is a version of the sonnet, with fourteen lines and
an almost entirely regular rhyme scheme of twoline rhymed couplets. In addition to this formal
structure, Muldoon’s repetitions of words and
sounds serve to create a cohesive pattern that holds
divergent meanings together. The full end-rhymes
throughout the poem, such as “bones / alone” and
“understand / hand,” generate a sense of satisfying
expectation. In addition, the more inventive echoings of sound in instances such as “pomegranates
/ grenade” add to the sense of structure and cohesion. In a Muldoonian twist, the poem’s last word
also mimics the meaning of “grenade” when read
as the pun “palm-grenade.” Although the poem
ends with this would-be explosive, the feeling
imparted is merely unsettling—not devastating.
Using sound and word-play, Muldoon shifts the
emphasis back to a sense of security by creating an
intricate edifice to house both expansive and destructive impulses in a place where wry musing,
and not the weapon, wins the day.
Source: Anna Maria Hong, Critical Essay on “Pineapples and
Pomegranates,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the author discusses
Muldoon’s career.
Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland’s leading contemporary poets. His short lyrics, modified sonnets and ballads, and dramatic monologues touch
on themes of love, maturation, and self-discovery,
as well as Irish culture and history. Terse and
highly original, Muldoon’s poetry is noted for its
multiplicity of meaning. In a Stand review, Rodney Pybus asserted that the poet’s works reveal a
“quirky, off-beat talent for sudden revelatory
flights from mundane consequences. . . . He found
very early a distinctively wry and deceptively
simple-sophisticated lyric voice.
Muldoon is the youngest member of a group of
Northern Irish poets—including Seamus Heaney,
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Terse and highly
original, Muldoon’s poetry
is noted for its multiplicity
of meaning.”
Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon—which
gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. As a
student at Queen’s University, Muldoon studied under Heaney, and refined his own analytical and critical skills in weekly discussions with other poets.
In 1971, at the age of nineteen, Muldoon had completed his first short collection, Knowing My Place.
Two years later, he published New Weather, his first
widely reviewed volume of poetry. The book secured Muldoon’s place among Ireland’s finest writers and helped establish his reputation as an
innovative new voice in English-language poetry.
The poems in New Weather generally illuminate the complexities of seemingly ordinary things
or events. Several critics have noted that the
collection’s multilayered, heavily imagistic, and
metaphoric verse explores psychological development with apparent simplicity and eloquence while
offering keen insights into the subjective nature of
perception. Calling the collection “the result of continuous age and aging,” Roger Conover suggested
in a review for Eire-Ireland, “Muldoon’s is a poetry which sees into things, and speaks of the world
in terms of its own internal designs and patterns.”
A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, however,
felt that the poems in Muldoon’s “highly promising collection are flawed by a vagueness of focus
that dissipates the strength of original ideas.”
Muldoon followed New Weather with the 1977
collection Mules, which opens with a poem reflecting Northern Ireland’s civil strife. Recurring
themes of political and social relevance inform the
other pastorals and ballads in Mules. “The Narrow
Road to the North,” for instance, depicts the debilitating effects of war on a Japanese soldier who
emerges from hiding, unaware that World War II
has ended. The poem subtly parallels the soldier’s
deadened emotional state with the toll that the
struggle in Ireland has taken on its citizens. As
Peter Scupham noted in his Times Literary Supplement review, “Muldoon’s taste for anecdote, invention, and parable shows strongly [in Mules],”
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and claimed that the collection is “a handsome
promise of good poems to come.” In Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978, Heaney deemed
Mules “a strange, rich second collection” and
judged the poet “one of the very best.”
By the time Muldoon’s next volume of poetry,
Why Brownlee Left, was published in 1980, the poet
had attracted considerable attention for his technical acumen, dry verbal wit, and provocative use of
language. Some critics considered Why Brownlee
Left a more mature effort than Muldoon’s earlier
collections. According to Alan Hollinghurst in Encounter, “the key to the book” lies in a seemingly
straightforward and elemental poem titled “October 1950.” Chronicling the poet’s own conception,
the poem reflects Muldoon’s preoccupation with
the search for self and acknowledges, noted
Hollinghurst, that life “refute[s] any philosophical
attempts to organize or direct it.” Feeling that Muldoon’s poetry in Why Brownlee Left was composed
mainly of “blueprints, sketches, [and] fragments,”
and that Muldoon is not “a truly satisfying poet,”
Anglo-Welsh Review’s David Annwn nonetheless
praised Muldoon for his “unnerving knack of capturing most elusive atmospheres, manipulating the
inflexions of Anglo-Irish . . . and conveying a
whole spectrum of humour.”
Muldoon’s 1983 collection, Quoof, takes its title from his family’s name for a hot-water bottle.
The imaginative poems in the volume offer varying perceptions of the world. “Gathering Mushrooms” opens the book with the narrator’s druginduced reminiscences of his childhood, his father,
and the turmoil in Ireland. “The More a Man Has
the More a Man Wants,” the final poem and the
volume’s longest, is a narrative that follows the exploits of the mercenary-like figure Gallogly as he
voyages through Northern Ireland. Writing in the
London Review of Books, John Kerrigan asserted
that the poetry in Quoof is “a bewildering display
of narrative invention . . . written with that combination of visual clarity and verbal panache which
has become the hallmark of Paul Muldoon.” Muldoon, in an interview with Michael Donaghy in
Chicago Review, commented on the violence in
Quoof: “I don’t think it’s a very likeable or attractive book in its themes.”
Meeting the British, Muldoon’s 1987 collection, contains several poems of recollection as well
as more unusual selections such as “7, Middagh
Street,” which, according to Terry Eagleton in the
Observer, blends fantasy and history with “dramatic energy and calculated irony . . . to produce a
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major poem.” A series of imaginary monologues
by such prominent artistic and literary figures as
W. H. Auden, Salvador Dali, Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, and Louis MacNeice, “7, Middagh
Street” contains provocative commentary on the
importance of politics in Irish art. Comparing Meeting the British with Quoof, Mark Ford in the London Review of Books found that whereas “Quoof
tended to push its metaphors, trance-like, to the
point of no return, its mushroom hallucinations not
deviation from but a visionary heightening of reality: the poems in Meeting the British seem more
self-aware. . . . Meeting the British adds some wonderful new tricks to Muldoon’s repertoire.” Deeming Meeting the British Muldoon’s “most ambitious
collection,” Mick Imlah, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, noted that the volume proves an
innovative addition “to a difficult and delightful
body of poetry.” Responding to several critics’ attempts to compare the poet’s style to that of his
contemporaries, Conover proclaimed that Muldoon’s “poems are too individual to characterize
very effectively in terms of anyone else’s work. . . .
[His] conception of the poem is unique.”
Muldoon’s next collection was the ambitious
Madoc: A Mystery, summarized by Geoffrey
Stokes in the Village Voice as “quite funny, very
difficult, highly ambitious, more than a little unsettling, and . . . subtitled ‘A Mystery.’ Which it
surely is.” Named after the title of a Robert Southey
poem concerning a Welsh prince who discovers
America in the twelfth century, the narrative flow
of Madoc revolves around “what might have happened if the Romantic poets Robert Southey and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge had indeed come (as they
planned in 1794) to America and created a ‘pantisocracy’ (‘equal rule for all’) on the banks of the
Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania,” commented
Lucy McDiarmid in her New York Times Book
Review piece on Madoc. Coleridge becomes entranced by peyote and Native American culture
while Southey becomes vengeful and tyrannical after a loss of idealism. The question, in the words
of Thomas M. Disch in Poetry, is whether or not
Madoc’s “helter-skelter narrative pattern, with its
excursions into such parallel lives as those of
Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Lewis and Clark,
Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson, and George Catlin,
add up either to a memorable drama or to a coherent vision of history?” Despite finding Madoc
“readable for its entire length,” Disch’s answer remained: “I don’t think so.” Michael Hoffman in the
London Review of Books concluded, however, that
each “reading—and still more, every new bit of
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information—makes Madoc a cleverer and more
imposing piece of work.” Stokes countered Disch,
and commented: “The question is whether it’s
worth stepping into Madoc even once; the answer
is an unqualified yes.”
“The Annals of Chile is easier of access and
more emotionally direct than Madoc, while more
allusive and arcane than [Muldoon’s] earlier work,”
argued Richard Tillinghast in the New York Times
Book Review. “Incantata,” one of two central poems in The Annals of Chile, remembers Muldoon’s
lover Mary Farl Powers in a “beautiful and heartfelt elegy” in the words of Times Literary Supplement reviewer Lawrence Norfolk. “It is Muldoon’s
most transparent poem for some time, and also his
most musical.” “Yarrow,” the second, “jazzily juxtaposes swashbuckling daydreams . . . with real
life’s painful memories of a druggy girlfriend’s
breakdown and the death of [Muldoon’s] mother,”
commented Michael Dirda in a Washington Post
Book World review. Mark Ford, in a review of
Annals in the London Review of Books, found
the themes of “less scope for the kinds of allsynthesizing wit characteristic of Muldoon.”
William Pratt concluded in World Literature Today that for those readers “who enjoy having a leg
pulled, Muldoon is your man; to those who expect
something more substantial from poetry, Muldoon
rhymes with buffoon.” Los Angeles Times Book Review’s Katherine McNamara, however, found that
in Annals, “every word, every reference, every allusion, carries meaning. Muldoon never flinches in
his brilliant verbal workings.” In his review of The
Annals of Chile for Poetry, F. D. Reeve characterized Muldoon as “a juggler, a handspringing carny,
a gandy dancer, a stand-up comic, and intellectual
muckraker,” and went on to state: “He bends language as easily as Geller, the psychic, bent spoons.”
The 1996 Kerry Slides, in which Muldoon’s
poems are accompanied by the photographs of Bill
Doyle, received significant praise from Patricia
Monaghan of Booklist who dubbed it “an inspired
collaboration.” The title of the book refers both to
the Irish dance of that name and to Doyle’s photos
of Kerry County in southwestern Ireland. “Muldoon’s short poems,” Monaghan remarked, “are
only obliquely connected to Doyle’s black-andwhite photos,” yet at the same time she felt that
their “wild rhymes and witty wordplay encapsulate
history, myth, language, and landscape.” Monaghan found Doyle’s photos to be “dreamlike despite their sharpness,” and went on to note “his eye
sees beyond the picturesque to the archetypal.”
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Muldoon’s 1998 Hay is a diverse collection,
covering subjects from the personal to the political
and the universal, offering a range of forms and
styles that includes sonnets, sestinas, haiku, and
much more. William Logan of New Criterion observed: “Poems shift and ratchet, one time slipping
into another, one place substituting for another,
scenes turning themselves inside out, lines jolting
and stuttering, mysteriously repeating according to
some Masonic code, subject to sudden outcries of
‘hey’ or ‘wheehee’ or ‘tra la.’” The dust jacket for
the book describes Muldoon as a “prodigy” who
has now become a “virtuoso.” It is Muldoon’s technical virtuosity that some reviewers of Hay fastened upon as a drawback in the work. Reviewing
the book for The New Republic Adam Kirsch noted:
“if virtuosity is all that a poet can display, if his
poems demand attention simply because of their
elaborateness and difficulty, then he has in some
sense failed. . . . It is true that Muldoon sometimes
writes directly, with plain emotion, even sentimentality. But those are not his most characteristic
poems, nor his best. When he is at his most original, Muldoon is rather a kind of acrobat, piling up
strange rhymes, references, and conceits in a way
that is disorienting and exhilarating.” According to
Logan: “Muldoon is . . . in love (not wisely but too
well) with language itself. . . . Too often the result
is tedious foolery, the language run amok with Jabberwocky possibility (words, words, monotonously
inbreeding), as if possibility were reason enough
for the doing.” Yet almost as if in spite of themselves, both Logan and Kirsch also offered praise
for Hay. Logan concluded: “Everyone interested in
contemporary poetry should read this book. . . . In
our time of tired mirrors and more-than-tiresome
confession, Muldoon is the rare poet who writes
through the looking glass.” In a similar vein, Kirsch
remarked: “at a time when poetry has all but forgotten the possibilities of adventurous form, when
the majority of poets are trivially self-expressive
and the minority with higher ambitions pursue a
formless complexity, Muldoon’s ability to construct his poems is rare, and admirable.”
Muldoon once told CA: “I started [writing poetry] when I was fifteen or sixteen. I’d written a
few poems before then, as I suppose most people
do. It seems to me that children of eight or nine—
though I don’t remember writing anything myself
when I was that age—are in a way some of the best
poets I’ve come across. Poems by children of that
age are quite fresh, untrammeled by any ideas of
what a poem might be or what a poem should look
like. While I think it’s perhaps a little romantic to
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suggest it, I believe it’s something of that quality
that people a little older are trying to get back to,
something of that rinsed quality of the eye.
“I wrote lots of poems as a teenager, many of
them heavily under the influence of T. S. Eliot, who
seemed to me to be quite a marvelous person. I devoured Eliot and learned everything I could about
him. He’s a bad person, though, for anyone trying
to write to learn from, since his voice is so much
his own; I ended up doing parodies of Eliot. I read
a lot of poetry, modern poetry as well as poetry by
writers all the way through in English and indeed
in Irish. And gradually I began to learn, particularly from writers who were round about, like Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and
other Irish writers who were writing about things I
knew about. I think it’s quite important to have people round about who remind one that writing poetry is not an entirely weird occupation, that one
isn’t the only one trying to do it.
“As to choosing poetry rather than some other
form of writing, in a way I chose poetry over the
weekly essay. We had a teacher who used to assign
an essay every week, and rather than an essay, I wrote
a poem one week because it seemed to me a much
easier, certainly a shorter, thing to do. In a way it was
out of laziness that I felt I might try to write poems,
and I continued to do it. I’d love to be able to write
prose, and I’ve written the occasional little autobiographical piece for radio or whatever, but I find it
takes me so long to write a sentence, or to write anything. I don’t have a natural fluency in writing. The
poems I do try to write are aimed to sound very offthe-cuff, very simple and natural, as if they were spoken, or as if they were composed in about the same
time as it takes to speak them. But I spend a lot of
time getting that effect; it doesn’t come naturally.
“There is a school of thought that holds that
the writer is dead, and really anyone can read whatever they like into this text, as they insist on calling it nowadays. I think one of the jobs of a writer
is to contain and restrict the range of possible meanings and readings and connotations that a series of
words on a page can have. There’s an element of
the manipulative about the process of writing. The
writer is very truly a medium if things are ideal.
The writer should be open to the language and allowing the language to do the work. I don’t want
to sound like somebody who’s heavily into Zen,
but I really do believe in all of that; I believe in inspiration in some way.
“On the other hand, there is this other part involved in the writing, the part that is marshaling
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and is looking on as an acute, intense reader. When
I am writing, I’m in control of this uncontrollable
thing. It’s a combination of out of control and in
control. What I’m interested in doing, usually, is
writing poems with very clear, translucent surfaces,
but if you look at them again, there are other things
happening under the surface. And I am interested
in poems that go against their own grain, that are
involved in irony, that seem to be saying one thing
but in fact couldn’t possibly be saying that. I am
interested in what’s happening in those areas, and
I do try to control that and hope that I have controlled it. But sometimes when I reread a poem
much later (which I don’t usually do), I wonder,
What on earth was I thinking of there?”
Source: “Paul Muldoon,” in Contemporary Authors Online,
Thomson Gale, 2004.
Rochelle Ratner
In the following review of Moy Sand and
Gravel, Ratner praises Muldoon for alerting readers “to new ways of seeing the world around them.”
Following on the heels of Poems 1968–1998,
Muldoon’s latest volume exhibits a tantalizing mix
of dichotomies. The language of rural Ireland
(where he was raised) co-habits with that of a professor at both Princeton and Oxford. First, consider
“moy” in the title: the OED defines it as an adjective meaning “mild, gentle; demure; also, affected
in manners, prim” or as a noun, meaning a “measure for salt; bushel.” And all the words that follow are chosen with equal care for heightened
ambiguity. Munificence is juxtaposed with munitions, while aunts is rhymed with taunts and fuss
with orthodox, almost daring readers to roll and
twist the words in their mouths. The poet convincingly joins such disparate elements as guns and butter in these narratives, using unfamiliar imagery
and missing pieces, reminiscent of John Ashbery’s
poetry. Even when he’s writing about the familiar,
as in his masterly love poem “As,” he alerts readers to new ways of seeing the world around them.
The use of traditional forms might well make this
book accessible to those not accustomed to reading poetry. An important purchase for all libraries.
Source: Rochelle Ratner, Review of Moy Sand and Gravel,
in Library Journal, August 2002, p. 101.
Sources
Muldoon, Paul, “Pineapples and Pomegranates,” in Moy
Sand and Gravel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 26.
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Ratner, Rochelle, Review of Moy Sand and Gravel, in
Library Journal, August 2002, pp. 101–02.
Review of Moy Sand and Gravel, in Publishers Weekly,
Vol. 249, No. 24, June 17, 2002, p. 57.
Wills, Clair, “Introduction,” in Reading Paul Muldoon,
Bloodaxe Books, 1998, pp. 9–23.
Further Reading
Heaney, Seamus, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–
1978, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
In this collection of essays, Heaney writes about his
poetics and those of other poets, including William
Wordsworth and W. B. Yeats. His essay “The Mixed
Marriage: Paul Muldoon” focuses on Muldoon’s second collection Mules.
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Holland, Jack, Hope against History: The Course of Conflict in Northern Ireland, Henry Holt, 1999.
A journalist of Catholic and Protestant Northern Irish
descent, Holland describes the thirty-year conflict in
Northern Ireland known as the Troubles, tracing the
history from 1969 through 1999.
Kendall, Tim, Paul Muldoon, Seren Books, 1996.
Kendall’s study interprets Muldoon’s poetry through
Muldoon’s The Annals of Chile, providing biographical information as well as information about
Irish history and mythology.
Kendall, Tim, and Peter McDonald, eds., Paul Muldoon:
Critical Essays, Liverpool University Press, 2004.
Scholars from Ireland, England, and the United States
discuss Muldoon’s work. Several of the essays began as papers at a 1998 conference on the poet, held
in Bristol, England.
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The Satyr’s Heart
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
2004
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s vivid, musical verse has impressed the literary community since the manuscript
for her first collection, To the Place of Trumpets,
was chosen for the 1987 Yale Series of Younger
Poets competition. She has since published two additional volumes of successful poetry. The Orchard
(2004), her third book, is a striking group of poems
that takes place in a world of dream figures and contemplates themes ranging from fertility to death.
A key poem in The Orchard—and an excellent
example of the “shocking and unfamiliar ferocity”
that Stephen Burt finds characteristic of Kelly’s book
in his New York Times review—is “The Satyr’s
Heart,” which was first published in the Kenyon Review. In this intriguing and mysterious poem, the
speaker rests her head against the chest of a headless statue of a satyr, observing the teeming animal
and plant life around her. Some of the poem’s lavish descriptiveness is challenging and difficult to
imagine, but this language is what makes the poem
innovative and compelling, and it is an important
part of Kelly’s song-like rhythm. Her commentary
on themes of sexual reproduction, bravery, and
higher human principles shines through and provides
a rewarding experience for an attentive reader.
Author Biography
Born in 1951 in Palo Alto, California, Kelly was
raised Catholic. Her career as a poet was launched
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when the acclaimed poet James Merrill selected her
manuscript To the Place of Trumpets as the 1987
winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. Published thereafter as her debut collection, To the Place of Trumpets received a number
of favorable reviews including that of Fred Muratori in Library Journal, in which Muratori writes
that Kelly “constructs a sort of mythology of the
real” in her “strange and uncommon” collection.
Kelly’s second book of poems, Song (1995),
uses music as a recurring theme and, like her first
collection, frequently comments on religion and
spirituality. It was also quite successful, winning
the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of
American Poets, and receiving positive reviews,
such as Mary Ann Samyn’s in Cross Currents:
“Kelly’s combination of lyric and narrative, of
image-making and storytelling, works to create poems that are as memorable for their songs as for
their singing, the whole collection echoing with
their strange, enchanting music.”
Kelly published her third book, The Orchard,
in 2004. This vibrant collection contains “The
Satyr’s Heart.” In addition to publishing her poetry
in books, Kelly is frequently published in magazines and journals, and she was included in the
1993 and 1994 volumes of The Best American Poetry. She has received many honors and awards, including the Discovery Award from the Nation, the
Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of
America, a Pushcart Prize, the Theodore Roethke
Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award. She has also been granted fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois State Council on the Arts, and the New Jersey
Council on the Arts. Kelly has also served as a professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Poem Text
Poem Summary
Lines 1–3
“The Satyr’s Heart” begins with a description
of the speaker resting her head on the chest of a
satyr, which refers to a creature that is part man,
part animal. In ancient Greece, satyrs were usually
depicted as men with the ears and tail of a horse,
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while ancient Romans portrayed them with the ears,
tail, legs, and horns of a goat. In both cultures,
satyrs were associated with the god of wine and
with lustful, animalistic sexuality. In the poem, the
speaker describes the satyr’s chest as “carved,”
which suggests that it is a statue.
The second and third lines clarify that the satyr
is a statue made of sandstone and that its chest is
hollow, lacking a heart. In line 3, the reader wonders along with the speaker if the statue of a “headless goat man” might actually have a heart,
particularly since the title suggests that there will
be a satyr’s heart in the poem. The reader pictures
the speaker with her head on the chest of a satyr
statue, perhaps leaning back on it while sitting at
its feet. Although the poem does not specify a
location, like many of the poems in Kelly’s collection it seems to take place in a vaguely mythological orchard, teeming with natural life but absent
of any humans except for the speaker.
Lines 4–7
Lines 4 and 5 describe the satyr’s neck, which
thins out until it reaches a dull point. The speaker,
who must be looking up from the satyr’s chest, says
that it points “To something long gone, elusive.” This
key phrase primarily refers to the satyr’s head, which
is now missing. The fact that the satyr is only a body
will become important later in the poem. Since the
neck must be pointing to the sky, it is also possible
that it is pointing toward some kind of god, or the
speaker is at least subtly suggesting that religion and
spirituality are what is “long gone” and “elusive.”
By contrast, at the satyr’s feet is a flurry of real
and fertile activity. In line 6, the small flowers
“swarm” and “breed” in the “sweating soil” as if
they are bugs or other small, rapidly reproducing
creatures. They are also “earnest and sweet,” which
seems to be a contradiction, and they make a
“clamor,” or noisy uproar, of “white” and “blue”
within the “black” soil. It is difficult to picture exactly how these flowers must look, but they certainly seem to be involved in an active and urgent
natural environment.
Lines 8–14
Line 8 contains a four-dot ellipsis that shifts
the perspective back to the speaker, who sits without moving at the feet of the satyr statue. Using the
poetic device of enjambment, which occurs when
one line of poetry runs into the next, the speaker
comments on “how quickly / Things change.” Birds
“[turn] tricks,” which suggests that they have sex,
since “turning tricks” is a slang phrase used to
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describe prostitutes picking up men. The speaker
then says “Colorless birds” as well as “those with
color” are involved in this sexual intercourse,
which seems quite strange because it is difficult to
imagine colorless birds.
In the next line, the speaker portrays “the wind
fingering / The twigs,” which presumably means
moving them around with the dexterity of human
fingers, but also may have a sexual connotation.
Across lines 11 and 12, the speaker says that furry
creatures are “doing whatever” it is that furry creatures do. Although this could refer to anything from
eating to sleeping, it likely refers to sex, considering the sexual imagery surrounding it. This reference is followed by the phrase “So, and so,” which
is an interesting poetic device. Because it reveals
the speaker watching natural events unfold in the
present time, it also allows the reader to experience
these events as they are happening, while giving
Kelly’s verse a rhythmical, musical quality.
The end of line 12 notes that there is a “smell
of fruit” in the air, which is an appropriate smell
given that there is so much fertile, fruitful natural
life around the satyr’s statue. The speaker also notes
in line 13 that there is a “smell of wet coins,” which
may connote the idea of a fountain into which people throw coins to make wishes. Then the speaker
says that there is the sound of “a bird / Crying,” although Kelly does not seem to hint at why this may
be or to suggest how a bird would cry. This phrase
is followed by yet another mysterious description,
when the speaker says that there is “the sound of water that does not move.” If it were not moving at all,
water would not technically make any sound, so the
speaker may be implying that she hears other sounds
that she associates with the water, or that there is a
paradox involved here, and that motionless water
does, mysteriously, make a sound after all.
Lines 15–17
The four-dot ellipsis that ends line 14 marks a
turning point in Kelly’s poem. In line 15, the
speaker poses the question “If I pick the dead iris?”
wondering what will happen if she plucks up a dead
flower and waves it above her head like “a blazoned flag.” Irises are associated with faith and
wisdom, as well as with royalty, since the fleurde-lis, the symbol of the French monarchy, is a lily
but is represented as a stylized iris. Lilies, in particular, are associated with whiteness, purity, and
virginity. This symbol of royalty coheres with the
idea that the iris will be a “blazoned” flag, since
blazoned means painted or conspicuously displayed with signs of heraldry (a term for title, rank,
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or precedence). The speaker then asks whether this
flag could be like her “fanfare” or her “little fare,”
which may refer to one of the “wet coins” mentioned in line 14 and with which, the speaker says,
she could “buy my way, making things brave?”
Much of this imagery is somewhat mysterious,
since it is not immediately clear how or where the
speaker could “buy [her] way,” and it is also unclear what “things” she would make brave. Kelly
may be referring to the animals and plants that are
actively breeding around her, as though her flag
would inspire them to be brave in the face of a difficult world, and with the verb “buy” she may imply that she is purchasing her stake as their leader
or buying her way forward. Lines 15–17 may also
suggest something about the speaker’s character,
however, such as the idea there is some difficulty
in her life against which she needs to make herself
brave and out of which she must buy her way.
Lines 18–21
In line 18, however, the speaker proclaims that
waving the dead iris as a flag is not the way to accomplish her goal of making things brave. She says
“Uncovering what is brave,” suggesting that she
does not need to make things brave or “buy [her]
way,” but merely reveal bravery that already exists.
When she bends over and turns up a stone with her
foot, she declares that she is doing it “Now,” in the
present, which contrasts with lines 14–17, phrased
as questions without a specified time frame.
Lines 20 and 21 continue to stress that the
speaker is acting in the immediate present because
she says that “the armies of pale creatures” are
“there,” right beneath her while they “Without
cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.” These lines
end the poem with a discovery, as the speaker uncovers the true bravery that has been beneath her
all the time. It is important that there are “armies”
of these brave creatures, instead of a more neutral
term like “groups,” because it highlights the fact
that they are purposeful. They do their work constantly, without any questions or doubts. The
phrase “sew the sweet sad earth” reveals that the
creatures are productive as well as brave, creating
the fabric of life despite the earth’s sadness.
Themes
Sexual Reproduction
Breeding and sexual reproduction are recurring
themes in “The Satyr’s Heart,” and the first indi-
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cation that they will be central to Kelly’s agenda is
the fact that satyrs are mythological creatures associated with lust and animal sexuality. Satyrs were
associated with the god of wine and revelry, Dionysus, and in ancient Greek and Roman mythology
they were often depicted with erect penises. Kelly’s
imagery of flowers “breeding,” birds “turning
tricks,” wind “fingering” twigs, furry creatures “doing whatever / Furred creatures do,” and tiny creatures sewing the earth, all emphasize that her poem
considers animal sexuality among its most important themes.
This kind of procreative sexuality seems to
be a great virtue in the poem, since it is responsible for providing the life energy and the fabric
of the “sweet sad earth.” The idyllic atmosphere
of the garden or orchard seems almost entirely due
to this fertile procreation. There is even the implication that the headless satyr statue actually
does have a heart, or is somehow brought to life
and given a beating heart in its sandstone chest
like the animal sexuality that sews the fabric of
life underneath the stone. This sexuality is not
necessarily characterized by pleasure, or at least
pleasure is not its most important characteristic.
The key to the poem’s idea of sexuality is fertility and reproduction, and Kelly implies that the
world’s survival and fruitfulness depends on the
ceaseless struggle of sexual procreation.
Bravery and Passion
In Kelly’s poem, the speaker seems to be
searching for what he or she calls “bravery,” and
by the end it becomes clear that s/he has found this
in the creatures that “sew the sweet sad earth.” The
poem suggests that the flowers associated with the
human virtues of faith and wisdom are not truly
brave, and that their pomp and royal purity is somehow empty or absent. Instead, the basic, animalistic impulses of living creatures are responsible for
sewing the fabric of life and creating the world.
This bravery is closely associated with the
poem’s title, because the heart is the traditional
symbol for bravery, courage, and passion, and because the key example of bravery in the text, animalistic sexual reproduction, is perhaps the main
thing for which satyrs are known. In a sense, the
title “The Satyr’s Heart” refers to the animalistic
courage of the creatures that bravely sew the fabric of life. There is something squalid about the
bravery of the creatures underneath the stone, however, and Kelly may also be implying that there is
something perverse or discomforting about the fact
that this is the only sort of bravery and passion left
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Research the mythological creature of the satyr.
What did it mean in ancient Greek times and
how was it portrayed? How was the satyr
adapted and changed by Roman culture? What
was its significance during this period? How
were satyrs then depicted in the Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, and later periods?
qualities. Think of a few topics related to Kelly’s
musicality and discuss them. For example, how
do you think “The Satyr’s Heart” is a musical
poem? How does Kelly approach the musicality of poetry in her previous collection Song?
What makes a poem like a song? What type of
music is similar to Kelly’s poetry, and why?
• Read The Orchard and compare “The Satyr’s
Heart” to the other poems in the collection. What
makes the poem unique? How are its themes developed in other contexts? How would you describe its place within the rest of the collection?
Choose one poem that you feel resonates
strongly with “The Satyr’s Heart” and compare
the two poems in style and theme.
• Research the contemporary poetry scene in the
United States. What are the most important poetic schools and which theories and movements
are most influential over today’s critically acclaimed American poets? Read one or two poems by Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Edward
Hirsch, and/or other famous poets that you come
across in your research. Discuss where you think
American poetry is heading and which types of
poems you find most innovative. How does
Kelly compare with these poets? How does she
fit into the contemporary scene?
• Critics view Kelly as a master of songlike verse,
and the musicality of her poems is generally
considered one of their most important stylistic
in the world. In fact, since the speaker says early
in the poem that the satyr does not even have a
heart, there is even the possibility that this bravery
and passion do not exist at all, and Kelly is being
ironic when she writes that the speaker is “Uncovering what is brave.”
God and Reason
There is no direct mention of God or spirituality in Kelly’s poem, nor is there any direct reference to reason or philosophy, but the phrase “His
neck rises to a dull point, points upward / To something long gone, elusive” likely refers to some combination of these ideas. The word “elusive” is the
key hint that Kelly is not simply referring to the
satyr’s head here, but to something associated either with the head and brain or the sky, since the
long lost head of a statue would not be elusive, but
simply absent. Since the elements below the satyr’s
neck, on the ground, are the real, unthinking plants
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and animals that breed and create the earth, the
vague and elusive elements associated with the sky
and the head are likely to refer to the opposite, the
abstract principles of consciousness and human
thought. This evidence suggests that Kelly is contrasting higher human ideals like God and reason
with the basic animalistic impulse of procreation.
The most important characteristic of God and
reason in “The Satyr’s Heart,” if Kelly is referring
to them in line 5, is that they seem to be absent
from the world. The satyr does not have a head or
a brain, and the creatures around the speaker reveal
a lack of abstract thought since they work “Without cease or doubt.” This is perhaps why the iris
that the speaker proposes to use as a flag—a flower
associated with the abstractions of faith and wisdom as well as the French symbol for the divine
right of kings—is “dead”; it suggests that these
philosophical and religious notions are long gone,
debunked, and outdated.
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Style
Enjambment and Musicality
Many of Kelly’s lines run-on across the line
break without any pause in sense or meaning, and
this technique is called enjambment, which comes
from the French verb for striding over, encroaching on, or straddling. There are a number of reasons that poets choose to employ enjambment, and
perhaps the most basic is that the technique keeps
the reader moving through the lines, connecting the
meaning across the text and making the poem flow
together. Enjambment also provides a more varied
rhythm in poems such as “The Satyr’s Heart,”
which, like many of Kelly’s poems, is musical and
has some of the characteristics of a song. This musicality involves a rhythm that is often difficult to
describe, but it often includes alliteration (repetition of initial consonant sounds), such as in line 16
(“flag,” “flag,” “fanfare,” “fare,”) or in line 21
(“cease,” “sew,” “sweet,” “sad”). “So, and so,”
from line 12, is an example of a phrase that does
not seem to be important for its meaning, but which
resonates musically, as though it were a backup
phrase in a popular song.
Also, enjambment allows Kelly to bring out
the meaning of her lines, and she chooses her line
breaks carefully. The best example of this comes
in the enjambment of lines 8 and 9, of the phrase
“how quickly / Things change.” Since the location
of the words changes quickly down to the next line,
Kelly is reinforcing the meaning of the text and also
suggesting that things are changing quickly in the
poem as the creatures around the speaker are actively breeding and procreating. Another example
of how Kelly relates enjambment to her thematic
goals is at the end of line 4, which ends “points upward.” Since it ends without a punctuation mark,
the phrase sends the reader’s eyes off into the visually blank space to the right of the line, as if to
emphasize that the speaker is looking up into the
blank, “long gone, elusive” space where the satyr’s
head used to be.
Elusive Description
Kelly is not always a straightforward poet, and
her language can sometimes appear quite mysterious. For example, she writes that the small flowers at the satyr’s feet “swarm” and “breed” with a
“clamor,” or a loud noise, and that they are “earnest
and sweet.” This imagery has a surreal quality, it
is difficult to picture, and it uses words that would
not normally be associated with flowers. Other examples of Kelly’s elusive description include the
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contradiction “Colorless birds and those with
color”; the unclear references to the “smell of wet
coins” as well as the sounds “of a bird / Crying”
and of “water that does not move”; and the seemingly out-of-place phrase “buy my way.” Although
this style can be confusing to the reader, it also asks
him/her to imagine the world of the poem in a new
and striking manner, and Kelly uses it, in part, to
challenge the reader’s expectations and render her
poems memorable and vivid.
Historical Context
When The Orchard was published in 2004, the
American poetry scene was diverse and varied,
with many poetic schools and no single dominant
movement. However, one of the most influential
literary theories at the time was that of postmodernism, which began in the years following World
War II and has continued to influence American
poetry through the initial years of the twenty-first
century. Postmodernism is perhaps best known for
challenging traditional understandings of reality
and contending that the world is composed of infinite layers of meaning. Psychoanalysts such as
Jacques Lacan began to challenge previous standards in psychological, philosophical, and linguistic thought by questioning the commonly held
belief that human psychology operates in a structured symbolic universe. Innovative theorists like
Lacan have inspired a variety of new literary movements and have moved many poets to be skeptical
of straightforward depictions of reality.
Postmodern philosophies and linguistic theories have influenced poets in a variety of ways in
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Poetry from this period often pictures reality as
endless, and it tends to not take for granted that
people experience and remember events in a
straightforward symbolic universe. Since the 1980s,
some poets have started to use new techniques that
reflect advances in computer and film technology,
and some have continued surreal and abstract impressionist traditions. American poetry has also become increasingly interested in voices from a
variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, especially groups that were marginalized in the past,
and many poets who were born outside of the
United States, such as Seamus Heaney and Li
Young Li, have been successful in the United
States. Some contemporary poets, such as Billy
Collins, have attempted to capture the dialect or
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An ancient European statue of a satyr
style of a particular region or culture within the
United States, using a voice that connects with
readers as though the poem were a conversation.
Recently, some poets have begun to think
about history from different, more subjective perspectives, and some have used references to
mythology or religion in new and evocative ways
in order to bring out contemporary moral issues.
For example, Louise Glück, the American poet laureate when “The Satyr’s Heart” was published, frequently reinterprets classical mythology to address
themes such as feminism. Kelly is another poet who
uses classical mythology and religion, particularly
Catholicism, to bring out contemporary themes.
Like many poets of her period, she approaches ancient writings not as sources for universal symbolism, but as historical texts to reinterpret based on
her particular thematic goals. Thus, a satyr is a symbol that means something unique in Kelly’s poem,
and although she draws on historical perceptions of
the satyr, she does not necessarily stick to the predominant or traditional views of its meaning.
Critical Overview
Kelly is a prominent contemporary American poet
who has an excellent reputation in the critical com-
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munity. She has received numerous awards since
her first collection, To the Place of Trumpets, won
the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. She has also been published in Best American Poetry and has received several generous
fellowships. Perhaps the most influential critic to
praise her early work was James Merrill, a wellknown poet who selected Kelly’s first work for
publication. Kelly’s work has since received favorable reviews in periodicals such as Library
Journal, Cross Currents, Southern Review, and
Booklist.
Critics tend to highlight Kelly’s commentary on
religion and her musicality of verse in their reviews
of her three collections. Stephen Yenser comments
in the Yale Review, “The religious imagination is
part and parcel of Kelly’s work,” and other critics
have discussed Kelly’s talent for creating songlike
verse. Most of the negative criticism Kelly has received concentrates on her tendency to leave her poems somewhat vague and unexplained. In Georgia
Review, for example, Judith Kitchen remarks, “I
keep wanting more of the hidden narrative.” In the
same article, however, Kitchen praises Kelly’s first
collection as “promising” and “filled with a language
that is both private and transcendent.”
A key early review by Stephen Burt of Kelly’s
The Orchard appears in the New York Times. Burt
characterizes the style of this collection as having “a
shocked, shocking, and unfamiliar ferocity.” Noting
that Kelly’s poems portray her as “the only live human being in a sanguinary landscape,” Burt writes,
“At times the whole book seems to mourn, and to
gain its power by mourning, the same dead child.”
Criticism
Scott Trudell
Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses the dichotomy between
the head and the heart, or reason and passion, in
Kelly’s poem.
A satyr is a mythological creature characterized chiefly by a duality; it is divided between a
human and an animal, with some attributes of each.
One might expect a poem such as Kelly’s, which
uses a satyr as its central image, to be about a duality in theme, and certainly there is one in “The
Satyr’s Heart” between human and animal, head
and heart. The “dull point” of the satyr’s neck
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points upward toward the human, cerebral themes
in the poem, while the satyr’s brave and animalistic heart is associated with the “armies of pale creatures who / Without cease or doubt sew the sweet
sad earth.”
This is, of course, one of the classic dualities
of literature and philosophy: the struggle between
reason and passion, or the abstract principles of the
head versus the animalistic sexuality of the heart
and body. Kelly’s version of the dichotomy is
unique in the sense that it also represents a division between weakness and bravery, as well as between some kind of God or spirituality and real,
practical, earthly existence. Perhaps the most important fact to realize about the struggle between
head and heart in “The Satyr’s Heart,” however, is
that Kelly’s chief symbol, the statue of a satyr, actually has neither a head nor a heart. Instead of its
head, the satyr’s neck points upwards to “something long gone, elusive,” while the speaker rests
her head next to “The hollow where the heart would
have been.”
The fact that the satyr’s head and heart do not
seem to exist is vital to Kelly’s thematic commentary on the dichotomy of reason and passion. As
far as the head is concerned, the speaker says that
it is “long gone,” which suggests that it used to be
there and has disappeared, but she also says that it
is “elusive,” which contradicts the idea that it is
gone forever and implies that it may be possible to
find it. Since the speaker is looking toward the sky
when she describes where the neck is pointing,
there is the implication that Kelly is referring not
just to the head, the most human part of the satyr,
but also to God and religion. Kelly is known for
alluding to religion, particularly Catholicism, in her
poems, so it is no surprise that God plays a key role
in “The Satyr’s Heart.” It is also important to note
that the reason so many statues of figures from classical mythology are missing their heads is that
Christians lopped them off during the Middle Ages
because they considered them sacrilegious. This
would support the claim that the absence of the
satyr’s head is somehow related to the absence of
religion, although it is unclear whether this would
be an ancient pagan religion or a Christian religion.
Kelly does not distinguish her reference to
spirituality from all “long gone, elusive” aspects of
the human mind; instead, she bundles them together
as abstract principles of the higher thought, all of
which are absent from the poem. Her other reference to these ideas comes in lines 15–17, when the
speaker contemplates waving a dead iris through
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Kelly reinforces the
idea that there is a beating
satyr’s heart with the
phrase ‘So, and so,’ which
is important not for its
literal meaning but for its
sound and rhythm, which
are actually quite similar to
the thumping of a
heartbeat.”
the air like a “blazoned flag.” The iris is associated
with abstract virtues of faith and wisdom, as well
as a symbol of royalty, and the fact that the speaker
considers waving it around like a heraldic banner
as well as a monetary “fare” associates it with human and cerebral, not animal, ideas. Also, the iris
reminds the reader of the “long gone, elusive” God
and reason of the sky because it is dead and it would
be waved in the air instead of left in the ground to
procreate along with the poem’s brave creatures.
On the surface, it appears that the satyr’s heart
is just as absent as its head, and the speaker is resting against hollow sandstone. In fact, however, the
absence of the satyr’s heart is characterized in entirely different terms, and Kelly’s treatment of this
symbol, which is clearly central to the poem since
it is the title phrase, provides a vital hint to her commentary on the dichotomy between reason and passion. The first important evidence that the satyr’s
heart is not, like its head, entirely absent, is the exuberance and liveliness of the teeming creatures
around the statue. The satyr’s heart is inevitably associated with animalistic sexuality, lust, and breeding because this is the satyr’s function in mythology
and because the heart is the symbolic center of passion. Therefore, when the flowers breed, the birds
turn tricks, and the furry creatures have sex with
each other, it is as though the satyr’s heart is alive
and well in the nature around him.
Kelly reinforces the idea that there is a beating satyr’s heart with the phrase “So, and so,”
which is important not for its literal meaning but
for its sound and rhythm, which are actually quite
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Kelly’s To the Place of Trumpets (1988) is a
unique and startling collection that launched her
career. Often tantalizing and ambiguous, its poems examine themes such as religion, death, and
the natural world.
• October (2004), by Louise Glück, who was the
American poet laureate in 2003 and 2004, is a
stark and direct collection of poems that often
uses mythology to develop its themes.
• Edith Hamilton’s Mythology (1942) is one of the
best available overviews of ancient Greek and
Roman myth, and it is world-renowned because
of Hamilton’s flair for the subject.
• Subterranean (2001), by Jill Bialosky, is a carefully crafted book of poetry about motherhood,
grief, and desire that often makes reference to classical mythology in order to bring out its themes.
similar to the thumping of a heartbeat. The next
two phrases of the poem echo this rhythm, repeating the words “smell” and “sound” in two beats,
the second of which is slightly longer. Similarly,
the final line includes four words that begin with
an “s” sound in order to emphasize the discovery
of the brave creatures that resonate with the satyr’s
heartbeat: “Without cease or doubt sew the sweet
sad earth.” All of these examples skillfully echo the
two-part rhythm of a heartbeat, in which the second beat is slightly louder and longer.
The idea of a hollow statue of a creature containing some living essence is not confined to “The
Satyr’s Heart”; several other poems in The Orchard
refer to similar versions of this phenomenon, and
the idea of life in a statue seems to be an important image for Kelly. For example, the lion, a creature that often appears in The Orchard, is portrayed
as a similar figure to the satyr in poems such as
“Lion”: “Of hollow steel the lion is made”—and
“The South Gate”: “How can a stone lion / Bear a
living child? Because still in the corner / Of her deformed head a dream lodges.” This latter image is
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even more explicit than “The Satyr’s Heart” in envisioning the source of fertility within lifeless
stone, and it resonates strongly with the image of
the speaker uncovering the stone to find it teeming
with brave, procreating creatures.
Although Kelly’s poem seems to deny the presence of both the head and the heart, it is only the
ideas associated with the satyr’s head—reason,
God, and abstract principles—that are absent from
the dichotomy. Kelly’s poem seems to be skeptical
of all abstractions, putting its faith in the “bravery”
of the heart and commending the animals that procreate “Without cease or doubt,” or without the consciousness of the human mind. This is likely the
cause of the despair in the poem: the reason that the
soil is “black and sweating,” the bird is “Crying,”
and the earth, in the last line, is “sad.” There is a
sense in which the speaker would like the iris to be
alive, and that she would love to wave it as a blazoning fanfare, but she cannot because she recognizes that God, spirituality, and human bravery are
absent from the poem. In a sense, she is mourning
the loss of the satyr’s head due to the passage of
time and the erosion of human belief and purpose.
At the same time, however, the world of “The
Satyr’s Heart” is an affirmation of the brave, creative, and animalistic passion that is still very much
alive even in a world in which the symbol of lust
and procreation, the satyr, has been reduced to a
headless, inanimate sandstone statue. Kelly is expressing the courage and nobility of the satyr’s
heart, which is portrayed as the engine of the earth’s
creativity and one of its greatest virtues. There is
something mildly disturbing about the fact that the
speaker uncovers “armies” of creatures that work
without “cease or doubt,” as though they are mindless automatons that lack any higher virtues whatsoever. It is also somewhat imposing that they are
characterized as “pale,” since there seems to be no
reason that they would lack color. Nevertheless, the
image of the creatures “sew[ing]” the earth is positive and affirming, as though they are mending the
earth from the decay that has taken the satyr’s head.
Regenerating the world like a beating heart, they
reinforce the idea that brave, fertile passion is the
vital and important element in its classic duality
with reason and higher thought.
Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on “The Satyr’s
Heart,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Patrick Donnelly
Donnelly is a poet, editor, and teacher. His
first book of poems is The Charge. In this essay,
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Donnelly interprets “The Satyr’s Heart” in the
context of the collection The Orchard as a whole.
“The Satyr’s Heart” demonstrates every characteristic of a lyric poem, the mode of poetry whose
purpose is primarily to express strong feeling:
language and sensual images that are emotionally resonant;
implications which gesture toward meaning,
without spelling everything out;
associative leaps that may not make logical
sense, but are linked by a through-line of
language, image, or feeling;
“musical” language: that is, sounds and
rhythms that pitch their appeal primarily to
human faculties other than the intellect or the
logical mind.
It’s the lyric strategy of “implications which
gesture toward meaning” that usually presents the
biggest challenge to beginning students of poetry.
Why does not Kelly (or her “speaker”) come right
out and say exactly what she means? Why is not
there one “correct” way to interpret the poem? One
can sympathize with such questions, and some poetry is in fact difficult to read and understand for
reasons that actually are the author’s fault. Kelly’s
poem—especially in the context of the book in
which it appears as a whole—actually does a very
good job of pointing the reader in the direction of
what it really “means.”
The Orchard, in which “The Satyr’s Heart” appears, is a completely unified sequence of poems,
as many books of poetry are not. All of its poems
are spoken by the same speaker, who experiences
in each poem some variation of the same strange,
troubled, and ecstatic state. Each poem casts light
on the other poems and adds to what we understand
about the speaker. So the key to reading “The
Satyr’s Heart” most skillfully is not in that poem
alone—though it certainly can be understood to
some degree and enjoyed on its own—but also in
other poems of the book. In particular, a passage
in “The Orchard,” the title poem of the book, gives
the reader a way to understand “The Satyr’s Heart”
and all the other poems:
I thought the scene might have been staged
For me. By my mind. Or by someone
Who could read my mind. Someone
Who was having a good laugh
At my expense. Or testing me
In some way I could not understand.
It should not be altogether unexpected that
Kelly would provide a key to reading the poems in
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In lyric poems, as in
life, the significance of
gestures, motivations, and
feelings are complex,
layered, and sometimes
cannot be understood
without investigation and
speculation.”
this book in the title poem: one purpose of titles is
to point the reader toward important information.
In this passage in “The Orchard,” Kelly suggests
several plausible interpretations of the bizarre
goings-on in “The Satyr’s Heart” and other poems
of The Orchard.
In lyric poems, the significance of gestures,
motivations, and feelings are complex, layered, and
sometimes cannot be understood without investigation and speculation. This being the case, the
most helpful questions a reader can ask encountering a lyric poem like Kelly’s are: “What kind of
person thinks and feels as this speaker does?” and
“What life experiences might cause a person to
think and feel this way, and express herself in this
tone of voice?” These kinds of speculations put the
reader in an advantageous relationship to the poem,
with a good chance of penetrating its mysteries.
So what can the reader notice and speculate
about Kelly’s speaker, and in what other ways
might the poems in The Orchard as a whole help
the reader understand “The Satyr’s Heart?”
One might characterize the speaker’s actions,
and her speech and personality, in these ways:
Though she has acute powers of observation
and description (like those she shows in the passage “There is a smell of fruit / And the smell of
wet coins”), she often experiences a confusion or
mixing of the senses, a condition called synesthesia. She describes, for example, color in terms of
sound: “a clamor / Of white, a clamor of blue.” Frequently in the book the speaker seems to experience the flood of incoming sensory data with a kind
of exalted hyper-awareness that is painfully close
to panic.
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One notices that the speaker often reacts with a
contradictory mix of horror and attraction to what
she experiences, as in the passage “the small flowers swarm, earnest and sweet,” in which the negative associations of the verb “swarm” are at odds
with the positive associations of “earnest and sweet.”
In passages like this:
If I pick the dead iris? If I wave it above me like a
flag, like a blazoned flag? My fanfare? Little fare
With which I buy my way, making things brave?
one sees how passionately and associatively the
speaker poses questions—questions that have no
answers, or no clear answers. She is also committed to great precision in her thinking and speech.
At several points in “The Satyr’s Heart” she seems
to argue with and correct herself: “Little fare / With
which I buy my way, making things brave? / No,
that is not it. Uncovering what is brave.”
One notices that the landscape the speaker inhabits in The Orchard is never a neutral background
but animate, active, highly allegorical and emotionalized. (This makes perfect sense if the landscape is,
at least in part, a projection of the speaker’s imagination.) The surroundings seem to have, in different
poems in the book, aspects of an abandoned pleasure
garden, a grand estate or palace, a graveyard, or a
temple precinct. In addition to the speaker, this landscape is populated by stone beasts and gods, and by
a young boy or boys who appear mysteriously and
then disappear or die violently. In various poems,
there are other vague human figures on the periphery, for whom the speaker experiences occasional
flashes of interest, sympathy, or attraction, but from
whom she seems mysteriously separate. The speaker
seems at home in this unhealthy cloister—perhaps in
a sense privileged to be here—but without a clear
purpose or role. Like Tamino and Pamina (characters in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, who endure
purifying trials of fire and water), she may have been
put into this environment to be tested emotionally
and spiritually, though by what agency is not clear.
Nor is it clear, by the end of the book, that the speaker
is in fact enlightened, liberated or purified, though
she does endure. The final image in the book is hopeful: two women—each potentially an aspect or projection of the speaker—enter the garden laughing and
“carrying on” (an expression which could mean both
“surviving” and “amorous play”).
Throughout The Orchard as a whole the reader
may notice subtle allusions:
to stories from Greek and Roman mythology
(about Leda impregnated by Zeus in the
form of a swan; about satyrs);
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to the Bible, especially the mix of erotic and
spiritual language in the Song of Solomon,
the visionary images of the Books of Ezekiel
and Revelation, and the story of the finding
of the infant Moses by Pharoah’s daughter
(Exodus 2: 1–6);
to magical transformations like those in
Ovid’s Metamorphoses;
to a “shadow-self,” the dark side of human
nature that psychologist Carl Jung
(1875–1961) theorized that each person
possesses and must acknowledge or be
overwhelmed by.
One notices that in many passages like “the
smell of fruit, / And the smell of wet coins . . . the
sound of a bird / Crying, and the sound of water”
the speaker is as obsessively repetitious as a religious litany, echoing words and phrases again and
again. Throughout the book, themes and images
also recur: of difficult or unusual births; of breasts,
milk, and maternity; of grotesque or monstrous
combinations of animals; of things which are only
half seen or partly understood; of danger, decay,
ruin, sourness, abandonment; of preciousness and
beauty hidden among rankness; of physical, emotional, and spiritual injury. In the midst of this network of repetitions, the speaker sometimes pauses
mysteriously and rhetorically, as though to gather
her thoughts or master her feelings before she can
go on. Midway through “The Satyr’s Heart” readers observe one such caesura: “So, and so.”
One notices that the speaker describes dreamlike interactions with the phenomena in her environment, as when in “The Satyr’s Heart” she rests
her head on the chest of what the reader may presume to be a statue of a satyr.
The satyr is one example of many images and
words in The Orchard that have sexual associations.
Satyrs were creatures (from Greek and Roman
myth) who were half man and half goat. Followers
of the god of wine—called Dionysus or Dionysos
by the Greeks, and Bacchus by the Romans—they
were associated with disorderly drunkenness and
uncontrollable sexual desire. Many other words and
phrases in “The Satyr’s Heart” have subtle sexual
or reproductive associations: “swarm,” “sweating,”
“breed,” “birds turning tricks,” “the wind fingering
/ the twigs,” “furred creatures doing whatever /
furred creatures do.” The recurrent sexual motif indicates interest, and a general state of arousal, on
the part of the speaker, but she seems to have no
obvious or appropriate partner.
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Or perhaps the speaker has lost her partner in
some traumatic way. There is an unnamed “you” to
whom some of the poems in The Orchard refer or
are occasionally, obliquely, directed. There may be
a subtle reference to this person in the speaker’s interaction with the stone satyr: the statue is missing
a head, and whether he has or ever had a heart is
also in doubt. Missing these organs that are symbolic of reason and compassion, the stone goat-man
could only be expected to act from his baser self
(and satyrs were never associated with selfless action, even with heads and hearts). This makes him a
potentially dangerous partner for the speaker, though
he causes her no explicit harm in the poem. (Indeed,
the speaker’s attention wanders away from the satyr
a third of the way through the poem, though the sensual arousal he symbolizes remains.) If the satyr’s
presence is a reference to the hidden “you” to whom
some of the poems refer, the reader may infer that
this person hurt the speaker in some way.
Not that the speaker represents herself as a
saint. In many poems of The Orchard she demonstrates an inflamed or irritated emotional sensibility, making admissions or showing instances of
character defects like selfishness, pettiness, or encouraging violence in others—only partly balanced
by attractive traits like intelligence, sympathy, and
endurance of troubles. The “lower” nature that the
satyr represents is fully present in the speaker as
well. In fact, The Orchard may be read as one
long acknowledgment, or embrace, of the speaker’s
shadow-self, as Jung insisted was necessary.
The actions the speaker describes herself making in “The Satyr’s Heart” are emblematic, in miniature, of her actions in The Orchard as a whole: she
rests her head on a stone satyr but finds no love or
comfort there. She documents precisely the disturbing vigor of the natural and supernatural environment. She questions everything ceaselessly.
Perhaps with the purpose to uncover “what is brave”
in herself and the world, she turns over a stone, a
gesture symbolic of a difficult journey to the underworld of the self, a refusal to settle for surface
appearances. What she finds under the stone is both
ugly and hopeful: “the armies of pale creatures who
/ Without cease or doubt sew the sweet sad earth.”
The speaker may feel doubt, but her searching and
questioning reveals a network of connections capable of sustaining the self and the earth.
Not since Theodore Roethke’s The Lost Son
(1948) has an American poet attempted a sequence
of poems so interior, so dramatic, so stubbornly
dead-set against objectivity, distance, orderliness,
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logic, intellectual analysis, directness, and prosiness as The Orchard. American literature in the
first decade of the 21st century is awash in opaque
poetry that is a collage of unrelated hyper-ironical
statements, and sentimental poetry of mild, flat,
prosy musings. Kelly’s book triumphs over both
these from-the-neck-up “schools” of poetry, with
language of extreme clarity, precision, music, and
emotional engagement, and with the quality of electric strangeness that is characteristic of all great
works of art.
Source: Patrick Donnelly, Critical Essay on “The Satyr’s
Heart,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Adrian Blevins
Blevins’s first book of poems, The Brass Girl
Brouhaha, was published by Ausable Press in 2003
and won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is
Assistant Professor of English at Colby College in
Waterville, Maine. In this essay, Blevins argues
that Kelly’s poem explores how intertwined human
consciousness is with its own animal instincts.
“The Satyr’s Heart” opens the second section of
Kelly’s third collection, The Orchard. Because the
collection is a sequence of lyric poems that rely on
one another for the ultimate narrative of the speaker’s
quest through an imagined garden of invented, archetypal, mythological, and allegorical demons, “The
Satyr’s Heart” is difficult to read out of context. In
fact, readers might find the speaker’s confrontation
with herself atop the statue of a sandstone “headless
goat man” absurd or worse. For this reason, it is important to read at least the opening lines of “The
Black Swan,” the collection’s first poem:
I told the boy I found him under a bush. What was
the harm? I told him he was sleeping And that a black
swan slept beside him, The swan’s feathers hot, the
scent of the hot feathers And of the bush’s hot white
flowers As rank and sweet as the stewed milk of a
goat. The bush was in a strange garden, a place So
old it seemed to exist outside of time.
These lines suggest that the satyr in “The Satyr’s
Heart” is not an actual monument or statue, but a
figure out of the speaker’s imagination. In fact,
everything that happens in The Orchard happens entirely in that most abstract of abstract landscapes.
Because the very little that happens in “The Satyr’s
Heart” happens “outside of time,” it is concerned
with the most psychological, spiritual, and philosophical of battles. The Orchard’s speaker is on a
quest to come to terms with “the unshaped and
chaotic element of nature,” which Northrop Frye,
writing in The Great Code: The Bible as Literature,
says is creative work’s most essential task. Since,
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The effect of these
repetitions is to undercut
the tone of immediate
thought by establishing a
pattern that moves the
poem away from speech and
into song.”
according to Frye, the traditional purpose of such
quests is to “[transform] the amorphous natural environment into the pastoral, cultivated, civilized
world of human shape and meaning,” Kelly’s vision,
which is to merge the cultivated, often-in-ruins human world with the grotesque, life-giving and liferemoving force of nature, is exceedingly strange.
That is, The Orchard is no pastoral. It is no idealized garden in which the poet can walk at peace
among a flock of wild birds. Instead, it is a book in
which a riot of grotesque images swirl together so
that Kelly might explore not only how animal the
human world is, but also, and far more notably, how
intertwined human consciousness is with its own animal instincts. In poem after poem in The Orchard,
Kelly’s speaker must confront a series of demons
and monsters—sandstone satyrs, black swans, a
four-head lion—in order to reveal humankind’s most
horrible truth, which is that it “is out of nature and
hopeless in it,” as the psychologist Earnest Becker
pointed out in The Denial of Death (1973). As a result, as Stephen Burt says in the New York Times, it
is a book in which “fertility and loyalty are inseparable from predation and death.”
“The Satyr’s Heart” marries “fertility and loyalty” with “predation and death” by enacting the
speaker in the middle of an argument with herself.
In the poem’s first line, the speaker rests her head
on the satyr’s carved chest. Because the satyr is associated with the cult of Dionysus, it is a representative of sex and debauchery. Because this satyr
has been decapitated, he also represents death. The
speaker weighs the satyr’s potential or power
against the more natural “small flowers” and the
“sweating soil / They breed in,” which as a fertil-
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ity image implicates sex and as a natural image implicates the insects that feed on corpses. The
speaker notices “the smell of fruit / And the smell
of wet coins,” which again merges the natural
world with the world of human-made objects. Because there is also “the sound of a bird / Crying,
and the sound of water that does not move,” death
does not dissipate just because the speaker recognizes the sexual nature of the animals in the
orchard. In fact, though the headless goat man appears to be rejected for “the armies of pale creatures who / Without cease or doubt sew the sweet
sad earth,” the poem’s form would suggest that
Kelly’s goal is more to blend than to choose.
After the speaker recognizes the pain and suffering in the idea of sex, she continues to wonder
what she might do to resolve the paradox the decapitated satyr statue represents. She wonders if she
should “pick up the dead iris,” which again symbolizes death in and of the natural world. The idea
of acting upon the truth of the natural world by
waving it around “like a flag” is also rejected when
Kelly says, “No, that is not it. Uncovering what is
brave.” So, although “the armies of pale creatures”
appear to have the final word in the argument between the human world of ruined ideas and symbols and the animal world of crying birds, in actual
fact the problem of how to live and die in a dual
world is suspended in “The Satyr’s Heart.”
The poem’s brilliance is not only in the way
in which its content intertwines life and death, but
also in the poem’s form, which also marries opposing forces. First, one of Kelly’s most favored
syntactical methods is a catalogue of phrases and
clauses that negate one another. For example, following the poem’s first line are the deducting
clauses, “The hollow where the heart would have
been, if sandstone / Had a heart, if a headless goat
man could have a heart.” One effect of this method
is to place the speaker of the poem in a kind of syntactical no-man’s land, where the speaker appears
to be in a place where nothing can happen or change
because all sides are being considered (and nothing is real). In addition, the self-correcting syntax
enacts the process of thought. This gives the poem
its sense of immediacy and depth while generating
a somewhat sardonic or mocking tone. This technique also risks the speaker’s credibility in that it
suggests she might be too vacillating to be reliable.
Kelly solves this problem with her many word repetitions, which serve to save the poem from disintegration into chaos by producing a pattern within
which the actual chaos of the poem’s content can
be contained.
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In the poem’s first three lines, “heart” is repeated three times and “head” twice. In lines 6 and
7, “clamor” is repeated twice. This pattern of exact repetition is maintained until the last three lines
of the poem. When words are not repeated exactly,
there are often just slight variations, as when
“point” shifts just slightly to “points,” “colorless”
becomes “color,” and “fanfare” “fare.” Less obvious might be the way the poem’s first lines are tied
to the poem’s last lines with repetitions, as well.
For example, the “now” that initiates the poem also
ends its closing movement in the line “Now I bend
over and with my foot turn up a stone.” The “sweet”
in line 6 is repeated in the poem’s last phrase. The
effect of these repetitions is to undercut the tone of
immediate thought by establishing a pattern that
moves the poem away from speech and into song.
The music of “The Satyr’s Heart” is produced
by sound repetitions that are almost too numerous
to believe. They are the glue that holds the poem
together. For example, the “h” sound in the poem’s
first line is repeated not only in “heart” but in “hollow,” “had,” and “headless.” The short “e” vowel
sound in “rest” is repeated in “head” and “chest,”
which repeats the “s” sound that was first introduced
in “satyr.” This sound is then repeated in “sandstone” and in the “less” of “headless.” It is woven
into the line 4 in “rises” and gathers intensity in line
5 in “elusive.” In line 6, the “s” sound has grown
to sound like an actual hiss, which is why the
“sweating soil” at the end of line 7 seems to actually sweat (and why the “So and so” of line 12
sounds so familiar). It is important to understand
that the entire poem not only uses but also rides
sound and in so doing undermines its syntactical
speech effects with an unbelievably complex music.
The poem’s rhythm is not only a consequence
of Kelly’s syntactical choices, which make full use
of the powers of sentence structure and type, but
also of a rhythmical method that verges on syllabics. Although there is no pattern to the number of
syllables per line in the poem, most lines are eleven,
twelve, and thirteen syllables long. The most energetic moments in the poem occur when this number shifts, as for instance in line 9, which is only
nine syllables long. In contrast, line 15 is, somewhat ironically, fifteen syllables long. It is interesting that this line, which contains the highest
number of syllables, sounds so much shorter than
many of the other lines in the poem. This is the result of Kelly’s word choice in this line, which is
completely monosyllabic. Combined with the ways
in which the clauses and phrases wind up the poem
until they crash into very short sentences (such as
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“So and so”) and lines that often end in sounds that
contrast or negate the sounds that precede them,
this odd rhythmical system helps to produce the
poem’s incantatory tone. It is worth noting that
“The Satyr’s Heart” begins by alluding to the
child’s prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep,” reinforcing not only its incantatory tone, but also the
reconciliation of death-in-life ultimately underlining the poem.
Source: Adrian Blevins, Critical Essay on “The Saytr’s
Heart,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the author discusses
Kelly’s few collections.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poetry is rich in detail
and complex in emotion. Her subjects include the
glories of nature, the capacity for evil, and the
doubts stirred in her by religion. Her work has won
numerous prizes; acclaimed poet James Merrill selected her first collection, To the Place of Trumpets,
for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and her
subsequent volume, Song, was the 1994 selection
for the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of
American Poets, given for the best second book.
To the Place of Trumpets includes several poems that reflect Kelly’s Catholic upbringing. In
“Imagining Their Own Hymns,” she writes of angels in stained-glass windows coming to life and flying away because they are “sick of Jesus, who never
stops dying.” In “Those Who Wrestle with the Angel for Us,” she also uses religious imagery to portray her brother’s daring as a pilot. Some poems
ponder death and dying, while Kelly also observes
the natural world—fields, trees, animals—and wonders how changing one aspect of a life might affect
all the others.
“This is a promising first book, filled with a language that is both private and transcendent,” commented Judith Kitchen in Georgia Review. Some
poems, Kitchen noted, show Kelly to be adept at taking on a child’s point of view. “The Catholic Sundays of childhood are subjected to the scrutiny of a
child’s honest gaze,” Kitchen related. “Retrieving
that child in its innocence is a difficult task, and
one that Kelly has mastered beautifully.” Kitchen
thought Kelly too vague at times, however, painting
expansive word-portraits yet leaving much unexplained. “I keep wanting more of the hidden narrative,” Kitchen remarked. Some other critics, though,
characterized Kelly’s tendency toward ambiguity as
a positive aspect of her style. The poems in To the
Place of Trumpets “exude an ambiguous wisdom,”
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in the opinion of Library Journal contributor Fred
Muratori. A Kliatt reviewer, meanwhile, called
Kelly “a poet-magician” whose work “offers great
challenges and great rewards.”
In Song, Kelly frequently uses music as a motif while dealing with many of the same subjects
as in her first collection. The title poem associates
a haunting tune with the brutal killing of a girl’s
pet goat by a group of boys. This poem “appropriately introduces the reader to some of the unexpected and compelling ways the poet achieves
meaning and effect through the agency of music,”
observed Robert Buttel in American Book Review.
In another poem she refers to the sounds made by
bats as “the peculiar lost fluting of an outcast heart”
and a group of trees as “a touchy choir,” and
throughout the volume she juxtaposes natural
beauty against human cruelty. She also, as in her
first book, refers often to religion, treating it with
a mix of fascination and skepticism.
“The religious imagination is part and parcel
of Kelly’s work,” related Stephen Yenser in the
Yale Review. “Always in touch with the so-called
natural world, her poems nonetheless present it ineluctably in Christian terms, whose implicit verities she invariably calls into question.” Buttel noted
that in Kelly’s poems, “spiritual certainty or any
connection with divinity remains elusive,” but still,
in dealing with nature and everyday occurrences,
“she experiences uncanny, fortuitous moments that
have all the revelatory impact of epiphanies.” Kelly
has a “singular, passionate, and accomplished art,”
Buttel added. Booklist contributor Patricia Monaghan called Song “a glorious, wild work” with a
“symphonic” quality, while Yenser summed it up
by saying it “is the reason one writes reviews. It
could even be the reason one writes poems.”
Source: “Brigit Pegeen Kelly,” in Contemporary Authors
Online, Thomson Gale, 2004.
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Sources
Becker, Earnest, The Denial of Death, Free Press, 1973, p. 26.
Burt, Stephen, “Poetry: American Pastoral,” in the New York
Times, Vol. 153, No. 52942, August 15, 2004, p. 19.
Frye, Northrop, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, p. 187.
Kelly, Brigit Pegeen, The Orchard, BOA Editions, 2004,
pp. 24, 29, 55.
Kitchen, Judith, “Speaking Passions,” in Georgia Review,
Summer 1988, pp. 407–22.
Muratori, Fred, Review of To the Place of Trumpets, in
Library Journal, Vol. 113, No. 9, May 15, 1988, p. 84.
Samyn, Mary Ann, Review of Song, in Cross Currents,
Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall 1995, pp. 424–26.
Yenser, Stephen, “Rare Birds: John Ashberry and Brigit
Pegeen Kelly,” in Yale Review, Vol. 84, No. 1, January 1996,
pp. 166–85.
Further Reading
Adcock, Betty, “Six Soloists,” in Southern Review, Vol. 32,
No. 4, Autumn 1996, pp. 761–78.
Adcock discusses Kelly’s Song, comparing its
themes and style to five other contemporary poetry
collections.
Clarence, Judy, Review of Song, in Library Journal,
Vol. 120, No. 1, 1995, p. 107.
Clarence provides a brief positive review of Kelly’s
second collection.
Williams, Lisa, “The Necessity of Song: The Poetry of
Brigit Pegeen Kelly,” in Hollins Critic, Vol. 39, No. 3, June
2002, p. 1.
Williams’s essay is a thorough and insightful analysis of Kelly’s first two poetry collections, concentrating on the songlike quality of Kelly’s verse.
Wilner, Eleanor, Review of Song, in Prairie Schooner,
Vol. 70, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 179–85.
This favorable review of Song explicates Kelly’s
stylistic and thematic accomplishments.
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The Toni Morrison
Dreams
“The Toni Morrison Dreams,” by Elizabeth Alexander, was first published in issue 75 of Hanging
Loose; next it appeared as part of Alexander’s third
collection, Antebellum Dream Book, published by
Graywolf Press in 2001. “Antebellum” refers to the
period before the American Civil War (1861–1865),
and its use here suggests that this collection of
dream poems though set in the second half of the
twentieth century are of a time before race relations
have evolved into a harmonious state of equality. A
dream book is a collection of narratives that have
dream-like qualities, which means that they mix rational and irrational elements sometimes presenting
improbable events as ordinary or based on fact. To
say these are dreams is to sanction this departure
from verisimilitude, to allow for surprise and illogic
which are the stuff of dreams. So the title alone suggests that the collection is a series of dream-like
scenarios or scenes somehow connected to an
American period of racial injustice.
Elizabeth Alexander
2001
The poems in Antebellum Dream Book are divided into three parts and “The Toni Morrison
Dreams” appears in the second part. The poems
include personal vignettes about childbirth, urban
life, and historical events such as the mid-twentiethcentury race riots and the Civil Rights movement.
The poem analyzed in this entry focuses on the hierarchy implicit in a literary conference where aspiring or beginning writers flock to hear the
celebrity author Toni Morrison read her own work
and comment on theirs.
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By 2001, Alexander had published three books
of poetry: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life
(1996), and Antebellum Dream Book (2001), which
includes the poem “The Toni Morrison Dreams.”
In 2004, she published a collection of essays on
popular culture, painting, and poetry called The
Black Interior. In addition to these separate publications, her short stories, poetry, and criticism have
appeared in various journals, including American
Poetry Review, Callaloo, and Kenyon Review.
While teaching at the University of Chicago,
Alexander received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. At Smith College, she was the first director of the Poetry Center.
Alexander also served as a member of the editorial collective for Meridians, a feminist publication.
Poem Text
1.
Elizabeth Alexander
Author Biography
Elizabeth Alexander was born on May 30, 1962, in
New York City and grew up in Washington, D.C.
She is the daughter of Clifford Leopold Alexander,
a business consultant, and Adele Logan Alexander,
a historian and writer. Alexander received her bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1984. She
went on to receive her master’s degree from Boston
University in 1987 and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.
Though destined to become a poet and university professor, Alexander began her professional life
with a one-year stint as a reporter for the Washington
Post. During the last four years of the 1980s, she
taught at several schools both in Philadelphia and
Boston. For the academic year 1990–1991, Alexander was scholar-in-residence at Haverford College in
Haverford, Pennsylvania. From 1991 to 1997, she was
a reviewer for the Village Voice and assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. After that,
Alexander was the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet-inResidence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and a lecturer in African American Studies
and English at Yale University. As of the early 2000s,
Alexander has been an adjunct associate professor of
African American Studies at Yale, teaching in the
Cave Canem Poetry Workshop.
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Toni Morrison despises
conference coffee, so I offer
to fetch her a Starbucks
macchiato grande, with turbinado sugar.
She’s delighted, can start her day properly,
draws on her Gauloises,
shakes her gorgeous, pewter dreads,
sips the java that I brought her
and reads her own words:
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Nuns go by as quiet as lust
Everything in silver-gray and black.
2. Workshop
She asks us to adapt
Synge’s Playboy of the Western World
for the contemporary stage.
She asks us to translate “The Birds.”
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She asks us to think about clocks,
see the numbers as glyphs,
consider the time we spend watching them
in class, on line, at the hairdresser’s.
In class she calls me “Ouidah” and I answer.
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“I am the yellow mother
of two yellow boys,” she says.
I sit up straight.
Now the work begins, and
Oh
the work is hard.
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3.
She does not love
my work, but she loves
my baby, tells me
to have many more.
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4. A Reading at Temple University
“Love,” she wrote,
and “love” and “love” and “love,”
and “amanuensis,” “velvet,” “pantry,” “lean,”
Shadrack, Solomon, Hagar, Jadine, Plum,
circles sth runagate
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and then,
she whispered it,
love
Poem Summary
1.
“The Toni Morrison Dreams” is a four-part
poem sequence, which includes at least two explicitly different settings (a classroom workshop
and an auditorium) and describes scenarios that are
reminiscent of experiences one might have while
attending a university-sponsored literary conference. The trick to appreciating the poem sequence
lies in seeing how its details reveal much larger
subjects, in this case pertaining to professional hierarchy and competition in the arts.
In section one, the scene takes place before the
literary program is to begin. The speaker realizes
that the presenter, the African American novelist
Toni Morrison, “despises / conference coffee.” So
the speaker offers to “fetch” Morrison a coffee from
Starbucks. The verb, fetch, reveals that the speaker
assumes a much lower status than Morrison has.
The speaker is happy to serve as an errand runner
for the important author, eager to leave the meeting in order to get a coffee to please Morrison. Thus
the speaker seeks to be singled out from the audience as the one who performs this service for Morrison. Getting “better” coffee for the presenter also
suggests Morrison’s elitist attitude; she “despises”
the coffee everyone else in the room is probably
drinking.
In the second stanza, the speaker notes that
Morrison is “delighted” and says this coffee allows
her to “start her day properly.” Like a patted puppy
that has performed a trick, the speaker feels special in the light of Morrison’s appreciation of her
service. But the elitism continues as Morrison takes
out her French cigarettes, Gauloises. Morrison is
discerning enough not to smoke ordinary American brands. The speaker watches Morrison like a
fan would a movie star. Morrison shakes her “gorgeous, pewter dreads” and “sips the java” the
speaker has brought her.
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Then Morrison begins reading her own words:
“Nuns go by as quiet as lust.” This sentence is paradoxical or self-contradictory because the quiet walk
of celibate nuns is compared to lust. While the sentence taken here out of context does not have much
meaning, the speaker is affected by it. She comments, perhaps on Morrison’s sentence: “Everything in silver-gray and black.” This line perhaps
suggests that the scene Morrison describes is rendered in these two colors. The comment may also
be a description of Morrison herself, with her pewter
hair and dark skin, drinking coffee, or perhaps the
line describes how Morrison blanks out everything
else in the room. Indeed the comment may extend
to literally “everything,” to the world at large and
to the way in which a hierarchy of color tends to
recur, between whites and blacks, between important African Americans and unimportant ones.
2. Workshop
In the second section, the speaker is a participant in a class conducted by Toni Morrison. The
first stanza begins, “She asks us,” and it goes without saying that the “she” refers to Toni Morrison,
the star of this conference. The writing strategy
Morrison suggests first is for the participants to
adapt John Millington Synge’s play Playboy of the
Western World, which was written in 1907, to a
contemporary stage. The next strategy is to “translate ‘The Birds.’”
Readers may ask why Alexander alludes to
these particular works. Synge’s play is in part about
how a person is evaluated by others who do not really know him. In this case, the main character,
Christy Mahon, believes he has killed his cruel father and this presumed act wins Christy the praise
of people in another town to which he flees. But
when the father shows up with a wounded head and
fights with his son, the townspeople form the opposite opinion of Christy. Thus, a person can be lauded
or attacked depending on how he is viewed by others in the society who do not even know him. To
adapt Synge’s play to a “contemporary stage” invites class members to find a current and equivalent
act that illustrates an attack on authority or the father figure that can incorporate some of the elements
in Synge’s play and make them relevant to the present time. The class members are also asked to translate Aristophanes’ play The Birds, a fifth century
B.C. comedy about two characters who try to escape
taxes and a law suit by tricking the gods. Both of
these assignments require the class members to work
within the white male literary canon. These are academic assignments, which are not likely to be very
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relevant to aspiring African American writers who
come to a Morrison-directed writing workshop hoping to gain something from Morrison’s own insights.
In the second stanza, Morrison asks the participants to “think about clocks,” to imagine the
numbers as “glyphs,” or symbols, and to “consider
the time [they] spend watching them / in class, online, at the hairdresser’s.” These writing strategies
may take the participants closer to their own experience, to their own lives. But it is unclear how exactly, if at all, these prompts connect directly with
the class members. It is safe to say that students are
asked to consider the symbols, not just in texts they
study or try to emulate, but also the ones cued by
the teacher. One part of the difficulty for students
lies in finding a way to connect to the focus of the
lecture and to the frame of mind of the teacher.
Thus far these writing strategies ask writers to work
more in the existing and dominant literary tradition
rather than out of their unique frames of reference.
Morrison calls the speaker “Ouidah,” and
she answers. “Why ‘Ouidah?’” a speaker-dreamer
might ask upon waking from such a dream as this
one. From the middle of the 1600s to the early
1700s, Ouidah was the leading port city on the Slave
Coast of West Africa. From this city, an estimated
15,000 to 20,000 Africans annually left their homeland and were crowded onto slave ships destined
for the American colonies. Now Ouidah is a tourist
spot to which travelers go to visit a museum of slave
history and to see the coastal memorial to millions
of Africans who disappeared from Africa’s coast
into slavery in distant places. Perhaps the speaker’s
willing subservience explains why Morrison calls
her by this name. Africans were denied their birth
names and renamed by their slave owners. Perhaps
the suggestion here is that the speaker is a “slave”
to the system of higher education and to the influence of this celebrated teacher and author.
Next Morrison says, “‘I am the yellow mother
/ of two yellow boys,’” a statement that makes the
speaker “sit up straight,” like a youngster who wants
to impress her teacher. The reference to motherhood
anticipates the next section in the poem in which
the speaker reveals that she has a baby. It also may
be for the speaker the most personally relevant comment Morrison has made thus far in the workshop.
In the last stanza, the speaker says, “Now the work
begins, and / Oh / the work is hard.” The suggestion may be that once Morrison hits upon a personally relevant topic, the speaker feels compelled
to begin writing. Another possibility is that with this
topic the speaker is reduced to a grade-school stu-
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dent, sitting up straight to please the teacher. This
reduction from full adult status and competence to
child reduces the speaker’s facility and fluency. She
comments, understandably, that “the work is hard.”
3.
In this section, Morrison evaluates the speaker’s
work. The speaker says Morrison “does not love /
[her] work.” A subjective evaluation like this one
completely without qualification, explanation, or
guidance is likely to fall on the speaker as a flat rejection of her work. The goal of the aspiring writer
is not to please one important reader but rather to
find what is inside herself and nurture that. She may
be able to learn from role models, but ultimately she
searches for her own voice and her own worldview.
The valued inner part may be symbolized by the
baby the speaker has with her that Morrison loves.
Morrison “tells [her] / to have many more.” If interpreted literally, this passage seems to say that the
speaker is a young mother who brings her baby to
this program. That she goes to the conference or into
a writing workshop with her baby suggests that she
is encumbered in more ways than one. She is pursuing two roles, as writer and as mother.
Morrison is her literary foremother—in a sense,
a role model. But instead of encouraging the speaker
in her professional pursuits, by perhaps pointing out
how the speaker’s writing works and how she might
develop it further, Morrison tells her to have more babies. To have more babies is possibly to incapacitate
the speaker all the more in her pursuit of education
and writing. That Morrison “loves” the baby is praise
for the young mother; that Morrison tells her to have
more babies is discouragement for the speaker’s aspirations as a writer. Looked at another way, the baby
may signify the speaker’s sense that her creativity is
interior and that she is already fully engaged in the
process of creating this inner self. This idea implies
that a woman’s baby can be a symbol of the woman’s
creative work, a literary work for example. The
dreamer designs the dream, controls all parts of it, and
these parts can signify different things or have more
than one meaning. The same is true of poetry.
4. A Reading at Temple University
The fourth section presents notes taken by the
speaker who is in the audience during a reading Toni
Morrison gives at Temple University. The speaker
writes down words. “Love” repeats five times.
Among several other words, the speaker writes
down “amanuensis.” An amanuensis is a slave who
performs secretarial duties or someone who has the
job of copying a manuscript. The amanuensis does
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Keep a dream book for several weeks, then take
story lines and images from the recorded dreams
to make up some poems. Read these poems to
your classmates and invite them to analyze the
poems’ meanings.
• Research Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) in order to learn about
Freud’s theories concerning the subconscious and
how dreams contain symbols and imagery that
may be interpreted as revealing the dreamer’s
psychological makeup and may then be used for
creative work. Then write a short story about a
person who has high dream recall and finds the
answers to his or her daytime problems by paying attention to the recalled dreams.
• Attend a literary conference held by a local college or university and observe the key note
speaker’s behavior and body language as you listen to their presentation. Then write a character
not initiate or create a text, but rather she takes dictation or copies the text. An aspiring writer who sits
in an audience taking notes is not being independently creative but is acting more like a secretary.
Also listed are biblical names, “Shadrack, Solomon,
Hagar.” Some of the words are spaced apart, not in
sentences, as if the speaker is drifting off to sleep
or not paying attention. The letters “sth” stand alone.
At the end, the speaker speaks, whispers the word,
“love,” as though that is what matters most, more
than listening, copying, particular words, or biblical persons. More than publishing one’s own words
or becoming famous, love matters most.
Themes
Celebrity Status of Famous Authors
Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for
her 1987 novel Beloved and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Beloved was made into a film, and
Oprah Winfrey, in selecting her as her favorite
author, brought additional attention to Morrison.
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study of that speaker, selecting details that hint
at who the real person is behind the performance.
• Do some research on groupies, people who follow a particular musician or actor and attend
their performances in the hope of getting some
personal contact with the person. Write a paper
about how celebrities and their fans interact,
both in positive and negative ways. Such a paper might examine, for example, the possible
causes for Princess Diana’s death in a car crash.
• In 1974, the term “supermom” was coined. It describes a woman who fulfills all the traditional
wifely and maternal responsibilities and is able
to balance those with a full-time professional life
outside the home. Research this concept and ideal
as it was considered during the women’s liberation movement and then write a paper on how the
private life and professional aspirations of a person can reinforce each other or be in conflict.
Elizabeth Alexander uses Morrison in this poem sequence because Morrison is so well-known. This
kind of celebrity wields much influence in the academic setting and with aspiring writers. The poem
explores how effective such a writer may be in working with and encouraging others. It also asks if in
the presence of a person of such stature a beginning
writer can maintain her own voice and withstand the
blow of possible criticism. The easy assumption
might be that in the presence of greatness, one can
learn the essential tricks to the trade of becoming
great. On the other hand, the case may be that the
beginner’s hopes can all too easily be quashed.
A dream book is a record of the writer’s
dreams, nighttime dreams, daydreams, and dreamed
of goals. “The Toni Morrison Dreams” suggests all
kinds of dreams. The speaker dreams about attending a lecture by Morrison and having Morrison hear
her own writing and see her baby. The poet Elizabeth Alexander also may dream about being a celebrated writer like Morrison, achieving that kind of
status and having that kind of impact on others. Using the dream framework, Alexander can explore
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the difficulties involved in being a young woman
and mother and aspiring writer, of seeking out the
celebrity writer and putting herself in the unnerving
position of trying to win that celebrity’s praise. In
this poem sequence, the speaker wins Morrison’s
appreciation for bringing her coffee and for having
a baby but fails to win it for her own writing.
Hierarchy among African Americans
The poem dramatizes the hierarchy that exists
between celebrity author and audience member, between famous writer and beginning writer, between
teacher and student. The Temple University setting
provides as backdrop the hierarchy which permeates
higher education, the one in the know is singled out
for the podium and everyone else is relegated to the
audience rows below them. In this case, the dreamer
of the poem, the speaker, is an African American
woman and aspiring writer. Although she has validity in her own right she immediately relegates herself to the role of a step-and-fetch-it servant in order
to “win points” with Morrison. That Morrison gets
to have a better coffee also underscores the two tier
gathering: the conference coffee is good enough for
the attendees but not good enough for Morrison. Perhaps part of the “antebellum” nature of this poem is
the way in which among African Americans themselves, the factor of status and power replicates the
hierarchy of white over black: the elite savor their
refined tastes and the underlings cater to them.
does. The speaker quotes Morrison as she addresses
her audience and the workshop participants. Everything the poem presents comes through the speaker’s
eyes, from her point of view. This angle on the subject emphasizes the celebrity status of Morrison
and the adoration of the speaker who wants to be
noticed and validated by Morrison. Though the
speaker seeks validation for her writing, she reports
that Morrison does not love her writing but does
love her baby, which suggests that Morrison is
quicker to validate her as a mother than as a writer.
Characterization
“The Toni Morrison Dreams” characterizes
two women: the novelist Toni Morrison and the
speaker who is an aspiring writer and a new mother.
Morrison is particular about her coffee and her
brand of cigarettes. She has her gray hair done up
in impressive dreadlocks. She gives strategies for
writing and reads from her own writing. The
speaker is so eager to participate in the program
that she does not allow the encumbrance of having
a little baby stop her from attending. As a writer
herself, the speaker seeks Morrison’s praise and encouragement and takes what she gets. The speaker
admits Morrison “does not love / [her] work, but
she loves / my baby, tells me / to have many more.”
Historical Context
Style
Literary Allusion
Alexander uses literary allusion in her poem
“The Toni Morrison Dreams” by making reference
to other literary works. In the second part of the
poem, one of the strategies Morrison suggests is to
adapt the 1907 play Playboy of the Western World
to a contemporary stage. The assumption is that the
workshop participants know this work by the latenineteenth-century Irish playwright, John Millington Synge. The play is about a son’s rebellion
against his father and the way in which the son is
evaluated by others. In order to try out Morrison’s
strategy, the participants have to know the play.
Morrison also asks participants to translate The
Birds, a comedy by Aristophanes, which would require them to know Greek.
First-Person Point of View
Alexander uses the eye witness of a single
speaker who reports on what Morrison says and
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Nobel Prize Winner Appears
at Temple University
In 1993 Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Frequently compared to the
southern novelist William Faulkner, Morrison has
written extraordinary, highly poetic and original
novels about the south and about race relations. In
April 1998, Morrison gave a lecture in Boyer Theater at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She read from her new novel Paradise,
which was published that same year. In the poem,
the speaker is a member of the audience who hears
Morrison’s presentation. Morrison’s reading at
Temple was very well received.
Critical Overview
As of 2005, Alexander has produced three books
of poetry. The first, The Venus Hottentot, published
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in 1990, is, according to a reviewer for Publishers
Weekly (July 23, 2001), “a stellar debut.” However,
that work was followed by the less impressive Body
of Life (1996), which the same reviewer calls “a
relative slump.” Antebellum Dream Book, in this
reviewer’s opinion is first rate, its poems are “aggressively vivid” and “impressive.” This reviewer
also points out that this book is published by the
well-funded Graywolf Press, affording the work
better visibility.
A reviewer for the Library Journal (January
2002) identifies “memory and race” as Alexander’s
main themes. This reviewer emphasizes the African
Americans to whom Alexander alludes in the collection: Nat King Cole, Michael Jordon, Muhammad Ali, and Toni Morrison. The reviewer also
praises Alexander’s poems about giving birth and
being a new mother.
Finally, Stephen Burt, writing in the Yale Review (July 2002) describes Alexander’s poems as
“accomplished.” Burt criticizes Alexander’s ear
for being “hardly infallible” but acknowledges her
“range of rhythms” and variety of poetic forms. He
points out that her work is inspired by blues, ballads, and jazz. He also praises her for skillful
juxtaposition.
Criticism
Melodie Monahan
Melodie Monahan has a Ph.D. in English. She
teaches at Wayne State University and also operates an editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the
following essay, Monahan analyzes “The Toni
Morrison Dreams” in order to show how Alexander conveys Morrison’s celebrity status through a
sequence of dream vignettes that culminate with the
poem’s most important value, love.
The title of Alexander’s Antebellum Dream
Book (2001) suggests the tenuous and sometimes
illogical thread that strings together the images in
these individual dreamlike poems. Like a book in
which a person records her dreams, logging the fanciful plots as they surface in memory upon waking, this collection presents separate poems that
more or less exploit the liberty of dreams in order
to step beyond the ordinary into fresh combinations. These combinations are often dream-like images or juxtaposed scenes that are not restricted by
verisimilitude, logical sequence, or cause-andeffect relationships. The poet, like a dreamer, allows
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Alexander
economically and concisely
establishes the celebrity
status of Toni Morrison
and the rapt adoration of
the aspiring writer who
attends the conference and
the morning workshop
Morrison directs.”
free association and seemingly random images to
float into the text and on that sea of receptivity and
fancy, the reader moves from one topic to another,
observing how wish fulfillment, animated fears,
and psychic disclosures take shape and become in
some cases weird elements of plot. “The Toni Morrison Dreams” comprises four vignettes, all pertaining to an appearance Toni Morrison makes at
a conference held at Temple University in Philadelphia. In these little scenes or dreams, the narrator
gets as close as she can to the famous African
American novelist and Nobel Prize winner.
In the first vignette, the scene takes place in
the morning right before a writing workshop conducted by Morrison is to begin. In this dream, Toni
Morrison expresses her hatred for “conference coffee,” and the narrator offers “to fetch her a Starbucks.” To be able to “fetch” anything for a writer
of Morrison’s stature and importance is an honor
to this narrator, and the use of this particular verb
emphasizes both the narrator’s unabashed pride and
her lowly status by contrast. She seems thrilled to
be helpful and proud that Morrison is “delighted,
can start her day properly.” Then the narrator notices that Morrison takes out a pack of French cigarettes, Gauloises. Morrison is discriminating about
her coffee, about her cigarettes. She is particular,
has class, and, the narrator notes, is beautiful. The
narrator sums up the portrait by describing how
Morrison “shakes her gorgeous, pewter dreads, /
sips the java that I brought her / and reads her own
words.” Morrison reads her own words: “Nuns go
by as quiet as lust,” and the narrator concludes that
“Everything [is] silver-gray and black.” Morrison’s
words about nuns, presumably in black with white
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Alexander’s first book of poetry, The Venus
Hottentot (1990), was praised widely and the
title poem is often anthologized.
• In 2004, Graywolf Press published a new book
of essays by Alexander. The Black Interior takes
a look at the role of the African American artist,
both in the black community and in the larger
dominant white culture.
• Smoke, published by BOA Editions in 2000, is
a collection of poems by Dorianne Laux. These
works vividly portray such diverse topics as the
portrait of a daughter, a wife’s erotic longing for
her husband, and popular culture.
• Winner of the thirteenth annual Nicholas
Roerich Poetry Prize, Echolocations, by Diane
Thiel, explores various subjects connected to
themes of dislocation, landscape, and memory.
Thiel’s poems stretch across time and continent
to include a parent’s memories of being a boy
in Germany during World War II. This collection was published by Story Line Press in 2000.
wimples, Morrison’s black skin and pewter dreadlocks, the whole scene becomes the hue of Morrison and her words.
Thus Alexander economically and concisely
establishes the celebrity status of Toni Morrison
and the rapt adoration of the aspiring writer who
attends the conference and the morning workshop
Morrison directs. Mostly, the relationship between
the two women is established in the offer to get
Morrison coffee and in the way Morrison’s presence and words transform a world of color into the
monochromic hues of “silver-gray and black.”
The second section is called Workshop. Morrison is identified as “She.” It goes without saying
that the narrator refers to Morrison. Who else
would she be speaking about? Morrison is the only
“star” present, and “she” is in charge. She tells the
writing workshop participants to “adapt / Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World / for the contempo-
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rary stage.” Morrison assumes the writers know this
1907 Irish play well enough that they can create
changes in it that would suit a late-twentiethcentury production. She also asks them to translate
“‘The Birds’” by Aristophanes, a task that would
require them to know Greek. Neither of these academic assignments are likely to be assigned in
a creative writing workshop, however. But their
effect on participants might be understandably
intimidating.
Next Morrison asks the participants “to think
about clocks, / see the numbers as glyphs, / consider the time [they] spend watching them // in
class, on line, at the hairdresser’s.” This second
strategy moves the group from academic knowledge to personal knowledge; it moves them from
the analytical exercises of adapting the Irish play
or translating the Greek classical play to a much
more personal level, inviting them to free associate, reflect on personal moments, and experiment.
Jumping further into the personal, the narrator
says that Morrison calls her “Ouidah,” the French
word for yes, oui, and the first syllable of daughter, -dah. Morrison has given the narrator a nickname, which suggests familiarity and friendliness,
perhaps even tenderness. Then Morrison says,
“I am the yellow mother / of the two yellow boys,”
a line that makes the narrator “sit up straight.” The
line speaks directly to the narrator, connecting with
her as a woman of color or blended race and as a
mother of two. With these lead-ins to writing, the
participants begin, and the narrator comments,
“Now the work begins, and / Oh / the work is hard.”
Thus in this dream workshop, drawing from reality about how workshops may actually be conducted, Alexander maps out how Morrison as
facilitator takes the group from the outer world and
from intellectual knowledge toward the inner world
of free association and reflections about common
objects, in this case the numbers on the face of a
clock. Empowered by being given a nickname, by
a few cues that connect with the narrator’s own life,
the narrator is able to begin to write but finds doing so hard work.
In the third section, the reader learns that the
narrator has brought her baby to the workshop, in
the real world a highly unlikely decision. The narrator admits, Morrison “does not love / my work,
but she loves // my baby, tells me / to have many
more.” In this dream poem, indeed, in a dream, the
dreamer can imagine such a scene where two forms
of creativity merge, writing and motherhood. The
narrator is an aspiring writer, a fan of Morrison, a
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person who wants to find her way into publication
and leave her mark on literature. But the narrator
is also a new mother; she has her hands full at the
moment with a little baby. These two ways of being productive, writing and motherhood, can be in
conflict. If a woman has her hands full with a baby,
she may not have a hand free for writing. But in
the dream, the narrator imagines Morrison loves
her baby and tells her to have many more. What
does this directive mean? It might mean that the
dreamed of Morrison is saying that the narrator’s
writing is not wonderful but her baby is and the
narrator’s place is in the home having more children. It is also possible that the dreamed of Morrison is saying that she loves the “baby” of this
narrator, both her beginnings in words and her beginnings in flesh. The word is the idea made flesh,
and childbirth is a likely metaphor for book birth
(publication).
The last section of the poem, the fourth dream
of Morrison, is titled A Reading at Temple University. (In fact, Toni Morrison appeared at Temple University on April 8, 1998, and read an excerpt
from her new novel Paradise, a novel about the
love of God and the love human beings feel for
one another. Elizabeth Alexander was teaching in
Boston and Philadelphia at that time and perhaps
she was able to attend this reading.) Now the “she”
seems to be the narrator who dreams of listening
to Morrison read and takes notes, writes down the
words Morrison uses. She writes “love” down four
times along with other words. “Amanuensis” she
writes down; an amanuensis is a person who takes
dictation or transcribes a manuscript. In this audience at Temple University, the narrator is in effect
taking dictation, writing down the words Morrison
reads. She writes other words, “‘velvet,’ ‘pantry,’
‘lean.’” These words appear in quotation marks;
she is quoting the speaker’s words.
Then the narrator writes biblical names,
“Shadrack, Solomon, Hagar.” Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego are three Hebrews named in
Daniel who refuse to worship a graven image and
are cast into a fiery furnace by Nebuchadnezzar.
They are seen in the furnace with a fourth person,
thought to be the Son of God, and they emerge
unharmed and free even of the smell of smoke
(Daniel 3:12-30). Solomon, son of David and
known for his wisdom, is granted his wish for “an
understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9), and Solomon
is the one who determines which woman is the
true mother of the baby two women claim (1 Kings
3:16-30). Hagar, servant of Abraham’s wife,
Sarah, bares Abraham a son, Ishmael, but when
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Sarah herself has a son, Hagar and Ishmael are
cast out into the desert to die. An angel directs
them to water and saves their lives (Genesis 21).
In time Ishmael has twelve sons of his own from
whom the Arab people are said to have descended.
These three biblical names are thus connected to
stories of blessing, survival, and reproduction.
The narrator writes, “Jadine,” the name of a
Sorbonne-educated, beautiful, black model in Morrison’s 1981 novel Tar Baby. Then she writes a
couple other words along with the letters “sth.” The
section ends with “and then, / she whispered it, //
love.” The reading affirms Morrison’s emphasis on
love. Love is the impetus and the reason for writing, as it is for having and rearing children. That
word alone is the ending point of the dream sequence. The four sections, then, begin in the adoration for the celebrity writer Toni Morrison, and
move through scenes of writing for and with Morrison to the final scene of listening to Morrison read
and the narrator writing notes, which seem themselves to suggest ideas of survival and reproduction toward the most important piece, love itself.
Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on “The
Toni Morrison Dreams,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson
Gale, 2005.
Catherine Holm
Holm is a short story and novel author, and a
freelance writer. In this essay, Holm looks at
Alexander’s dreamlike style, strategic placement of
words and lines, and allusion to race and color in
this poem.
In “The Toni Morrison Dreams,” a serial poem
with a subtle and edgy quality, Alexander uses language to create allusions to race. Alexander also
strategically places words and lines in the poem for
maximum impact. The author conveys a strange,
dreamlike tone in the words and events that are chosen in this poem.
The four parts of this serial poem revolve
around the interaction between the narrator and the
African American writer Toni Morrison. There is
a workshop and a reading. Two other portions of
the poem seem to serve as segues, much like a
dream might proceed. The procession of the poem
seems oddly spontaneous—giving it a dreamlike,
unpredictable quality. For example, the poem
seems to start out in the moments prior to a reading or workshop by Toni Morrison. It feels as if
this is indeed the beginning of a day. Toni Morrison can now “start her day properly,” having received the kind of coffee she likes best.
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. . . perhaps
Alexander is trying to say
that love supercedes many
of the other ideas and
words in existence.”
It then makes sense that the workshop scene
would follow in part two of this serial poem. But
part three comes out of nowhere, much like a dream
might proceed. The reader cannot be sure what
prompts Toni Morrison to remark on and love
the narrator’s baby. If Toni Morrison does not love
the narrator’s work in the workshop, but loves the
baby, did the narrator bring her baby to the workshop? Or did the narrator and Morrison meet at another time? Or is the third part of this serial poem
unrelated to the events in the rest of the poem? It
is also possible that Alexander intended to parallel
the mothering and birthing of a baby with the creation of artistic work, both of which are creative
acts. In this interpretation, Toni Morrison could be
telling the narrator to continue creating new writing, which would be in keeping with this type of
symbolism common in dreams.
Part four of the poem refers to a Toni Morrison reading. The reader cannot be sure whether all
the events of the poem took place together, or if
they are simply dream segments that share only the
common theme of Toni Morrison’s presence. In its
entirety, the procession of the poem is quite dreamlike, since dreams often disregard linear time and
move and shift with no particular order. Part four
sounds and feels surreal. The reader cannot be sure
whether Morrison’s reading actually consisted of
the words presented on the page, or whether these
are words that were part of a reading—words that
stayed in the narrator’s mind. If the reading is
dreamlike, which the reader can assume, given the
name of this poem and the premise of Alexander’s
collection (The Antebellum Dream Book), then this
random presentation of words very much resembles the spontaneity of a dream.
What is interesting about part four of this poem
is that the reading seems to come full circle. Morrison starts out by writing “love” four times. At this
point, the reader cannot be sure whether Morrison
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is writing, or reading out loud from her writing.
Even though the stanza uses the term “she wrote,”
Morrison could still be reading from writing that
she wrote at one point. The second stanza is even
more of a mystery. The words in this stanza are
still enclosed in quotation marks, but now the
reader is not told whether Morrison is writing or
speaking the words. The first word in this stanza,
“amanuensis,” actually refers to a person who is
skilled at transcribing speech. Perhaps Alexander
is subtly trying to capture the transition of the creation of writing, from when it is written on the page,
to when it is spoken out loud at a reading. The third
stanza loses the quotes, but uses an assortment of
capitalized words that appear to denote places or
people. The fourth stanza loses all punctuation, but
the word “circles” is used, perhaps alluding to the
fact that the reading ends where it began.
The last line of part four is “love” and it is spoken, rather than written. As if to imply its power,
the word “love” is whispered. With an apt choice
of words, Alexander writes, “and then, she whispered it.” The inclusion of “it” at the end of this
phrase creates a little more suspense and impact,
and gives the reader pause to wonder what “it” is,
before reading the final line of the poem. If Alexander had written “and then, she whispered,” there
would not be the almost indiscernible pause between “whispered it” and “love.” They would instead run together a little sooner in the reader’s
mind. It is this pause, which Alexander achieves
with the addition of “it,” that gives the final stanza
(“love”) of the poem the power it deserves. And
with the beginning and ending of part four, perhaps
Alexander is trying to say that love supercedes
many of the other ideas and words in existence.
Certainly, love is emphasized over the random assortment of words in part four.
Throughout this serial poem, Alexander uses
intentional, strategic placement of lines and words
for emphasis and impact. The end of part four is a
good example of this. When Morrison “whispered
it, // love,” the word “love” is set off in a stanza of
its own. The third stanza from the end of the poem
“circles sth runagate” seems to be purposefully presented as it is, perhaps to demonstrate an overall
trend away from the structure of “she wrote” and
of quotation marks and of names to what is really
important (love).
Intentional placement of words and lines for
emphasis is used in other parts of “The Toni Morrison Dreams.” In part one of the poem, Alexander
sets off “Nuns go by as quiet as lust.” This seems
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to follow a grammatical convention. In written
work, dialogue is often set off in a paragraph of its
own. But while this could be considered dialogue
(since Morrison begins reading out loud after sipping her “java”), it also forces the reader to insert
a pause between “words:” and “Nuns.” The reader
inserts this pause, whether the poem is read out loud
or in the mind.
The last stanza of part two also uses placement
of words and lines for emphasis.
Now the work begins, and
Oh
the work is hard.
This entire stanza would be much less effective if it was written as one line. Again, breaking
the lines between “and” and “Oh” as well as between “Oh” and “the” gives real impact to the
word “Oh.” Mental or auditory pauses are inserted
by the reader, whether reading the poem out loud
or silently. “Oh” is also capitalized for further
emphasis.
Part three of “The Toni Morrison Dreams” also
uses word placement effectively. In this case,
Alexander breaks phrases unconventionally in the
lines within the two stanzas in part three. Instead
of using the commas to end each line, she chooses
to end the first two lines with the words “love” and
“loves,” a possible foreshadowing of what is to
come in part four.
She does not love
my work, but she loves
my baby, tells me
to have many more.
These stanzas would read very differently if
the commas defined the lines.
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one is a dream in silver-gray and black. If so, why
is the narrator not dreaming in color? Nuns also imply black and white, with the image of their traditional garb. Black and white are opposites, but
silver-gray implies something in between. Alexander could be alluding to the fact that divisions between races become more and more blurred. In part
two of the poem, Morrison says, “‘I am the yellow
mother / of the two yellow boys.’” Whatever this
means, it causes the narrator to “sit up straight.” The
implied importance of the statement also causes the
reader to take notice. And since the entire poem is
like a dream, it may not matter whether the statement is explained or not. The reader can make his
or her own inferences about any allusions to race.
In part two of this poem, the name “Ouidah” is also
a racial reference; Ouidah was a historical location
for the export of slaves.
Because the premise of this poem is based on
a dream, Alexander is free to model the poem in a
dreamlike manner. Like a dream, thoughts and
words and events do not always follow in a logical fashion. But the astute reader can dig deeper
and look for Alexander’s implied emphasis on certain words and ideas. And for the reader willing to
look deeply and read with a critical eye, the poem
is full of symbolism and suggested allusion.
Source: Catherine Holm, Critical Essay on “The Toni Morrison Dreams,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Stephen Burt
In the following review excerpt, Burt praises
Alexander’s ear for rhythm and her assemblage of
disparate items.
She does not love my work,
but she loves my baby,
tells me to have many more.
Alexander’s placement of line breaks emphasizes “love” and “my work” and “my baby.”
Alexander also breaks for a new stanza right before “my baby.” This seems to emphasize separate
facets of the narrator’s life—the work of writing
and the act of mothering.
“The Toni Morrison Dreams” is full of references to color. Some of these references could be
interpreted as allusions to race. Toni Morrison “despises” conference coffee, the implication being that
Starbucks will make a stronger (blacker?) cup of
coffee. Morrison’s dreads are pewter. The last line
of part one (“Everything in silver-gray and black”)
could be referring to nuns, or could refer to all of
what has been presented in part one. Perhaps part
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“And memory is romance / and race is
romance”—these lines from the five-part poem
“Fugue” reveal that memory and race are indeed
two of Alexander’s most powerful themes. Alexander’s third book, after Venus Hottentot and Body of
Life, features poems about several famous African
American icons, including Nat King Cole, Toni
Morrison, Richard Pryor, and Muhammad Ali. Her
sense of fun comes to the fore in poems such as
“Opiate,” in which the speaker goes out on a date
with Michael Jordan. “Georgia Postcard” explores
the new South, which still harbors evils from the
past, and “Overture: Watermelon City” describes
friendly neighborhoods where people sit outside at
night, though it also notes “the smell of smoke and
flesh, / the city of fire for real.” There’s filler here,
too. One poem is no more than a recipe, and a couple of the celebrity poems come across as almost
trivial. But when Alexander’s forge is hot, as in
“Neonatology,” the reader is transported to her
world: “to the mouse-squeak of your suckling, behold your avid jaws, / your black eyes: otter, ocelot,
// my whelp, my cub, my seapup.” Recommended
for most collections.
Source: Doris Lynch, Review of Antebellum Dream Book,
in Library Journal, January 2002, p. 108.
Sources
Alexander, Elizabeth, “The Toni Morrison Dreams,” in Antebellum Dream Book, Graywolf Press, 2001, pp. 30–33.
Burt, Stephen, “Poetry in Review,” in Yale Review, Vol. 90,
July 2002, pp. 170–85.
Lynch, Doris, Review of Antebellum Dream Book, in
Library Journal, Vol. 127, January 2002, p. 108.
Review of Antebellum Dream Book, in Publishers Weekly,
Vol. 248, No. 130, July 23, 2001, p. 68.
Further Reading
Doris Lynch
In the following review, Lynch asserts that
“memory and race are indeed two of Alexander’s
most powerful themes.”
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Baker, Houston A., Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics
of Afro-American Women’s Writings, DIANE Publishing,
1998.
Alexander and Patricia Redmond provide phototext
for Baker’s analysis of African American women’s
writings and theories developing about African
American studies. Baker examines Zora Neale
Hurston’s Mules and Men, Morrison’s Sula, and
Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass. The book includes
thirty-nine images of black women which convey in
picture form the poetics Baker discusses.
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Egar, Emmanuel Edame, Black Poets of Harlem Renaissance, University Press of America, 2003.
Unlike most of the previous studies of the Harlem
Renaissance, this book looks at the literary achievement of women poets active during this period and
subsequently ignored or omitted. Egar argues that
African American women poets of this period wrote
about the black spirit in ways quite distinct from their
fellow male poets.
Kowit, Steve, In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable
Workshop, Tilbury House, 1995.
Kowit knows a lot about poetry and presents in a lowkey and accessible manner many models and strategies for aspiring poets. He also explores style and
explains skills that new writers would do well to cultivate. The poems included as models are mostly
from unknown yet excellent poets.
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Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Knopf, 1987.
Morrison’s poetic novel brings to life the haunting
legacy of slavery and a mother’s resolve not to bring
children into the world where some slave catcher might
return them to captivity. Sethe is so impassioned in her
resolve to keep her baby “free” that she murders it to
avoid the possibility that it will be kidnapped and returned to slavery. Afterward the dead child in the form
of a young woman called Beloved haunts Sethe and
causes her house to vibrate with her spiritual presence.
This novel intricately braids an extraordinary story with
highly poetic and evocative language, and the paranormal scenes are dreamlike in their irrational logic.
Novakovich, Josip, Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Story Press,
1995.
Would-be novel writers will enjoy this study of the
novel as a form, a book full of writing strategies, helpful definitions, and excerpts from works of fiction.
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Trompe l’Oeil
Mary Jo Salter’s poem “Trompe l’Oeil,” which provided the title for her 2003 collection Open Shutters, describes an artistic style found in Genoa, Italy,
and throughout Europe: that of painting realistic
murals on the outside walls of houses and buildings,
so real that people passing by are fooled, at least
briefly, into mistaking the painted images for the
things they represent. Salter uses this particular style
of painting to spark a meditation on the nature of
reality and the arts in general, finding insincerity in
both the fake shutters that stand beside a real window and the French word “oeil” itself, which can
be considered deceptive or a lie because it presents
a final “l” to the eye but not to the ear (it is not pronounced the way it is spelled if one assumes each
letter stands for a specific sound).
Mary Jo Salter
2003
This poem is representative of Salter’s work
as it has evolved over the course of five books of
poetry in the past two decades. The two subjects—
painting and foreign travel—are typical in Salter’s
writing. Stylistically, the poem shows the deft control of rhyme, off-rhyme, and rhythm that readers
have come to expect of her words. Salter’s technical elegance is balanced with a light sense of humor that makes the most of ordinary ironies, such
as the contrast between laundry piled up inside the
house and imitation clothes hung to dry on a
painted clothesline on the wall outside. The poem
manages, in just a few lines, to treat readers to a
new way of looking at the world and of looking at
how artists depict the reality that others simply
experience.
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Author Biography
Mary Jo Salter was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on August 15, 1954. Her father was an advertising executive, and her mother was a painter,
an influence that can be seen in many of Salter’s
works. She was raised in Baltimore, Maryland and
Detroit, Michigan and she then attended Harvard
University where she studied under the poet Elizabeth Bishop (whose style Salter has been said to
emulate). Salter graduated from Harvard in 1976.
She then went to England to attend New Hall, Cambridge where she earned her master’s degree with
first-class honors in 1978. After that, Salter spent
a year in France on an Amy Lowell Traveling
Scholarship. She married poet and novelist Brad
Leithauser whom she had met in 1980.
Since 1984, Salter has been intermittently affiliated with Mt. Holyoke, a liberal arts women’s
college in South Hadley, Massachusetts, mixing
teaching with international travel. Salter has also
served as the Emily Dickinson Lecturer in Humanities at Mt. Holyoke.
Salter has published five collections of poetry.
She served as Poet in Residence at Robert Frost
Place in 1981. She was awarded the Discovery
Prize from the Nation in 1983 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for 1983–1984.
Her book Unfinished Paintings: Poems (1989) received the prestigious Lamont Prize in Poetry and
also the James Laughlin Award. In 1989, she received the Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Prize
awarded by the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters. In 1994, she was a nominee for
the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for her
collection Sunday Skaters. Salter is a past vice president of the Poetry Society of America and was the
poetry editor for the New Republic from 1992 until 1995. “Trompe l’Oeil” is included in her collection Open Shutters, which was published by
Alfred A. Knopf in 2003.
Poem Text
Poem Summary
Lines 1–3
“Trompe l’Oeil” is set in Genoa, a city in
northeast Italy, not far from the border of France.
Genoa has a long history dating back before the
third century B.C. when it was destroyed by the
Carthaginians. It was rebuilt by the Romans and
was a military base for the Roman Empire. It is
common in Genoa to paint outside building walls
to make them look as if they contain actual three
dimensional objects, such as shutters, trellises, and
flower pots. The French phrase “trompe l’oeil,”
used as the poem’s title, refers to a style of painting that is so realistic that the eye is supposed to
confuse painted objects for real ones: “trompe” is
the French third person singular for “to deceive,”
and “oeil” is French for “eye.”
Line 2 refers to shutters painted next to windows in such a realistic style that, on first seeing
them, one can be fooled into thinking that they are
actual shutters that can be moved. It is only after
looking more closely at them that one can tell that
the shutters are not really shutters at all. Having
been deceived at first, the illusion is then shattered,
as described in line 3.
Lines 4–6
This stanza begins by contradicting the end of
the first stanza. The illusion of real shutters does
not actually “shatter.” On some level, the viewer
may have been tricked into thinking that the painted
shutters were real, but on a deeper level the artifice of them has been known all along. By the third
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line of this stanza, the speaker identifies the mental pattern that occurs when encountering such realistic art as the mind becomes conscious of the
artifice involved “time and again,” which implies
that the illusion is just as often forgotten.
Lines 7–9
Stanza 3 consists of one long sentence that
offers the same factual information that the poem
has already established, saying, in essence, that the
shutters are false. What this stanza has to offer is
stylistic. It refers to the window as an open eye,
which allows the play on words that the shutter, if
it could close, would shut the eye. It implies that
the artist who made this shutter look so realistic
made a “claim” about its ability to move like a real
shutter and, because the artificial shutter cannot in
fact do that, the claim is judged to be a lie.
Lines 10–12
This stanza examines the unusual visual phenomenon of the stationary shadows. The latches that
hold shutters in place stand out from the wall and
would cast different shadows at different times of
the day. In the case of painted shutters with painted
latches, the shadows that are cast are stationary
throughout the day. In line 12, the poem alludes to
the way that a sundial uses the sun’s changing location in the sky to tell time, implying that the stationary shadows are, like the stuck hands of a clock,
incapable of showing the passage of time.
Lines 13–15
This stanza continues the relationship between
the frozen shadow painted on the wall and the inability to measure time, a theme introduced in the
previous stanza. Acknowledging that the painted
shadow is like a sundial that continuously shows
the same time all day long, the speaker determines
that there is nothing wrong with that. The false
shadow is correct once every day when the sun is
positioned overhead in such a way that the latches
would in fact cast a shadow in that direction, if they
were real. This singular occurrence, when the sun
corresponds with the angle of the painted shadows
is adequate, the speaker says; there is no need to
see the shadow constantly moving with the sun’s
position. Line 15 asserts that the painter’s imagination, expressed here as “play,” is more important
than the scientific principles that rule real shadows.
Lines 16–18
Having raised the importance of play, the poem
gives deeper psychological significance to the artifi-
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cial shutters. It contrasts the life of imagination that
created and appreciates such an illusion with the drab
sameness of reality. Reality is depicted in lines 16 and
17 as an “endless / supply of clothes to wash.” While
laundry is never a welcome chore, Salter makes it
even more daunting by pointing out the fact that it
will always be there, an eternal burden. The inside of
the house is oppressive. In line 18, a contrast is drawn
when the outside of the house is described with the
positive word “fresh.” The last line of this stanza is
unpunctuated, leaving readers to linger on that unresolved idea of freshness as they take the jump to the
next stanza to see what is being described this way.
Lines 19–21
Line 19 makes a metaphorical connection between the laundry in the house and the paint that the
artist has applied to the outside. Both are hung out
to dry: the laundry is hung from a clothes line, and
the paint is “hung” on the wall. Salter uses the word
“frieze,” which is literally a sculpted or decorated
horizontal band near the top of a building but can be
applied here in a more general sense as a decoration
for the top of an outside wall. The use of this word
allows the poem to remind readers of the expression
“flapping in the breeze” with its similar-sounding
expression “flapping on a frieze.” The poem further
explores this relationship by pointing out that laundry painted on the wall might seem to be in motion
even though the real breeze cannot touch it.
Lines 22–25
The relationship between reality and artifice
that has been explored throughout the poem in
terms of the realistic painting on the wall is applied
to the relationship between spoken and written language. Line 22 describes the words of the poem as
being “pinned” to the page, like the shirt tales that
look like they are blowing in the breeze are immobilized on the wall by the painter. In line 23, the
poem draws attention to the fact that its title, which
has not been mentioned within the poem, comes
from a French expression. Using both “foreign” and
“lie” to describe the title connects the poet’s work
to the painter’s work of, as described here, creating an artificial version of reality. The critique of
reality comes down to a phonetic level as Salter
points out that the final “l” in oeil is silent (the word
is pronounced “loi”). Rather than just leaving it as
an unpronounceable letter, the poem uses it to raise
yet another question of reality versus artifice by
saying that the final letter only “looks like an l,” as
if its absence from pronunciation might mean that
it does not really exist on the page after all.
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Find some pictures of trompe l’oeil outdoor murals and write descriptions about what elements
you think make each one convincing.
• Stanza 7 is a play on the old adage, “Even a
stopped clock is right twice a day.” Make a list
of other things that are eventually right even if
they do not move.
• The speaker of this poem realizes that the
painted shutters are not real because the shadows from the latches fall in the wrong place.
Find examples in films or television shows
where shadows at the wrong angles ruin the illusion of reality and bring them to your class for
discussion.
• Make your own trompe l’oeil with a computer
photo processing program, editing an image into
a picture that readers will not immediately notice should not be there. Be sure to match the
color and texture as much as possible.
• Search for examples where the trompe l’oeil
concept is used in music, making listeners think
they are hearing things that they are not, and explain how a trained ear can tell the difference
between reality and simulation.
Themes
tion, the spelling of the word “l’oeil” is said to be
a faulty imitation of the spoken word, a “lie,” because it contains a final “l” that is not present in
the word’s pronunciation.
Imitation
The main focus of this poem is the distinction
between what is real and what only seems to be
real. The poem’s primary symbol for explaining
this distinction is the painting style known as
trompe l’oeil, which is found on the outsides of
houses in many European cities. This style emphasizes the illusion of reality in the artist’s work,
suppressing artistic style for a nearly photographic
effect. In the examples that the poem says are found
around Genoa, artists have not only rendered their
subjects realistically, but they have placed them in
locations where the actual objects depicted might
occur. Window shutters are painted outside of windows, and shirts hanging on clothes lines are placed
beside walls where clotheslines might actually be
hung. In such real-life settings, as opposed to in
museums or galleries, the paintings can actually
fool viewers into thinking that the items depicted
are real.
The poem extends its examination of reality
in the eighth stanza by questioning the relationship between the poet’s words and reality. The
words are said to be “pinned” onto the poem, indicating a basic distinction between the words,
which can be written, and the free-flowing
thoughts they are supposed to represent. In addi-
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Truth and Falsehood
It is almost certain that a work concerned with
the ways in which art imitates life will address the
relationship between truth and falsehood. Implicit
in the idea of illusion is that the product made by
the artist has some qualities in common with its
original model but lacks others. The things that are
lacking in the imitation can be considered lies.
“Tromp l’Oeil” raises this question early on
when, at the start of the second stanza, it contradicts its own version of reality as being “not true.”
In this case, it is not the false shutters that are accused of falsehood, but the way they are described:
the poem starts by saying that the viewer is fooled
into thinking the shutters are real before abruptly
realizing that they are painted, but then it says that
the viewer knew they were painted all along. Beginning like this, Salter establishes an uneasy relationship between reality and intentional dishonesty
not just between the viewer and the painter, but also
between the reader and the poet who is examining
the painting’s dishonesty.
Instead of looking at deception as being somehow immoral, this poem describes it as a good
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thing. This can best be seen in stanza 6, when the
real-life clothes waiting to be washed are contrasted
with the clothes that are painted on the wall, already washed and perpetually hung to dry. Salter
compares the drudgery of ordinary life with the fantasy of chores that are perpetually completed. The
poem does in fact consider the limitations in the
artistic version of life when comparing the painted
shadow on the wall to the frozen hands of a clock,
but it dismisses such limitations as unimportant,
noting, “Who needs to be correct / more often than
once a day?”
The last stanza raises the question of truth and
falsehood once again when calling the pronunciation of the word “l’oeil” a “lie.” Rather than serving as an accusation against the French language,
which has evolved to this pronunciation, the poem
seems to make this distinction in order to soften the
concept of “lying.” In pointing out a coincidence
and calling it a lie, the poem encourages readers to
think less judgmentally about the ways in which
reality and artistry differ.
Stillness
In this poem’s view, the biggest difference between real life and the version of life presented in
trompe l’oeil painting is that the painted version is
frozen still. This is responsible for confounding
the mind, which expects the shadows to move as
the sun moves across the sky and the clothes on the
line to flap in the breeze. As a result, anyone experiencing this kind of painting and thinking about
it for any amount of time is led to contemplate the
active world that we live in and what would happen if that activity came to an end. In this poem,
Salter pays attention to those very issues. The conclusions reached indicate a kind of weariness with
the activity of the real world, with play shadows
being given just as much respect as real shadows.
In stanza eight, Salter shows how the poet’s job,
like the painter’s, is to bring the world to a stop,
“pinning” words down on the page so that they are
not free to move around.
Style
Consonance
Consonance is a form of rhyming. With traditional rhymes, the final vowel and the final consonant sounds appear in both rhymed words, as in
“boat” and “goat” or in “lagoon” and “cartoon.”
When a poet uses consonance, the vowel sounds
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may be different, only the final consonant need be
the same, as in “stuff” and “off” or “monk” and
“sock.” The repetition helps draw the poem together but not as tightly as a traditional rhyme
might do.
Salter uses different forms of rhyme in “Tromp
l’Oeil.” There are traditional rhymes, such as “eye”
and “lie” in stanza 3 or “day” and “play” in stanza
5. There are also off rhymes, or imperfect rhymes,
as in the similarities between “shutters” and “shatters.” More often than is common, though, the poem
uses consonance. Through the use of pairings such
as “on” with “again,” “strike” with “clock,” and
“wash” with “fresh,” the poem asserts the author’s
control without following a strict pattern that would
lock it into a formal rhyming scheme.
Pun
Puns are a play on words that draw attention
to the ways that similar-sounding words can be
used, in the right circumstances, to mean similar
things. The poem starts with a pun on the word
“shutters,” following it closely with “shatters”
which is just one letter away. A pun is also made
of the phrase “hung out to dry”: it applies to laundry, which is pinned to a clothesline and hung in
the sun after washing, but it also applies to paint,
which is put on a wall wet and therefore “hung” to
dry. The phrase “flapping in the breeze” is subverted, with the word “frieze” put in to substitute
for “breeze,” which then shows up in the following line. In the end, the poem engages in a complex play with words. The word “l’oeil” is called
a “lie” because it has a letter that is not pronounced,
but it is also a “lie” because the pronunciation of
the French word “l’oeil” is close to “lie.”
Historical Context
Trompe l’Oeil
The artistic technique of trompe l’oeil has been
used for centuries. There are examples of it found
in the ruins of ancient Rome, including floor mosaics depicting what could be debris found scattered around after a feast but is actually crafted into
the tiles by the skilled hand of an artist. There are
several examples of such floor mosaics from the
second or third centuries B.C. Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer from the first century A.D., tells a story
about a competition between two Greek artists,
Zeuxis and Parrhasios, who competed to show who
could create the most realistic drawing. Zeuxis’s
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painting of a cluster of grapes was so convincing
that birds swooped down to peck at it, but he found
himself bested when he tried to open the curtain to
reveal Parrhasios’s work only to find that the curtain that he was reaching for was itself painted on
the wall.
Trompe l’oeil manifests itself in many different ways in different artistic styles. In addition to
the floor mosaics already mentioned, the practice
of painting murals on outside walls of buildings to
depict reality has been popular since the Renaissance, when artistic theories about linear perspective allowed painters to challenge themselves with
larger, grander scenes. There are also canvas paintings that capture visions of reality, a practice much
more common before the advent of photography in
the nineteenth century. Recently, sculptors working with ceramic and plastics and other malleable
materials have been able to simulate realty with
great results, creating sculptures of people in public places that look convincing until the eye uncomfortably notes their lack of motion.
The trompe l’oeil technique relies on this element of surprise. Many types of visual artistry try
to imitate reality, but most do it with the tacit agreement between the artist and viewer that what is being presented is an artist’s view of the world. With
trompe l’oeil, the viewer is not supposed to think
of the artist’s intent, at least not at first. The first
impression should be of viewing something that is
actual, an impression that naturally fades after a
few moments. After the initial shock, the viewer
can step back from the situation and consider what
aspects of the picture led to the illusion. One aspect of this trick is the matter of proportion: the object cannot be too obviously large or small for the
setting in which it is displayed. Another aspect is
the setting itself; usually, a trompe l’oeil work will
not be displayed in a place where the artistic object would not naturally fit in, although many artists
have in fact worked magic by putting images where
viewers least expect them: a train tunnel on the side
of a building, for instance, or a person seated in
a fountain. One aspect that is fairly common in
trompe l’oeil works is that the objects depicted are
often old and worn. A reason the picture or sculpture is able to fool the eye is that viewers have traditionally been used to idealized subjects in artistic
works and are caught unaware when they see things
that reflect the strains of everyday life. In general,
artists working in trompe l’oeil have tended to be
less well known than other artists because of the
emphasis placed on reproducing reality over personal expression.
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Critical Overview
From the very start of her career, Mary Jo Salter has
been considered an important American poet. Her
first book of poetry, Henry Purcell in Japan: Poems
(1985), was reviewed in several national publications, including the New Republic, where Alfred Corn
gave it a grade of “A,” commenting particularly on
the poetry’s “achieved tone and fine-grained diction.”
Phoebe Pettingell also gave Salter an “A”
when reviewing her second book, Unfinished
Painting, for the New Leader. The book, Pettingell
wrote, “deftly embodies the imperfect, the dilemma
of loss, the fragility of accomplishment.” She noted
that she saw in it slight improvement over weaknesses in Salter’s first book.
Not all reviewers have been glowing in their
praise of Salter, though those that are reluctant about
her have been few. One such reviewer is William
Logan of the New Criterion. Logan’s review of A
Kiss in Space (1999) found Salter to be too timid
of a writer. “The good poems are few enough,” he
wrote. “Salter doesn’t take chances, and settles too
easily for well-mannered, well-manicured poems.”
The praise for Open Shutters, the volume that
contains the poem “Trompe l’Oeil,” has been almost universally positive. For instance, Donna
Seaman explained in her review for Booklist that
“Salter’s moves are so precise and gravity-defying,
so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader
feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform
intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.” Reviewing Open Shutters
in the Antioch Review, John Taylor noted that
Salter’s poetry is like the painted-on shutters and
drying clothes mentioned in “Trompe l’Oeil” in
that they “display subtle surface effects: rhymes,
half-rhymes, deft meters, carefully counted syllables, playful homages to traditional poetic forms.
But like trompe l’oeil, her best craftsmanship ultimately guides our eyes behind the illusion, or beyond, or inside—and leaves us with wonder, with
unanswerable questions.”
Criticism
David Kelly
Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In this essay, Kelly examines ways in which
the layers of verbal complexity in this poem actually
diminish readers’ confidence in its meaning.
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A corridor showing trompe l’oeil frescoes
Throughout her illustrious career, Salter’s poetry has been lavished with recognition and awards,
and rightly so. Her work offers a sense of formalism and a lightheartedness that has been missing
from a great deal of poetry in the last fifty years—
a time that has seen a shift in sensibilities. Academic poetry (as opposed to the kind of poetry
flourishing in music and in poetry slam-type readings) has distanced itself from common readers by
becoming more and more difficult to understand,
or to even want to understand. Salter has always,
to her credit, been accessible to readers at any level.
What she has earned for it, in addition to numerous awards, visiting professorships, and edito-
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rial positions, is the charge that her work, from the
beginning, has come up short of the intellectual and
emotional content that poems of her level of accomplishment ought to have. Salter plays with
words so well that critics have found themselves
asking if there should not be more substance behind the play. This is not an unreasonable assumption; it is, after all, very conceivable that a
writer could rise to prominence just on the strength
of technical elegance, with nothing to offer except
clever word manipulation and literary critics should
be expected to be on the lookout for that, to make
sure that a knack for skilled verbal mechanics does
not allow emotional vacancy to pass as serious
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The poem calls this a
‘lie,’ as it earlier calls the
painted shutters a lie. It
does not, however, go on to
examine the difference
between lie, deception, art,
and coincidence.”
poetry. It would be just as unconscionable to praise
skill without heart as it would to praise raw emotion without skill, though it is easier to see how
critics might easily fall into doing the former.
In reading Salter’s poetry, readers have to be
particularly careful about drawing conclusions. So
polished is her work, so harmonious to the ear, that
skeptics are inclined to jump to the conclusion that
inside of all of that verbal grandeur must be a hollow core, as if there would be no reason for anyone to write the kind of luxurious poetry that Salter
writes unless they had something to hide. Fans, on
the other hand, tend to assume that the kind of intellect that can produce the ornate formal poetry
that she deals in must, as a matter of course, have
something substantial to say about what it is to be
human. Though critics generally admit to having
seen Salter open up over the decades that she has
been a published poet, this question of the soul of
her works is the one lingering doubt.
In her recent poetry, this tension becomes evident most clearly in a poem like “Trompe l’Oeil”
(trompe l’oeil is a kind of painting that tricks the
eye, is an illusion). The starting piece in her 2003
collection Open Shutters gives the collection its title in the second line. The expression is, of course,
an oxymoron: “shutters” are meant to be, by their
nature, “shut” and are at odds with their nature
when “open.” As with any oxymoron, alert readers
have to stop for a moment to think of how the contradictory ideas can fit together, if they can in fact
at all. The question that arises when a writer captures language acting funny is whether the incongruities that are brought to light are significant, or
if they are just amusing but inconsequential flukes.
“Trompe l’Oeil” is rich with linguistic coincidences. Words pair off with others on the basis of
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sounds rather than meanings; they suggest that ideas
are more a matter of verbal arrangement than any
intrinsic value. They rebel against the notion of reality. At its heart, this is not really such groundbreaking theory; it just tells readers that the words
that represent reality are, like trompe l’oeil painting,
not actual reality. The poem gives this basic lesson
in such an entertaining way, though, that it is difficult to feel that reading it has been time wasted.
The most superficial level on which this poem
works is sound. Sound is in itself basic to poetry
and is frequently the point of a poem itself. The
most obvious example of this would be something
like Poe’s “The Bells,” or Coleridge’s or Baudelaire’s ramblings, which justify themselves entirely
with their music. What renders sound “superficial”
in a poem like “Trompe l’Oeil” is the fact that it is
handled too sketchily to be considered a main concern as it could be in other, more passionate works.
For example, look at the first stanza: the second line
ends with “shutters” and the third line ends with
“shatters.” This can be no coincidence. These are
similar-sounding words, identical but for one letter,
but what of it? The relationship does not extend beyond the superficial level to one of greater meaning.
Rhyme is a pattern of repeated sounds. The
purpose of rhyming is usually to give readers overt
or subliminal assurance that there is order in the
poem’s universe, that truths are either being revealed or satirized. “Trompe l’Oeil” uses just
enough rhyme to not be ignored, but it does not offer a consistent enough pattern to make a statement
about order or chaos. The last two of three lines in
stanzas 3, 5, and 7 end with exact rhymes, and the
lines ending stanzas 1, 2, 6, and 8 have approximate rhymes. The point seems to be that this poem
offers a view of the universe where logic just sort
of reigns, where the underlying sense is sporadic.
There can be times where poems are stifled by adhering too strictly to a formal pattern, and there are
times when poems are too free-floating and formless, failing to provide readers with enough assurance that there is in fact an author in charge.
“Trompe l’Oeil” falls into neither of these categories, but aspects of each undesirable effect linger
around it.
In this poem, as in others, Salter draws on another level of the relationships of sounds between
words, substituting one word for a similar one in a
way that, like trompe l’oeil painting itself, operates
as a kind of optical illusion. The mind expects to
read that the laundry on a clothesline is “flapping
in the breeze”; the poem does not provide that
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Salter’s Unfinished Painting (1989) is a collection of poems that take a rather fearless look at
the passage of time and such vital experiences
as impermanence, family, friends, love, death,
and memory. This collection won the Lamont
prize in poetry.
• The poem “Trompe l’Oeil” comes from Salter’s
collection Open Shutters (2003) and served as
the inspiration for the book’s title. Many of the
poems in that book are reminiscent of ideas presented in “Trompe l’Oeil.” In particular, the final poem, “An Open Book,” reminds one of the
central theme that things are not always what
they seem: the title refers to Muslims praying at
a funeral, with palms turned up as if an invisible book were present.
• Salter studied at Harvard under Elizabeth
Bishop and her writing has been compared to
Bishop’s. Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems, 1927–1979, published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux in 1984, contains the complete oeuvre (work) of a woman who is widely considered to be one of the best American poets of the
twentieth century.
familiar phrasing, but what it does say, “flapping
on a frieze,” sounds so much like the expected
phrase that it can cause a reader to stop and do a
double take. It is fun to be misled briefly with this
kind of trick, and impressive that the author has
such a strong command of the language that she
can find a phrase that fits the situation so perfectly
while echoing the sound of the expected phrase so
well. What such a trick does to forward the poem’s
message, though, is unclear. It tells readers to not
be complacent with their understanding, with the
simple message that reality is more complex than
it seems. What it says is less about the relationship
between reality and art as it is about the relationship between art and illusion.
A final level on which “Trompe l’Oeil” works
with verbal coincidences is that of extended
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• Salter’s poetry has been compared to that of Lucie Brock-Brodio, who directs the poetry program at the Columbia School of Arts, in its
verbal dexterity and sly humor. Brock-Brodio’s
collection Trouble in Mind: Poems (2004), published by Albert A. Knopf, provides ample evidence of ways in which her sensibilities and
Salter’s correspond.
• Poet Louise Glück started her poetry career
about a decade earlier than Salter did. She is
praised for her ability to work simply and honestly in a looser form than what Salter uses.
Glück’s evolution as a poet can be traced in First
Four Books of Poems, published in 1990 by
Ecco Press.
• For more than twenty years, Salter has been married to poet Brad Leithauser. His book of poems
The Odd Last Thing She Did (2000) shows a
style similar to hers but with different concerns.
• Caroline Cass’s book Grand Illusion, published
by Phaidon Press in 1988, presents pictures of
contemporary murals, with over twenty pages of
beautiful prints of trompe l’oeil murals.
metaphor. For instance, it draws a comparison between a window and an eye. In itself this is a fair
enough metaphor, not exactly original but appropriate enough to be mentioned in passing. But
Salter is too brimming with ideas to leave this simple comparison alone, referring to the inability of
the imitation shutter to shut the eye. Readers can
see the verbal connection—eyes are shut, shutters
are shut—without being drawn to any deeper level
of thought by adding a new layer. What would happen if the window could be shut like an eye? What
does it mean that the window left unguarded forever is like an eye unguarded forever? There are
ideas that could be explored here, but the poem
leaves them for the reader to think about, to provide them with meaning or not. More is being
implied than explained, raising the question of
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whether this poem really does have a message, or
if its significance is just an illusion that each reader
projects onto it.
In the end, the greatest weakness of a poem
like “Trompe l’Oeil” is that it sounds like it should
be more important than it really is and in that way
makes false promises. The last stanza, for instance,
draws attention to its own seriousness by breaking
the three-line pattern that has been established in
all previous stanzas. In tone, this sends a message
that the poem’s lightheartedness has come to an
end, that the comfortable has given way to a time
for frank, direct talk. But all that it really says is
that the last letter in the word “l’oeil” is silent. The
poem calls this a “lie,” as it earlier calls the painted
shutters a lie. It does not, however, go on to examine the difference between lie, deception, art,
and coincidence. Linguists may have a word for the
way evolution has made written forms divert from
their pronunciations, but “lie” certainly is not it.
The only way to understand this loose use of the
word “lie” is to accept that the poem does not really want one to think of this circumstance as a lie,
but is trying to make readers broaden their understanding of the word. The problem is that it is not
clear enough about what exactly the reader is supposed to understand “lie” to mean in this context.
This is the final line, the poem’s last chance to send
a message, and, once again, it offers no more than
it had determined by the second stanza: that things
are not always what they seem.
There has never been any question about
Salter’s skill as a poet, only about her relevance.
As her career has progressed, critics have come to
trust her more, to approach her poetry expecting
more than just an impressive display in linguistics.
In most of her mature works she is able to tap into
the true currents of contemporary life, particularly
the poems that she wrote as a response to the terrorist assaults on September 11, 2001. Sometimes,
as in a poem like “Trompe l’Oeil,” Salter’s poetry
just does not go for depth, but instead exercises its
right to have fun with words for their own sake.
The problem is that such an impressive command
of the language makes an implicit promise, and
readers rightfully believe that such talent should be
used to take them deeper into the nature of reality.
Like the art style that it discusses, this poem is good
for providing some adroit tricks and then admitting
those tricks, but it does Salter’s gift an injustice by
saying nothing new.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on “Trompe l’Oeil,” in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
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Joyce Hart
Hart is a published writer who focuses on literary themes. In the following essay, Hart examines the psychological implications behind Salter’s
use of visual images and word play in her poem.
Salter’s poem “Trompe l’Oeil,” is not, as its title suggests, only filled with illusions. It also contains beautiful visual images that take the reader to
a warm and colorful Mediterranean climate and
transport the reader inside and outside of the
speaker’s world—both the physical and the psychological. Enhancing these images are playful
word games that the poet uses to add dimension.
These word plays come to the reader in the form of
sound and also in the structure of oppositional pairs.
With these devices, the short and seemingly simple
poem lives up to its title, providing not only a description of various visual imaginings but becoming a bit of an illusion in itself as the poet exposes
glimpses of her emotional reactions to things around
her by hiding herself within the images.
The overall illusion that Salter presents in her
poem is that of the imagined shutters. They are
painted on the walls on either side of windows
rather than being workable shutters made of wood
and constructed to open or close, depending on the
need for light or protection from a storm. In the
second line of her poem, Salter first presents these
painted shutters as if they are real, merely describing them as she sees them: “windows with open
shutters.” With this statement, the poet conveys,
along with her opening stanza, that she is visiting
Genoa, and it can be assumed that at first sight of
the houses, she feels welcomed. The shutters are
open, as if the owners of the houses are greeting
her, their arms wide open, mirroring the openness
of the shutters.
By the third line in the first stanza, the speaker
makes an abrupt turn. Whereas her first impressions were the welcoming, openly stretched arms
of her presumed hosts, she quickly learns that this
is only an illusion. The expressions of openness are
false. The open shutters do not mean that the people are inviting the visitor inside their houses,
which are filled with sunshine that is pouring into
their shutter-less windows. Neither do they mean
that storms are completely out of the forecast. All
the false shutters signify is the craftiness of some
artisan, who loves colorful adornment and, maybe
more importantly, loves the grand art of illusion.
Coupled with the visual images of the first
stanza are various psychological implications, which
begin with the sense that the speaker feels taken,
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maybe even a little used, by the illusion of the
painted shutters. The mood the poet paints is one
filled with a sense of rejection. What was once an
open feeling becomes one that is closed. In other
words, if the open shutters are merely an illusion,
then too might be her own feelings of openness.
Another possible interpretation might be found in
turning that image on its head. Maybe the speaker
herself feels shuttered, as in having bars running
across her line of vision, allowing her only a partial view of life. Maybe she is shuttered and only
allows a portion of herself to show through. Although she might present an openness to the world,
maybe that too is an illusion.
In the third line of the first stanza, the word
play begins, and this mood of being tricked is intensified. Here the poet changes one letter in the
word “shutters” to create the word “shatters.” It is
with this small exchange of letters that the poet
deepens the sense of gloom. She has been deceived
and feels she may have been made a fool of. She
believed in something that turned out to be an untruth. The question that the reader must decide
might be: is the speaker the one who is taken by
the illusion or is she the one who has created it? If
readers probe this question a little deeper, they
might find that the answer to this question might
be an ambiguous “both.” They might discover that
the speaker is both the creator of the illusion and
the one who is duped by it.
A hint that the speaker supplies for the answer
to this question might be found in the second
stanza. It is here that she remembers a moment before the illusion had set in. It was during that moment, however brief, that she thought the shutters
might have been merely painted on the wall. Then
she concedes, reminding herself that she has been
taken, “time and again.” She believes the shutters
are real when she forgets the illusion. She suddenly
remembers that they are painted, and she scoffs at
the fantasy. She must want to believe in the illusion. Time and again, she says, she falls for the
fake reproductions. The speaker admits to her own
folly in the fifth stanza by writing: “Who needs to
be correct / more often than once a day?” It is as
if the speaker is questioning her own sanity or
maybe her intelligence. How can the illusion of the
painted shutters constantly lure her back into believing in them? At least once a day, she consoles
herself, she remembers. At least once a day, she
calls the illusion for what it really is.
There are more clues provided in the third
stanza, in which Salter plays with opposition in the
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They are merely
painted to look open. So
not only are the shutters an
illusion, the openness of the
shutters is also a lie.”
use of the words “shut” and “open.” She first mentions the “painted shutter” and how it claims to be
able to shut “the eye / of the window.” Immediately
following this statement, she uses the word “open”
in the phrase: “is an open lie.” So what is meant
here? First, what is an “open lie”? How can a lie be
either open or shut? Could the speaker be referring
to something else? The word “open” harkens back
to the image discussed earlier, that of the assumed
open shutters. If they are real, shutters can be either
shut or opened. But these painted shutters are not
real. Not only can they not be closed, or shut, they
also cannot truly be open. They are merely painted
to look open. So not only are the shutters an illusion, the openness of the shutters is also a lie. This
reinforces the earlier sense of the speaker possibly
wanting to hide behind slatted shutters. She may be
saying that she offers people a glimpse of herself
through the shutters. These people may think they
are really seeing her, think they really understand
her, think that she is truly being open with them,
but that too may be an illusion. She may not be as
open as she appears, and therefore her presentation
of herself may also be an “open lie.”
It is not until the sixth stanza that the poet takes
the reader from the outside world, the more public
view, into the interior, or more personal view. “Inside the house,” she writes, “an endless / supply of
clothes to wash.” This appears to be an abrupt
change of pace. From walking along the street in
the sun and shadow of a bright day, examining the
artwork of painted shutters on city houses, the
reader is not only abruptly pulled inside but also
the reader is pulled away from the sense of vacation and detachment. The beginning of the poem
reads as if the speaker were visiting a place that is
wholly new to her. It is a foreign vista, and she encounters images she has never seen before, and she
becomes fascinated with them. Then she is lost in
the drudgery of washing clothes. This chore is
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“endless,” she writes. With this change from a
leisure tour to household chores, where has the
speaker taken the reader, and why? By bringing the
reader into a house, could the speaker now be referring to a more intimate part of herself? Is the
drudgery of washing clothes a metaphor for the
chore of creating the illusions of her false self?
Clothes are the things one wears to keep warm, but
also they are objects that are worn to conform to
and to portray a certain public image. Clothes hide
the more personal elements of the body, just as illusions are capable of hiding the more personal features of one’s psychology. Like caring for the
endless supply of clothes, the speaker seems to be
tired of the hard work of having to continually
watch over the illusions in which she psychologically dresses herself.
She does, however, present an image that contrasts with the never-ending transformations presented in the metaphor of washing clothes. She
offers a more permanent vision of clothing at the
end of stanza 6 and in the entire seventh stanza.
Here she offers a picture of clothes that are painted
on a wall. These clothes, in contrast to the ones that
must be continually washed, are “fresh” and “unruffled.” It is important to note that these clothes
do not belong in the interior quarters of the house.
They are located on an “outer wall.” With this image, the poem takes the reader back to the element
of illusion. While the speaker may be feeling tormented by the continual examination (or washing)
of her interior life, her outer clothing, the mask that
she wears—the “fresh / paint”—is unflappable.
Adding to this image is the interjection of another
word play in this seventh stanza. The poet uses the
word “frieze,” as in a wall painting. The word works
in two different ways. First, it appears to describe
the so-called painting of “shirttails flapping.” It also
provides another oppositional structure. The word
play comes in the form of sound. The word “frieze”
sounds like the word “freeze.” In fact, the “shirttails flapping” are frozen in time and in space. The
public clothing of the speaker, likewise, is frozen.
Unlike her emotional interior life, which is in a constant flux, saturated with insecurities and uncertainties, her public appearance is set. It might not
be real, just as the painted shutters are not real, but
she can at least count on it. She knows it well. She
has practiced it often. She has painted it on so many
times that the illusion, one can assume, fools those
around her just as the painted shutters have, so
many times, fooled her. The problem with this public image, however—no matter how clean and unruffled it might be—is that it is not real.
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It is at this point, that the speaker takes readers back to the concept of untruth. Like the shirt,
the shutters, and even the words in this poem, all
of them are illusions. Finally, even the foreign word
in the title of the poem is a lie, because even though
you see the letter “l,” it does not stand, as most letters do, for a particular sound. The “l” in the French
word for “eye” is placed there for some forgotten
reason and now has lost most of its worth. It is used
for show, much like the shutters are used and much
like the public masks that the speaker uses to present herself to the public world are used.
Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on “Trompe l’Oeil,” in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
John Taylor
In the following review, Taylor praises the way
Salter’s best work “guides our eyes beyond the
illusion.”
Salter’s fifth collection is delightfully heterogeneous, with crisp and witty poems set at home
and abroad. Among the latter stands out a meditation on a gypsy accordionist in the Paris metro.
“He’s a brazen mess / of hand-me-down, ill-fitting
plaids and paisleys,” reports Salter. “He’s barely
old enough to be skipping school, / but no note of
fear of shyness, or of shame, / shadows his face: it
was years ago already / somebody taught him how
to do this.”
Yes, Salter can be touching, gently ironic, selfrevealing (though never ostentatiously candid). In a
tactless age, she is curious about others, yet tactful.
Her engaging long-poem about her former therapist
and his accidental death is a model of the unpretentious confessional poem. Her poem about reading in bed with her husband is tender and teasing;
and when, after evoking failing to sleep, snoring and
waking up again, she concludes “till death do us
part,” she points—as she often does elsewhere—to
something darker, or lovelier, or more mysterious,
that cannot be reached with words.
Indeed, as she suggests in her opening poem,
“Trompe l’Oeil,” which elucidates the title of this
collection, poetry involves the art of illusion. In
Genoa, she imagines “an endless / supply of clothes
to wash” inside a house, while on the trompe-l’oeil
facade she observes “fresh // paint hung out to
dry— / shirttails flapping on a frieze / unruffled by
any breeze, // like the words pinned to this line.”
Like those painted-on open shutters and drying
clothes, Slater’s poems display subtle surface effects: rhymes, half-rhymes, deft meters, carefully
counted syllables, playful homages to traditional
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poetic forms. But like trompe l’oeil, her best craftsmanship ultimately guides our eyes behind the illusion, or beyond, or inside—and leaves us with
wonder, with unanswerable questions.
Source: John Taylor, Review of Open Shutters, in Antioch
Review, Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter 2004, p. 177.
Contemporary Authors Online
In the following essay, the author gives a brief
summary of Salter’s career.
Mary Jo Salter is a relatively young poet who
intertwines her variety of cultural experiences with
an obvious understanding of poetic tradition. It is
in these poems, the works that describe her time
outside of the country, that Salter has been applauded most often by critics. Robert Darling explains in his essay for Dictionary of Literary
Biography that “She is at her best when exposure
to other cultures provides a freshness that is not as
evident in her domestic poems.” Alfred Corn, writing for New Republic, specifies that in her poems
on Japan in Henry Purcell in Japan, “Salter steps
outside what might be considered reasonable expectations for a first book. . . . These brilliant and
searching poems are the best in the volume.”
Phoebe Pettingell echoes Corn’s praise, pointing
out in her New Leader review that Salter skillfully
maintains her individuality, yet without abandoning the influence of her Western predecessors.
Pettingell writes that “even where she [Salter] employs English Poetry’s most traditional forms, rich
in historical associations, her own voice sings out
clearly.”
Salter is often identified as a standout of the
1970 and 1980s flowering of New Formalist poets, who according to Christopher Benfey in New
Republic, “have come not from Whitman’s expansive overcoat, but from Emily Dickinson’s
clean white dress.” Salter has received mixed reviews from critics regarding the clear influence of
Dickinson on her form and tone. In a review of the
collection Unfinished Painting in Tribune Books,
William Logan complains that “Salter has none of
her mentor’s ease in forming the simple language
of feeling and is too eager to draw a lesson or round
a revelation from already constricted means.”
However, others argue that throughout the collection, Salter successfully develops Dickinson’s talent for examination and the inevitable obtaining of
self-knowledge. Howard Frank explains in his
Washington Post Book World review that “The title poem, ‘Unfinishing Painting,’ describes an incomplete portrait this remarkable woman painted
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of her young son, then goes on to reveal much
about the painter herself.”
Despite a difference in critical interpretation,
many reviewers would agree with Frank that Salter
and other New Formalists are responsible for keeping contemporary American poetry “alive and
flourishing: ambitious and moving,” and arguably,
as Frank attests, for creating “the most interesting
poems in the United States today.”
Source: “Mary Jo Salter,” in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2003.
Mary Jo Salter with
Stephen R. Whited
In the following interview-essay, Whited comments on poems from Salter’s A Kiss in Space collection and the state of poetry in the late 1990s.
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‘I do believe a reader
who puts time into poems
ought to be able to get
what I mean after a few
readings, and maybe a few
things I didn’t know I
meant. I want readers. I
want to communicate.’”
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Source: Mary Jo Salter with Stephen R. Whited, “Mary
Jo Salter,” in Book, March–April 1999, http://www.book
magazine.com/archive/issue3/poetics.shtml.
Sources
Corn, Alfred, Review of Henry Purcell in Japan: Poems, in
the New Republic, Vol. 192, April 8, 1985, p. 40.
Logan, William, “Vanity Fair,” in New Criterion, Vol. 17,
No. 10, June 1999, p. 60.
Pettingell, Phoebe, Review of Unfinished Paintings, in the
New Leader, Vol. 72, No. 11, July 10, 1989, p. 16.
Salter, Mary Jo, “Trompe l’Oeil,” in Open Shutters, Alfred
A. Knopf, 2003, pp. 3–4.
Seaman, Donna, Review of Open Shutters, in Booklist,
Vol. 99, No. 17, May 1, 2003, p. 1567.
Taylor, John, Review of Open Shutters, in Antioch Review,
Vol. 62, No. 1, Winter 2004, p. 177.
Further Reading
Ebert-Schifferer, S., Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries
of Trompe l’Oeil Painting, National Gallery of Art, 2002.
This book explores the art style described in the poem
with ample illustrations of past and present examples.
Hoffman, Daniel, “Wings of a Phoenix? Rebellion and Resuscitation in Postmodern American Poetry,” in After New
Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative and Tradition, edited
by Annie Finch, Story Line Press, 1999, pp. 18–24.
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Salter is often associated with New Formalism. Hoffman’s essay informs readers about the background of
the artistic movement.
Pritchard, William, Review of A Kiss in Space, in Commonweal, Vol. 126, No. 21, December 1999, p. 22.
Pritchard, one of the most respected names in poetry criticism, examines Salter’s previous collection
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and is impressed with her technical expertise and
frequent humor.
Whited, Stephen, Review of Open Shutters, in Book, Issue
30, September–October 2003, p. 89.
Whited compares Salter’s work to that of novelists
George Eliot and Anne Tyler in its fine eye for domestic detail.
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What I Would Ask My
Husband’s Dead Father
Sharon Hashimoto’s poem “What I Would Ask
My Husband’s Dead Father” was published in
Hashimoto’s first full-length poetry collection, The
Crane Wife (Story Line Press, 2003). The poem
was inspired by the poet’s annoyance that her husband’s family had left his father’s ashes in a closet,
where they remained more than a year after his
death. (Cremation is a common Japanese funeral
practice.) This led her to speculate on her own mortality and ultimately to question the rituals involved
with life and death. The poem is typical of
Hashimoto’s work in that it deals with an incident
involving her family and yet reaches out and
touches a more universal issue.
Sharon Hashimoto
2003
Author Biography
Sharon Hashimoto was born on October 23, 1953,
in Seattle, Washington. She has lived all her life in
the Pacific Northwest. She holds two bachelor degrees, one in modern European history and the
other in editorial journalism, both from the University of Washington. In 1990, Hashimoto also received a master of fine arts degree in creative
writing from the University of Washington.
Hashimoto was encouraged to pursue an interest in poetry by many other writers such as Nelson Bentley, Lonny Kaneko, Alan Chong Lau, and
James Masao Mitsui. Enjoying the challenges of
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wordplay and imagery, she seeks to capture small
but important moments in everyday life.
In 1989, while still in graduate school, where
she was studying with Colleen McElroy, David
Wagoner, and Shawn Wong, Hashimoto’s poetry
was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts. Hashimoto
also studied fiction writing. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Poetry, The American Scholar, the Seattle Review, Shenandoah, and
Asian Pacific American Journal. Hashimoto has
been awarded grants from the King County Arts
Commission, and Artist Trust.
In 1992, Brooding Heron Press published a
limited edition chapbook of Hashimoto’s poems
entitled Reparations. In 2003, her first full-length
poetry collection, The Crane Wife, was published
by Story Line Press. It included the poem “What
I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father.” The
Crane Wife was co-winner of the 16th annual
Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize for a first full-length
collection of poetry.
Since 1990, Hashimoto has been an instructor
of Literature and Writing at Highline Community
College in Des Moines, Washington.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–7
“What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father” begins with the speaker addressing her husband’s dead father directly. The man has been dead
for over a year, but the family has not yet found a
final resting place for his ashes. The ashes have
been “sifted and smoothed” into a small white box,
and the lid has been tightly shut. The makeshift urn
is kept in a closet, which becomes the man’s resting place until the family decides what to do with
his remains. The speaker suggests some possibilities. The ashes might be scattered in the woods
“among pines and firs,” or perhaps they could be
scattered over the water in Puget Sound in the Pacific northwest, where they would be borne along
by the tide.
Lines 8–16
The speaker then says that perhaps this is one of
those things that cannot be decided. She reflects that
what is now missing from the remains—the body
animated by the spirit—is “more than 98 percent
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water.” She imagines the spirit steaming away from
the body. Then, she produces a more concrete image
of what is missing. She remembers a common sight
of her husband’s father when he was alive, his head
nodding slowly as he fell asleep on the living room
couch. She offers another reason for the failure to
take care of the ashes. Perhaps it is because they simply cannot imagine their father romanticized by having his ashes scattered over the mountains. He lives
for them in a much more mundane context such as
in photographs at Christmas time, in which he can
be seen holding up another flannel shirt. The shirt is
presumably a gift from another family member and
one that he is used to receiving at Christmas.
Lines 17–24
The speaker then moves on to a general comment about aging, how “spines compact,” meaning
that people lose height as they age. She brings her
own parents into the poem. They too are “shrinking” as they age. Like her husband’s father, they
have given no indication of what they want done
with their bodies after death. After asking a direct
question of the dead man about whether there
should be a headstone placed next to that of his
mother, the speaker returns to contemplating her
own father. He is not a religious man, so there
should be no religious ceremonies or rituals,
whether Catholic or Buddhist, at his death. He does
not want a wake to be held. He just tells his daughter that it is up to her what she does after his death.
When he is dead, he will not know anything about
it; whatever happens will not make any difference
to him.
Lines 25–32
The speaker then muses about her own beliefs.
She is not sure of what she believes. She reports
that when she was eight years old, someone told
her that the spirits of the dead are all around the
living. It must be crowded, she says. She wonders
about her grandfather, who was killed in a landslide. If his spirit is present, perhaps he is calling
to her, in which case, what would he say to her
when she does not respond? The speaker implies
that he would rebuke her. That thought leads her
to think of a dead dog lying beside the road, which
seems to stare up at her with one clear eye. She
thinks that maybe there is some connection between those thoughts of the grandfather and the
dead dog, but she does not make explicit what that
connection might be.
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Themes
Rituals of Death
The occasion of the death of her husband’s father and the delay in taking care of his ashes prompts
the speaker to reflect on the rituals that accompany
death and on the notion of an afterlife. The poem
also touches on the difficulty of understanding the
change that comes about in death. It is easy to remember a person from photographs or from a familiar memory, but it is not so easy to imagine what
they have become or how they might live on. There
is agnosticism about the speaker’s attitude; she admits that she does not know what to believe, and
the occurrence of the word “perhaps” twice in the
second verse adds to the open-ended possibilities.
There is no theological or religious dogmatism in
the poem, but there is a willingness to be open even
if that means living with uncertainties.
The poem suggests an uncertainty about the
appropriate rituals that should accompany a death
and the disposal of the body. Other than having the
body cremated, the family cannot decide what to
do; there is no accepted tradition for them to follow. The speaker’s remark, “We’ve waited for over
/ a year” suggests some annoyance with the long
delay and the indecision. Keeping the ashes in a
closet is obviously no long-term solution, but where
should the ashes be scattered—in woods, on water,
or on mountains? Or somewhere else that they have
not thought of yet? The family must invent some
kind of appropriate ritual, but the speaker feels that
they do not have the imagination to do so. It is not
as if they can rely on a tradition that they could follow whether they understood it or not. In the world
of the poem, the burial ritual seems to be a matter
of individual choice, but the dead man expressed
no preferences.
Life after Death
The loss of traditional religious ritual and belief is forcefully expressed in the blunt words of
the speaker’s father, which she quotes: “‘It’s up to
you. When I’m dead, I’m dead. I won’t know / the
difference.’” This is one of two opposing perspectives on death presented in the poem. For the
speaker’s father, death is the end of everything.
There is no afterlife of any kind. This is the point
of view of an atheist, as the speaker points out. Neither Catholic Christianity nor Buddhism has anything valuable to offer in such a view.
The last verse suggests another possibility to
which the speaker seems to be drawn. The idea is
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Topics for
Further
Study
• Research the internment of Japanese Americans
in World War II. What were the conditions like
in the camps? Why did the American government consider internment necessary? How long
did it take for an official apology to be made?
• Why have humans always felt the need for burial rites? Why is cremation rather than burial becoming more popular in the United States? What
do different religious faiths say about cremation?
• Is religious belief increasing or declining in the
United States? What are the reasons for the
trend? What percentage of the population declares themselves to be atheists? How many believe in an afterlife?
• Write a poem that focuses on an ordinary moment,
or incident, involving you and a member of your
family. Try and draw out the significance of the
moment. Did it produce an important insight about
yourself and your feelings? Or about someone else
and his or her feelings? Did it reveal something
to you that had been hidden before?
that the dead are present all around the living, even
though the living cannot see or hear them, or even
sense their presence. This idea is presented not as
part of an identifiable religious tradition, but just
as something the speaker heard someone say when
she was eight years old. She does not identify who
said this, and it does not appear that the remark was
even addressed directly to her. Yet, it obviously
made a big impression on her since she remembers
it still and treats the idea it expresses with respect.
The speaker also allows her imagination to embellish the basic idea that the dead continue to
exist all around the living. She entertains the possibility that not only do the dead live on as spirits,
but they may also be trying to communicate with
the living. The separation between the dead and the
living is therefore not as absolute as might otherwise be supposed. The final image of the dead
dog with the clear eye is a mysterious one, but
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perhaps the implication is that the dead can communicate through signs. Perhaps the call of the
grandfather that the speaker fails to hear and the
eye of the dead dog are connected. The clear eye
that stares up, not just at the sky, but also specifically at the speaker, is perhaps an accusing one, a
reproach from the ancestor at the granddaughter’s
failure to acknowledge him. This of course is presented not as a dogmatic belief but as an imaginative possibility. For the speaker, it appears to be a
more attractive notion than her father’s belief that
life ends at death.
Style
Language and Imagery
The poem’s language reinforces the different
perspectives on death that are presented. In the
first stanza, the dead man has been “sifted and
smoothed” into the corners of the box that contains
his ashes. The verb “smoothed” suggests the gradual erosion of pebbles and stones as water runs over
them over a long period of time. It suggests that a
human being is gradually being reabsorbed into the
natural environment. The same impression is conveyed by the image, “a body settles.” The context
is how people lose height as they get older, but the
image of settling suggests a building that may
settle into the ground over time, sinking gradually
by its own weight. It suggests a preparation for
death—the body is getting closer to the earth into
which it must eventually be reabsorbed. The word
“settle” may also carry a secondary meaning of acceptance, in the sense that a person may settle for
a certain thing or attitude, in this case, the inevitable
approach of death.
The images in stanza 2 suggest the difficulty
of imagining the reality of death as descriptions
of dissolution and mortal remains alternate with
homey images of the real person who was known
and loved. First, the depersonalized idea of a human body is conjured up in the phrase that it is
“more than 98 percent water.” This is followed
by another impersonal image of dying—as spirit
steaming from a body. There is the familiar personal image of the man himself in a typical posture, which is followed by another impersonal
image of ashes scattered on a mountain. This is followed by a second personal image of the man as
he is remembered through photographs.
The alternation of impersonal and personal images suggest that the speaker is still trying to come
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to terms with the incomprehensible transition of a
loved one who moves from life into death. The two
perspectives tend to overlap, in the sense that life
is found in death and death in life. The personal
image of the man nodding off to sleep and slumping on the couch, for example, also suggests the
coming of death. The “fine scarf” the speaker imagines formed by the ashes on the mountain humanizes the impersonal state of death, presenting the
human remains as a kind of high-quality fashion
accessory. (The primary meaning of the word “fine”
in this context—made up of minute particles—is
not the only meaning, since fine also means elegant, attractive or beautiful.) Since a “fine scarf”
would also make a fine Christmas gift, the image
anticipates that of the flannel shirt two lines later—
the shirt that was a Christmas gift. In that image of
the living there is also a hint of death. Not only is
it not a direct image in the mind of the speaker, unlike the previous image of the dead man, since it
has to be stimulated by a photograph and in that
sense is more distant, but the holding up of the
empty shirt in an innocent Christmas snapshot becomes an ironic reminder of death, since after the
man dies the shirt remains but the body that was
within it is no more.
In the last stanza of the poem, the image of the
crowded city reinforces the theme of the blurring
of an absolute separation between life and death,
since the dead are being described in terms drawn
from the living.
Historical Context
Asian American Literature
Chinese and Japanese immigrants have been
coming to the Pacific Northwest since the nineteenth century, attracted by the high demand for labor. Many Japanese arrived in the region after the
United States annexed Hawaii in 1898. However,
although Japanese Americans, as well as Chinese
Americans, have a long history in the northwest
and in other regions of the United States, many
decades were to pass before mainstream America
took any notice of the literature produced by these
immigrant groups. Before 1970, few works of fiction and poetry by Japanese Americans had been
published. But this did not mean that nothing had
been written. In fact, Japanese Americans had a
thriving literary culture in the 1930s, publishing their
work in their own literary magazines. They continued to produce literary journals when imprisoned in
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internment camps during World War II, although
everything they wrote was subject to censure by the
American authorities.
After World War II, a few pioneering writers
managed to get their work published. Toshio Mori
wrote Yokohama, California (1949), consisting of
stories of the Japanese American communities in
Oakland and San Leandro, California, although when
published those communities no longer existed. The
first novel by a Japanese American was No-No Boy
(1957) by John Okada. It is about a Japanese American who refused to join the armed forces in World
War II and consequently was imprisoned for two
years. After the war he returns to the Japanese American community in Seattle, where he is rejected for
his disloyalty, although his mother praises him for
his loyalty to Japan. The novel has since become a
classic. Another distinguished writer during this immediate post-war period was Hisaye Yamamoto, who
was born in 1921 and was interned during World
War II. Between 1948 and 1961 she published seven
short stories which are still considered among the
finest works by a Japanese American.
A breakthrough in the cultural visibility of
Asian American literature came in 1974, with the
publication of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of AsianAmerican Writers, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery
Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu
Wong. It was the first major anthology of Asian
American literature, and included work by those of
Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino descent. The anthology established a canon of Asian American
writers although it was later criticized by some for
too narrowly defining Asian American identity.
The second major anthology, compiled by the same
editors, was The Big Aiiieeee! (1991), which included the work of first-generation Asian immigrants to the United States.
During the 1980s, Asian American literature
began to enter the literary mainstream. A landmark
in this respect was Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
(1989), which became a bestseller and was made
into a successful movie. Among Japanese American writers, one prominent figure is the poet
Janice Mirikitani. Born in 1942, Mirikitani was imprisoned as a child in an internment camp in
Arkansas. A third-generation immigrant, she has
been an extremely influential figure for Asian
American writers. She has published three volumes
of poetry, Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987) and We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (1995). Her poetry attacks racism,
sexism, poverty, war, and injustice.
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An issue for Japanese American writers has
been how to come to terms with the experience of
mass internment during World War II. Many have
chosen to ignore it in their writings. (Hashimoto
uses the topic of internment but in a rather personal
way; she is curious about how it affected her parents but appears to have no wish to directly confront the injustice of it.) Cynthia Kadohata, whose
novel The Floating World (1989) is about a Japanese American family and is partly set in the 1940s,
was criticized by other Japanese American writers
for not even mentioning the internment camps.
Other issues that Japanese American writers, like
other Asian Americans, have had to deal with, are
cultural stereotyping in America. Until recently,
Asians were often portrayed in a negative fashion in
the American media. This has meant that Americans
of Asian descent have been forced to develop a strong
self-identity and confront negative stereotypes.
Critical Overview
Hashimoto has only published one other book prior
to The Crane Wife, which was her poetry chapbook
called Reparation. Although she has published little, Hashimoto’s books have been highly regarded
and acclaimed and have showed her to be an emerging poet with great talent. As writer Shawn Wong
says about Hashimoto (quoted on The Crane Wife
book jacket), “[Her] voice claims that space with
the pressure of each line in our ears.” The Crane
Wife was the co-winner of the sixteenth annual
Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, launched by Story
Line Press, in 2002.
Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has published many articles on twentieth-century poetry.
In this essay, Aubrey discusses the themes in
Hashimoto’s poetry collection The Crane Wife.
Although “What I Would Ask My Husband’s
Dead Father” only hints at it, Hashimoto is a poet
of dual heritage. The Crane Wife reveals her deep
connection to Japanese culture, but it also shows
that she is also firmly rooted in American culture,
particularly the Pacific Northwest area where she
has spent all her life.
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Seagulls flying over Puget Sound
A number of poems in The Crane Wife take
their inspiration from Japanese folktales that
Hashimoto uses to subtly probe issues of family
relationships and the experience of loss. “The
Mirror of Matsuyama,” for example, draws on a
folktale in which a dying mother gives her daughter a mirror, telling her that whenever she is lonely
she must look in the mirror, and she will find that
her mother is always with her. In the poem, the surprised daughter disbelieves her mother’s statement
at first, but then, when she puts it to the test and
looks in the mirror, “Amazed, / you looked back,
your fingers stretched / to meet mine.” The poem
suggests the indissoluble link between close family members that survives death (a point of view
that is also hinted at in “What I Would Ask My
Husband’s Dead Father”). Yet, the sense of loss
and longing cannot be fully assuaged, as the last
two lines imply: “Each time we meet, we press /
closer together, as if you could make me whole.”
Another Japanese folktale inspired the poem
“The Mountain Where Old People Are Abandoned.” The tale is about a village that has no use
for old people; anyone over sixty is banished and
left in the mountains to die. The poem is told in the
voice of a mother, who is being carried up the
mountain by her own son. The son (in contrast to
the speaker in “The Mirror of Matsuyama”) refuses
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to look at his mother’s face. This fact does not stop
her forgiving him since he is only doing what the
rules of the village require.
The title poem, “The Crane Wife,” also alludes
to a Japanese folktale, one in which a sailmaker who
lives by the sea finds a wounded crane lying on his
porch. He nurses it back to health, and it flies away
only to return in the disguise of a beautiful young
woman. They fall in love and marry. When economic times get hard, the crane wife makes him a
magic sail to sell in the village. She sets two conditions, the first being that he does not look at her
while she is making it and the second being that she
will never make another one. The sailmaker disobeys both instructions, and the two are parted forever. In the poem, Hashimoto assumes her reader is
familiar with the tale. As the crane wife makes the
sail, she thinks back over the circumstances of her
transformation and realizes that she is not content:
“Disguised as a woman, I forget / what I want as a
crane.” Longing to get back in touch with her essential nature, she resolves that “tonight, / when his
body moves against mine, I’ll wake / to listen for
the wind in his breathing.” The last line seems to
be an allusion to the folktale, in which the sailmaker
loves cranes because he thinks they are like sails
and seem to hold the wind in their wings. The poem,
which some might read as a feminist allegory,
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suggests that self-sacrifice and love are not enough
to bring personal fulfillment if they lead to a distortion of the authentic self.
In addition to exploring this realm of myth and
folktale, which is well suited to her wistful thoughts
about the connections and the separations between
people, Hashimoto also writes of a key event in
Japanese American history. This began in 1942,
during World War II, when more than 100,000
Japanese Americans were sent to internment
camps. The American government stated that this
was for their own protection but, in fact, the government believed that Japanese Americans were a
threat to national security at a time when the United
States was at war with Japan. From the evidence
of the poems, Hashimoto’s grandparents and parents were sent to Heart Mountain Relocation Center located between Powell and Cody in Wyoming.
More than ten thousand Japanese Americans were
interned at Heart Mountain. Since the poet was
born in 1953, she has no direct knowledge of the
camps, but the poems show that she is curious about
what the experience was like. Like many people
who have been through difficult times, her family
is reluctant to talk about it. In “Because You
Showed Me a Piece of Barbed Wire,” the poet visits the area in Wyoming where the camp was.
Someone shows her a piece of barbed wire that
came from the camp, and she feels that she has a
piece of her mother’s past in her hand. She wonders whether her mother, who at that moment is on
a trip to Tokyo, would tell her some details of what
happened if presented with that stark reminder.
Conveying a hint of the enclosed world of the
camp, the poem concludes, “I turn the knotted path
of wire smelling of ghost dust, / touching the barbs
that held everything in.”
In “The Backseat War,” the poet tells of a trip
by car taken when she was young with her brother
and grandmother. The grandmother points to a
place where a Buddhist church existed before the
war. Her family and other Japanese Americans
about to be interned brought their special belongings there for sake keeping. When they returned
after the war, their valuables had been broken or
burned. She mentions the word “camp,” which for
the young girl means Girl Scout cookouts, but for
the old woman it recalls unpleasant memories, and
not for the first time: “Once Grandma / had spoken of four people crowded into one small room /
before she turned because something was in her
eye.” In “Reparations: My Mother and Heart
Mountain” the poet reveals that her family was held
for four years at Heart Mountain. She tries to imag-
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In the poems that
focus on her closest
relatives, Hashimoto
sometimes makes empathic
leaps into the essence of
their experience of life, but
more often she asks
poignant, unanswerable
questions about how they
must have felt in certain
situations.”
ine her mother at age thirteen in the camp and asks
her what she remembers. All the force of the remembrance is in the last line of the poem, in the
sudden switch from the natural to the sinister:
She tells me: Your grandmother made us think
it was an adventure to hang blankets at night
and make our own rooms, to fall asleep listening
to the wind and each other’s coughing
as floodlights filled the slits in the walls.
If many of these poems draw on Hashimoto’s
dual cultural background as a Japanese American,
it should also be pointed out that others convey a
quintessentially American childhood. In “Wonder
Bread,” for example, the poet as a young girl returns from a Brownie meeting and sits sidesaddle
on her brother’s bicycle, clutching her sack of
Wonder Bread as “Tank-like Buicks, Fords and
Chevrolets / Crowd the main road.” In “Rock-OPlane,” she takes a scary ride with her mischievous
brother on the Rock-O-Plane at the Puyallup Fair
in Puyallup, Washington.
As these poems suggest, Hashimoto is primarily a poet of the family. It is family relationships that often stimulate her deepest thoughts and
her most poignant expressions of empathy. The
death of her grandfather in a landslide is one example. It is this incident that leads to her speculation about the continuance of life after death in
“What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father.”
It is also the subject of “Temblors.” In that poem,
the poet tries to penetrate what might have been her
grandfather’s feelings during those fatal moments in
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Hashimoto is also a short story writer. Her story
“The Mushroom Man” (published in The Raven
Chronicles, 1997) is about a Japanese American
girl’s memories of her late father, who used to go
out to the woods near Seattle to collect mushrooms.
The story can be found online at http://www.raven
chronicles.org/raven/rvback/issues/0497/apr97/
hashim.html (accessed March 1, 2005).
• In Camp Notes and Other Writings (1998), Mitsuye Yamada reflects on the internment camps
for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Yamada was born in Kyushu, Japan, and raised
in Seattle (the same area that Hashimoto comes
from). Her family was sent to a detention camp
in Idaho.
• James Masao Mitsui’s From a Three-Cornered
World: New and Selected Poems (1997), from
the Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies, contains topics ranging from childhood to career, and friendships and love. Mitsui
is a prominent Japanese American poet who,
like Hashimoto, lives in Washington state. Also
like Hashimoto, he writes of family and the significance of everyday moments.
• On first publication in 1993, Encyclopedia of
Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference
Pahoa, Hawaii in 1923. And in “Saihei Hashimoto
Apologizes to His Wife for Dying,” there is another description, from his point of view, of the
accident. This is a touching poem that concludes
with the man’s attempt to comfort his wife. After
mentioning the grass that grows over his grave,
he says, “Don’t let the scent of plumeria / feed
your sorrow.”
Many other poems in The Crane Wife are built
around the poet’s interaction with family members.
She learns from her aunt how to weave a lai; she
worries about how her five-year-old niece will be
affected by the sudden discovery of a dead duck;
as a girl, she tussles with her rambunctious, teasing brother; and, most frequently, she observes the
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from 1868 to the Present, edited by Brian Niiya,
with a foreword by Daniel K. Inouye, in conjunction with the Japanese American National
Museum (updated edition, 2000), was named by
the New York Public Library as one of the outstanding reference books of the year. The updated
edition of 2000 also includes an overview by
Asian American studies scholar Gary Okihiro, a
detailed chronology of major events in Japanese
American history, and an extensive bibliography
of the best sources for further research. There are
nearly 100 photographs in this work.
• The Floating World (1989), Cynthia Kadohata’s
first novel, is about a Japanese American family of misfits wandering around from the Pacific
Northwest to Arkansas during the 1940s and
1950s in search of work. Their only companionship is with each other. The story is narrated
by a twelve-year-old girl named Olivia.
• The poet David Mura is a third generation
Japanese American. His Turning Japanese:
Memoirs of a Sansai (1991) is his account of a
year he spent in Tokyo in 1984 on a United
States/Japan Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship. He also recalls his early years growing up
in a mostly Jewish area of Chicago.
quiet lives of mother, father, and grandparents. In
the poems that focus on her closest relatives,
Hashimoto sometimes makes empathic leaps into
the essence of their experience of life, but more
often she asks poignant, unanswerable questions
about how they must have felt in certain situations.
In “Four Weeks Unemployed: I Fail the Water Department’s Lift and Carry Exam,” for example, the
poet tries to get a secure but uninteresting job on
the advice of her parents. She asks herself when
her parents forgot about their dreams and settled
for something less than what they really wanted:
Late nights, did they fall asleep listening
to each drop of rain breaking against the roof,
remember how the sky let go of its dreams?
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There is always affection and compassion in
these poems about family, but sometimes they contain disturbing thoughts that arise from unexpected,
puzzling emotions. In “Watching the House,” for
example, the poet is alone in her parents’ house after they have left for a trip to Tokyo. She realizes
that she does not really belong there anymore and
feels like a stranger:
Something about the way
the rocking chair leans
back and forth
chills me, when I know
I should be warm
in the presence
of my father’s glasses
on top of the television
or my mother’s yarn spilling
from a paper sack.
It is the poet’s responsibility to enter the recesses of the heart and not flinch at what she may
discover there. As Hashimoto explores the significance of everyday moments and probes the delicate web of family relationships, she encourages
the reader to think and feel more deeply, more truly,
beyond the surfaces of things.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “What I Would
Ask My Husband’s Dead Father,” in Poetry for Students,
Thomson Gale, 2005.
Catherine Holm
Holm is a short story and novel author, and a
freelance writer. In this essay, Holm looks at how
Hashimoto’s poem addresses indecision and discomfort about aging and death.
Sharon Hashimoto’s “What I Would Ask My
Husband’s Dead Father” is a poem that explores a
number of ideas in a very short space. Perhaps most
obviously, the theme of indecision is addressed. But
the poem also has much to say about society’s perception of elders and of the dead. This poem contrasts the romantic and the idealistic with gritty
reality. And finally, and maybe most important,
“What I Would Ask My Husband’s Dead Father”
asks the question: do the dead continue to know
about and care about what goes on here on earth?
Even though the title of the poem is a statement, the
poem really is a large question that deals with issues and decisions that are not easily resolvable. The
poem explores aspects of death and challenges the
reader to face aspects of death and aging that are
uncomfortable territory in today’s western world.
The poem suggests that society’s impulse is to
minimize the unpleasantness of death. The first few
lines refer to a “small white box” with ashes that
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This is the crucial
issue. What do the dead
want, and how do their
living relatives deal
with the closure of the
deceased’s life?”
are “sifted and smoothed to each corner.” The more
order that one can bring to dealing with death, perhaps the more easily and fearlessly it can be faced.
The lid of the box is “snugged down and tight” in
an attempt to gentrify, and possibly even confine,
death—because death is something that no one understands and that everyone will face. The small
white box with a tight lid defines and puts structure around something (death and the deceased’s
ashes) that is really a complete mystery.
Order and sameness are also suggested in an
auditory way in the first several lines of the poem,
using alliteration. Hashimoto shows repeated sameness by using words in this part of the poem (and
throughout the poem) that begin with the letter
“s”—sifted, smoothed, snugged, scattered, spirit,
steamed, sight, slumped, sleep, spine, settles,
shrinking, stilled, stinking, and stare. The repeated
sound of “s” could be interpreted to mimic the inevitability of death, or perhaps a constant reminder
that these human realities will occur, and it is a predictable reality that all living beings progress toward. And all these s-words reach across a wide
range of emotions or experiences. For example,
“snugged” could imply comfort or neatness.
“Stinking” on the other hand, would suggest an entirely different experience—one of revulsion or distaste. The s-words march through the poem with
the orderly regularity and predictability of death,
and mimic the ups and downs of the human experience—life.
As if confining the ashes of the deceased was
not enough of an effort to put order around death,
the box has been consigned to a closet until the family decides what to do with the ashes. Perhaps the
decision is postponed because it is easier to leave
the small, neat box with cover tightly tamped down
in a place where no one will be reminded of death—
the ultimate shared human experience. In a closet,
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in the dark, with cover tightly containing it, death
can never escape. The poem says just as much about
those who are alive as it does about the person who
has died. The living relatives have waited for over
a year to dispose of the ashes, and the reader gets
the sense that no one is in a hurry to make a decision. The relatives have flirted with two contrasting
scenarios for disposal of the ashes—to place them
among the still and rooted pines and firs, or to scatter them in the moving tides in Puget Sound. Both
options suggest freedom for the deceased’s ashes
and perhaps the deceased’s spirit—particularly the
vision of “following the tides in Puget Sound.” If
the spirit does live on after death, surely such freedom in nature would be more desirable than being
tamped down in a closed box in a closet. But the
living relatives would rather minimize death (both
the death of the husband’s father as well as their
own inevitable deaths) than fully accept it and fully
feel it as a part of their experience of life.
The poem also takes a hard look at aging, and
societal reactions to this phenomenon that is a
shared part of the human experience. People do not
usually get to decide when they die or how they die;
people may not get to decide certain aspects of aging. “Spines compact as we age,” says Hashimoto,
“a body settles.” The word “settles” could also suggest that people have to settle for the fact that aging and death are inevitable. The inevitability of
death and aging in life are an interesting contrast to
the theme of indecision running through the poem.
The hard truth about aging also serves as a stark
contrast to any attempts to romanticize death, or the
life of the deceased. A neatly tamped and hidden box
of ashes still does not let the survivors in this family forget the dead father’s “head slowly nodding as
you slumped in sleep on the living room couch.” A
“fine scarf of ashes dusting mountain crags” is a
lovely image, but it is superseded by Christmas photos of the deceased “holding up the shoulders of another flannel shirt.” The mention of shoulders also
refers the reader back to the hard, anatomical signs
of aging in this poem-shoulders are close to the spine
and shoulders can slump. Hashimoto chooses her
words carefully and they work on several levels—
telling the story of the poem in real time, and creating allusions and hints for the reader that make a
deeper impact about the themes of old age and death.
Indecision is a theme throughout this poem on
several levels. Most obviously, the family cannot
decide—or puts off deciding—how to handle the
deceased’s ashes and put closure around his death.
But there is also indecision on the narrator’s part
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about whether death is really the final end for a
soul or a spirit. Someone tells the narrator that “the
spirits of the dead are all around us.” Yet the narrator’s own father claims not to care about wakes
or memorials after his death, and leaves it in the
hands of the living relatives. He says, “It’s up to
you. When I’m dead, I’m dead. I won’t know the
difference.” It is interesting that this is the only
piece of dialogue in the poem, which seems to give
it added emphasis. This is the crucial issue. What
do the dead want, and how do their living relatives
deal with the closure of the deceased’s life?
With that one line of dialogue, the narrator’s
father has turned the decision of the closure of his
life over to the narrator. But it is a decision that no
one is comfortable with and that no one wants to
make, as illustrated with the indecision regarding
the ashes in the tightly tamped box. In a larger
sense, the narrator cannot make a decision about
whether the dead live on as spirits. “I’m not sure
what I believe,” the narrator says. This is the crux
of the issue. If the people in this poem knew that
existence truly ended with the death of the body, it
may not make a difference (as the narrator’s father
firmly summed up) what is done to memorialize
the person after death. But the narrator and the narrator’s relatives, who cannot reach closure regarding the ashes, are not convinced that the dead do
not know the difference. At the same time, procrastinating on a decision regarding the ashes may
be a way to avoid getting closer to the uncomfortable subject of death.
If spirits of the dead really do not exist, wonders the narrator, then why does the “stilled and
stinking dog” stare “up at me with its one clear
eye?” Without overly describing, Hashimoto has
conjured an arresting image that completely captures the mysteries of life, death, and the passage
between them. What person has not looked at the
body of a dead person or animal, and marveled or
tried to comprehend that life truly has left the body?
The eyes have been referred to as gateways to the
soul. Perhaps this is why Hashimoto chooses to emphasize the open and clear eye of a dead dog. Obviously the dog is quite dead, to the point of decay,
yet there is something about the open eye that suggests to the narrator that some spirit or soul or part
of the dog may still exist. It is as if the dog would
seem more completely, finally dead if his eye were
closed. Yet Hashimoto’s narrator makes no attempt
to shut the eye of the dog, as is done in some
traditions with the bodies of dead humans. In fact,
the narrator wonders whether the dog, with its open
and clear eye, is trying to tell the narrator something
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about that fact that she may not have responded to
the call of her deceased grandfather. Hashimoto’s
narrator, the reader infers, wonders if the spirits of
all living beings who have died (dogs, people, others) communicate their desires to each other. The
narrator still wonders if the dead follow and care
about the living. The poem never resolves the question, and that would be impossible. Just as it is impossible to know what happens after life, it is
impossible for the narrator and others in this poem
to reach resolution about how they handle a family member’s death. Appropriately, the poem ends
with a question, rather than a conclusion. For in
this poem, people can never be sure what follows
death, at least while they are living.
Source: Catherine Holm, Critical Essay on “What I Would
Ask My Husband’s Dead Father,” in Poetry for Students,
Thomson Gale, 2005.
Tarisa Matsumoto and
Sharon Hashimoto
In the following interview, Matsumoto and
Hashimoto comment on the theme of family history
in Hashimoto’s poetry.
“I often draw upon family history and events
in day-to-day life as a starting point,” said Sharon
Hashimoto, whose current book of poetry, The
Crane Wife, took more than 15 years to finish.
Born, raised and educated in Seattle, Hashimoto is
at work on a short story collection, Almost Best,
and continues to work at Highline Community College, where she has taught literature and writing for
15 years. Hashimoto discussed her poetry in an interview with the International Examiner.
[Tarisa Matsumoto]: So many of the poems in
The Crane Wife can be read as autobiographical.
Did you set out to write a family history in poetry?
[Sharon Hashimoto]: The poems kind of happen that way. I guess I find myself muddling through
interesting questions and the poems become a kind
of theme or problem-solving. For example, I was
thinking the other day of how quickly I’m losing the
Japanese words I used for food and family. Unless
you use them all the time, you kind of forget them.
I had to ask my brother that word for those vinegared little dried up fish. I still forget the word, although I remember the image, the smell, the texture.
Several poems use images of dirt, soil, earth,
and loam spilling or falling or leaving. Another
poem mentions the body and soul are one in Japanese culture. Are the earth images representative of
the soul leaving the body or vice versa? When earth
slips away in yours poems, what is being lost?
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Here’s the back story. My dad never knew his
father. Dad was only six months old when his father died in a construction accident. The words
“buried alive” is one that has repeated throughout
our family history. In fact, my dad only has one
photo of his father. I guess the “buried alive” thing
has become a personal image for loss. The loss
would be things never spoken or discussed.
Does your family consider the poems and how
do they react to reading about these unspoken things?
I consider myself the family historian, having
pestered most of my older relatives about what they
know of the internment and World War Two—the
times both before and after the war. I think I’m just
at that age (50) where I heard things around me and
can remember them enough to ask questions. I’m
concerned that if I don’t ask now, I’ll never get
anything close to a response much less an answer.
Sometimes I get a few facts or opinions, but most
of the time it’s just a fleeting feeling of “oh yeah,
that did happen. Let’s see. . .why are you asking?”
My family is not literary-minded. We don’t often discuss what I’m writing about—the subject for
stories or poems but then again I’m not really sure
how many other writers have family who are so involved. I know they’re impressed with the awards
and happy for my success.
Since you use Japanese folktale excerpts as prefaces to your poems, do you consider the poems in
The Crane Wife as creating new Japanese folktales?
Not so much creating new Japanese folktales.
I guess I’m drawn to the persona/characters, their
point-of-view and stories: the old woman in
“Mountain,” the crane, the daughter in “Mirror,”
and my only male speaker is “Urashima Taro.”
What drew you to the characters and subject
matter of the poems about the Japanese Airlines
tragedy?
I remember the newspaper articles about
Japan Airlines Flight #123 and reading about how
this airplane was going down. The crew and passengers had 30 minutes to prepare themselves for
what they knew must be the end. The image of a
man writing down his last thoughts in a pocket calendar really stuck with me. A former teacher, I
can’t remember exactly which one, said we often
write from our fears. Due to some bad airplane
flights and my own growing claustrophobia. I
thought I could maybe write through this problem.
That’s when my research started. Sad to say, I’m
worse off than before when it comes to flying. But
again, the story and the characters in it appealed
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to me—the what if, what could, what did, what
would they do.
When I read the poems in The Crane Wife I
feel such urgency in the lines because of the quietness of the words and images. The spaces-between
images are like hearing you take deep breathes before moving on. Where do you hope readers go?
Do you want the poems to be more personal or universal? Does it matter to you?
I want both. I love stories and words and images that one lingers on, savoring each nuance. It’s
only when you take it all in that you see the connection, the universal.
Source: Tarisa Matsumoto and Sharon Hashimoto,
“Family and Folktales: An Interview with Poet Sharon
Hashimoto,” in International Examiner, February 3, 2004,
http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?docid
=1P1:91950126.
Sources
Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and
Shawn Hsu Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of AsianAmerican Writers, Howard University Press, 1974.
Hashimoto, Sharon, The Crane Wife, Story Line Press, 2003.
Wong, Shawn, ed., Asian American Literature: A Brief
Introduction and Anthology, Harper Collins, 1996.
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Further Reading
Galang, M. Evelina, ed., Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of
Asian American Images, Coffee House Press, 2003.
This is a substantial anthology that explores images
of Asians and Asian Americans in America, both positive and negative.
Hongo, Garrett, “Introduction: Culture Wars in Asian America,” in Under Western Eyes: Personal Essays from Asian
America, edited by Garrett Hongo, Anchor Books/Doubleday,
1995, pp. 1–33.
Hongo discusses the disputes that have surfaced concerning the public role of the Asian American writer
on matters concerning politics, community, social justice, and the representations of Asians in mass culture.
Matsumato, Tarisa, “Family and Folktales: An Interview
with Poet Sharon Hashimoto,” International Examiner,
February 3, 2004.
In this interview, Hashimoto talks about the autobiographical nature of many of her poems, her role as
family historian, and the use she makes of Japanese
folktales.
Uchida, Yoshiko, and Richard C. Jones, Dancing Kettle and
Other Japanese Folk Tales, Harcourt, 1949.
Uchida was a Japanese American from California
who wrote extensively about the Japanese American
experience. This is a collection of fourteen Japanese
folktales retold in simple language. They give insight
into the kind of material Hashimoto reinvents in some
of her poems.
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When I Heard
the Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman, whose name is synonymous with
the United States and who continues to be widely
considered America’s greatest romantic poet, was
inspired in a variety of ways by the Civil War.
Many of the poems in Drum-Taps (1865), for example, a collection that was instrumental in establishing Whitman as a spokesperson for his country,
deal directly with the fierce struggle between the
Union and the Confederacy. However, this collection also included a number of poems with broad
stylistic and thematic innovations only indirectly
related to the conflict. Diverse explorations of
Whitman’s powerful and musical poetic voice,
these poems were later incorporated into a variety
of sections of Whitman’s most important work,
Leaves of Grass, which he revised and released in
various editions throughout his life.
Walt Whitman
1865
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” which
is included in the “By the Roadside” section of the
standard 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, published
in New York and now widely available from imprints
such as W. W. Norton (1973), is a prime example of
a Drum-Taps poem whose subject is not confined to
the Civil War. Although one of its important themes
deals with the idea of unity and individualism that
resonates with the struggle for the Union of States,
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is chiefly
a poem about romanticism, nature, and astronomy.
With its sophisticated linguistic devices and its organization that envisions an escape from a confined
lecture room to the glory of the night sky, the poem
contrasts the limited scientific process with a personal
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Walt Whitman
and romantic interaction with the stars. A visionary
poem with an intimate and immediate voice, it is a
brilliant example of Whitman’s achievement, containing a broad and transcendental vision into a short
romantic poem.
Author Biography
Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, New
York, in 1819, into a climate of patriotism for the
newly created nation of the United States. His father was a carpenter by trade but began farming
by the time his first son (Walt) was born. The family moved to Brooklyn when Whitman was four.
Whitman studied in public schools for six years
before he began working as an errand boy for
Brooklyn lawyers. From then on he educated himself in the library. Beginning work as an apprentice printer for local newspapers in 1831, Whitman
soon began to write articles and later moved
around Long Island between jobs at newspapers
and posts as a teacher. He also became active in
debating societies and campaigned for the Democratic Party. In 1840, Whitman returned to New
York City and began publishing short stories in
newspapers and magazines.
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In 1846, Whitman traveled to New Orleans as
an editor for a local paper. Somewhere between this
assignment and the publishing of the first edition
of Leaves of Grass in the early 1850s, his poetic
style shifted to the unconventional and visionary
technique for which he would become famous.
Leaves of Grass claimed to be speaking for all of
America, and it was very favorably received by the
influential American writer and philosopher Ralph
Waldo Emerson. Whitman continued to revise
Leaves of Grass throughout his life, and each edition changed and expanded from the original
twelve untitled poems.
After the onset of Civil War in 1861, Whitman
became increasingly affected by the conflict and
began to volunteer in hospitals for wounded soldiers. In 1862, After finding his brother’s name on
a casualty list, Whitman set out to Virginia to find
him. His brother had only a superficial wound, but
Whitman came in contact with some of the most
severe horrors of the war and decided to stay in
Washington, D.C., working in the government paymaster’s office and assisting in hospitals. The
poet’s experience of the war was central in inspiring a collection of poetry titled Drum-Taps, which
included “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,”
in 1865.
After being fired from his job in the paymaster’s office when the former Senator James Harlan
found a working copy of Leaves of Grass in Whitman’s desk and declared it indecent, the poet returned to New York to work on the 1867 edition
of the collection. Whitman suffered a stroke in
1873, but remained active for many years, continuing to publish new editions of Leaves of Grass as
well as other poetry and commentary. He died in
1892 of tuberculosis.
Poem Text
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he
lectured with much applause in the lectureroom,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by
myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to
time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
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Poem Summary
Lines 1–2
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” begins by repeating the title, something that often occurs in Whitman’s poetry and gives extra weight
to the first phrase, to set up the idea that the speaker
is listening to an educated scientist. This phrase
also stands out because of its internal rhyme, or
rhyme within the same line, of “heard” with
“learn’d.” This is also a slant rhyme, or an inexact
rhyme, since “learn’d” has an “n” sound unlike
“heard,” but it nevertheless emphasizes a sense of
repetition. The slant rhyme even gives the first line
an impression of awkwardness, since it is difficult
to pronounce and uses the same long vowel sound
twice in a row.
The other element of the first line to notice is
use of the contracted version of “learned.” Whitman frequently contracts words such as this, which
would always be spelled out today, partly in an attempt to capture the way people actually spoke, instead of a high prose style. In this context, the
contraction places some distance between the
speaker of the poem, or the voice of the narrator,
and the educated astronomer to whom he is listening. The poet may be suggesting here that the
speaker uses a different, perhaps a more common
or lower class, style of expression from the learned
scientist.
Line 2 of the poem then presents the interesting image of “proofs” and “figures” of mathematical equations “ranged,” or arranged, in “columns.”
Notice that the poem’s first four lines become increasingly longer, unlike these columns, which presumably go straight up and down within the same
horizontal space. If a poetic line stretches beyond
the margin, the standard method of printing that line
is to continue it below, after an indentation. If a poetic line is continued in this way, therefore, it does
not change the fact that the line should be considered to extend further and further to the right. Thus
Whitman is likely to be contrasting the visual poetic expansion in the lines with the columned mathematical expansion of the astronomer’s proofs.
Lines 3–4
The third line, in which the speaker is shown
materials related to astronomy and asked to manipulate mathematical equations, is full of mathematical diction, or word choice, such as “charts,”
“diagrams,” “add,” “divide,” and “measure.” These
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words make up almost the entire line, and they are
likely to overwhelm the reader, as they will increasingly overwhelm the speaker. That the speaker
is asked to “add, divide, and measure” the “charts
and diagrams” also emphasizes the negative side of
the process, as though the lecture has nothing to do
with the sky but merely manipulates its own figures.
This is reinforced by the fact that, through the
fourth line, the poem has said nothing about astronomy. The fourth line also emphasizes that the
speaker is “sitting,” as opposed to standing or actively engaging with the subject, and stresses again
that the lecture is occurring in the “lecture-room,”
away from nature. And, once again, the reader is
caught up by the internal repetition of “lectured”
and “lecture-room,” as is the case in the internal
rhyme of line 1. This technique serves to contain
the line inside its own words and achieve the stuffy
lecture-room atmosphere that Whitman seems intent upon conveying. The applause that the lecturer
is receiving therefore does little to make the lecture seem compelling or interesting.
Lines 5–6
Line 5, which comes at the halfway point in
the poem, shifts in style from the first quatrain, or
unit of four lines. In fact, everything that has come
previously in the poem sets up and modifies the
statement “I became tired and sick,” which also
contains the poem’s first active verb. It is partly
understandable from the description of the lecture
why the speaker feels this way, but the deeper reason is contained in the word “unaccountable.”
Slightly confusing at first because it seems out of
place in the sentence, this word primarily means
that it is “unaccountable,” or difficult to determine,
why the speaker became tired and sick. But there
is a strong secondary meaning of the word of great
importance to the main themes of the poem;
namely, that the speaker has become tired and sick
because he is an “unaccountable” person, or someone who is impossible to explain or define.
The speaker then wanders off by himself in
line 6, leaving the lecture room, and this line is
therefore the turning point in the poem. There are
a number of key elements to notice here, including
the fact that the first two descriptive verbs, “rising
and gliding,” make it seem as though the speaker
is flying out into the sky and directly interacting
with space. This is an important poetic technique
that combines the figurative, or metaphorical and
representative, meaning, with the literal meaning,
which is that the speaker walks outdoors.
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The second important aspect of this line is the
fact that the speaker “wander’d” out of the lecture
room; this is the first hint that perhaps the speaker
is somewhat aimless or unstructured in comparison
with the exactness of the learned astronomer. Finally, it is important that the speaker leaves the lecture “by myself,” because this suggests that, unlike
the group effort of scientific analysis, the speaker
will be approaching the phenomenon of astronomy
alone. Like an artist, the speaker will be interpreting the stars on his own terms, as a creative
individual.
Lines 7–8
In line 7, the speaker has emerged outside into
the “moist night-air,” and the key word in the description of the night sky is “mystical.” This word
could suggest a variety of spiritual ideas, from ancient pagan worship to romantic individualism, but
it is very distinct from anything scientific, and it
establishes a radically different atmosphere from
that of the lecture room. The seventh line again uses
the technique of internal repetition with “time to
time,” but this idiom, or phrase from common
speech, is mainly a method of reinforcing the
speaker’s more relaxed and unstructured process of
observation. By looking up every so often, whenever he desires, the speaker is approaching nature
very differently from the scientific regularity of observation and analysis.
It is also important to recognize that, in referring to the “mystical moist night-air,” line 7 contains the first actual image of the sky itself. But
even here the speaker has not quite reached the astronomical phenomena themselves, and does not do
so until he looks up “in perfect silence” in line 8,
again using a contracted “ed” verb, “Look’d,” like
“wander’d” in line 6 and “learn’d” in line 1, to emphasize his common touch. Here, in the very last
word of the poem, only after the speaker has
reached “perfect silence” and just before the words
and descriptions of the poem end altogether, the
speaker finally sees the vision of the “stars.”
A s t r o n o m e r
talism, and both of these terms are discussed in the
historical context section below. But the particular
strand of romanticism and transcendentalism that
Whitman invokes in “When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer” can be seen in poem’s contrast between the value of the sensory imagination and the
logical method of the scientific process in their approaches to the natural world.
The first quatrain concentrates on the mathematical logic of the scientific process, and the
poem details the breakdown of data from the real
world as it is arranged and ordered by science. Although there is a sense that the learned astronomer’s ability to arrange the information in
this order is impressive, the main emphasis of
Whitman’s language suggests that his approach to
astronomical data is cramped within a lecture
room and even distinct from the astronomical phenomena themselves. Whitman may be suggesting
that the lecture makes the speaker “tired and sick”
because the manipulation of figures and the sitting in the closed lecture room full of applause is
not as meaningful as the contemplation “in perfect silence” of the stars. Because the final three
lines are so much richer in language and vision,
it seems that romantic mysticism is favored above
logic and science.
However, this does not necessarily suggest that
the speaker has no interest in astronomy, or that the
scientific process is worthless. Whitman, who was
himself quite interested in the field of astronomy
and the scientific advances of the period, also includes the hint in line 6 that the speaker is somewhat aimless in his escape from the lecture room
by using the word, “wander’d.” Wandering and
mysticism are therefore not necessarily Whitman’s
straightforward solutions to the problems of the
strict logic of the lecture room, and it is also possible that the “unaccountable” speaker may simply
be unable to handle the truth and exactness of science. Nevertheless, the overriding sense of the
poem seems to stress that logic and science are often unable to see and absorb the fuller sense of the
world that a romantic inclination can provide.
Personalism
Themes
Romanticism and the Scientific Process
When applied to literature, the term romantic
refers, very broadly, to the stress of the imagination and the senses over reason and logic. Pre-Civil
War American romanticism has more specific associations, as does the philosophy of transcenden-
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“Personalism” is the name given to Whitman’s
own version of individualism, the philosophy that
individuals should lead their lives as they desire,
balanced with the democratic ideal of a state that
governs individual actions to some degree and develops a sense of union. The precise balance between individualism and ideals of statehood is not
always clear in Whitman’s poetry, however, and
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Topics
For Further
Study
• The Civil War was a major inspiration for the
collection of poems in which “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer” was originally published.
Read about the history of the Civil War and research Whitman’s activities during the period.
How do you think the conflict affected the
poem? Which of the main themes of Drum-Taps
apply to the poem? How does it express them
differently or uniquely? Describe and compare
other historical or contextual themes in “When
I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
• Many of Whitman’s poems have musical qualities in their tone and style. Discuss and describe the musicality of “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer” by analyzing its tone, diction, organization, and linguistic devices. How
is the poem similar to a song, and how does it
differ? How do you think the poem’s musicality affects its meaning and themes? How and
why does Whitman use music in his other poems, such as those in the “Drum-Taps” section
of Leaves of Grass?
• What is your impression of Whitman’s feelings towards science and astronomy after reading “When
I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”?” Research
Whitman’s personal interest in the subject and read
about the scientific advances of the 1860s, such as
the discoveries in spectroscopy by the astronomer
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff. How does this information affect your understanding of the poem? How
do you think the message of the poem regarding
the scientific process relates to science today?
What might Whitman say to a modern-day scientist, and what might he think about twenty-first
century technology and astronomy, or the fact that
people have walked on the moon?
• Read other sections of Leaves of Grass that are
related to the themes of “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer,” such as “Drum-Taps,”
“From Noon to Starry Night,” “Songs of Parting,” and the rest of the poems in “By the Roadside.” How does “When I Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer” compare to other poems that envision astronomical bodies, and how is it typical or distinct from Whitman’s other poems
about nature? What is the typical role of the
moon and the stars in the collection? How do
you think the poem relates to the overriding
themes of Leaves of Grass, and what does it contribute that is unique and individual?
the poems of Leaves of Grass often question the
balance between the individual and the collective
that this theme requires. The main clue that “When
I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” includes a meditation on the theme of personalism is the phrase
“wander’d off by myself” in line 6, a clear reference to the solitary nature of the speaker’s observation of the night sky.
Contrasting the speaker’s lone interaction with
the stars to the group of scientific observers that
applaud the learned astronomer, Whitman at first
seems to be stressing the importance of an individual’s unique and personal contemplation of astronomy. When he leaves the group inside the
lecture room, the speaker is able to rise and glide
out into a mystical appreciation of the stars that
does not make him “tired and sick” or unsatisfied.
It seems due to the speaker’s personal freedom that
he is able, “from time to time,” to enjoy the fuller
and more majestic meaning of the stars.
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As in Whitman’s treatment of the theme of romanticism, however, there are also a number of subtle suggestions that such an individualistic approach
is not necessarily without problems. The fact that the
speaker is an “unaccountable” person, or at least unaccountably unable to remain confined in the lecture
room, supports this ambiguity. The problem of his
“wander[ing]” from the scientific truths of the mathematical figures in the first quatrain, as well as the
fact that the speaker’s individual observation results
only in “perfect silence” and not in any judgments
about the stars, also suggest that individualism is not
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the sole solution to the poem’s problems. Mathematics appears unable to produce compelling imagery like that of the second quatrain, but it is
possible that this compelling imagery is itself a distraction from the true meaning of astronomy that a
group effort can discover. This is why the elements
of Whitman’s theory of personalism that he is testing in this poem should be considered an ambiguous balance between the volition of the individual
and the solidarity of the group.
Space
Whitman’s poem uses astronomy to convey
ideas about various other themes, but the poem is
also making a comment about the importance of
space itself. The speaker’s sense of awe and wonderment at the stars, which is reinforced by the fact
that he views them in a reverential “perfect silence”
and connects them to the word “mystical,” highlights the fact that Whitman viewed astronomy as
something of a new frontier for American thought.
By applying advances in technology during the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists were
making many discoveries about the physical nature
of planets and stars, and Whitman’s poem makes
reference to the excitement about space during this
period of discovery.
Also, and perhaps more centrally to Whitman’s
thematic goals in the poem, the speaker’s interaction with the stars suggests that space is an amazing and inspiring realm that should be explored
personally and intuitively as well as scientifically.
There is even the possibility that the stars have a
spiritual or religious significance, since they are associated with the mystical, eternal, and endless part
of the universe that Whitman connected with spirituality. If this is the case, the poem can be understood as the next step in the process of discovering
the truth of the universe when science fails or becomes too self-contained to see the bigger picture.
Style
Diction
One of Whitman’s most important stylistic devices in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
is his extremely careful choice of wording, or diction. When, in lines 2 and 3, the meaning of the
poem stresses the ordered and categorical process
of science and mathematics, Whitman’s language
is full of mathematical words such as “proofs,”
“figures,” “charts,” and “measure.” Or, when he is
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attempting to suggest the actual and magnificent
nature of the night sky, Whitman describes the
speaker’s wandering with the words, “rising and
gliding,” which suggest the behavior of the stars or
astronomical bodies themselves. This language is
not simply descriptive; it is meant to bring out the
poet’s thematic goals because of the resonance of
the words in the reader’s mind.
Another example of the importance of diction
to the poem is Whitman’s use of the common language of everyday speech, such as the contraction
“learn’d” for “learned” or “look’d” for “looked,”
and the simplification of “arranged” and “until” to
“ranged” and “Till,” respectively. This is a stylistic technique used to develop the individual voice
of the speaker in the poem, and it relates to the
poet’s desire to stress a common and personal understanding of nature. The style serves as a contrast to the precise mathematical language of the
learned astronomer and his scientific lecture.
Repetition
Many words and sounds are repeated in Whitman’s poem, beginning with the first line, which is
a repetition of the title. This line also contains the
internal slant rhyme of “heard” and “learn’d,” and
line 4 again repeats the sound of “lecture” with
“lectured” and “lecture-room.” “When” is the first
word of each line of the first quatrain, and there is
another internal repetition, “time to time,” in line
7. Finally, there are a number of instances of alliteration, or the repetition of initial sounds, such as
“myself, / In the mystical moist,” and “silence at
the stars.”
These devices of repetition have a number of
functions in the poem. For example, the repetition
of “When” or the internal repetition of “lecture”
may be meant to highlight the awkward failings of
the scientific approach to astronomy. Meanwhile,
the rich alliteration in the final three lines may be
intended to stress the musical allure of the speaker’s
mystical approach to viewing the stars. In all cases,
Whitman’s technique of repetition is a musical device meant to enhance the pleasure of the reading
experience, and it is a major part of what draws the
reader to the intricacies of the poem.
Organization
Although “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” does not have a particular meter, or sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables, it does
use organizational techniques such as line length and
poetic form in order to demonstrate its meaning. For
example, the first four lines become increasingly
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longer, by about two feet, or stressed syllables each.
So, at the end of the quatrain, line 4 appears particularly long and inelegant compared to the brief and
internally rhyming first line. On the contrary, the last
line of the poem is in iambic pentameter, a traditional meter that is considered pleasing and was
frequently used by Shakespeare. This stylistic technique may be a method of underscoring Whitman’s
theme of the value of interacting with nature as a
categorical scientist or as an independent and creative observer.
Historical Context
Romanticism and Transcendentalism
European romanticism began in the late eighteenth century as a rejection of the Enlightenmentera’s preoccupation with reason and rationality.
Due in large part to the influence of the American
philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, romanticism
spread to the United States in the nineteenth century and became an important influence over many
mid-nineteenth-century American writers such as
Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Whitman. The type of romanticism practiced by these
and other writers varied widely, but it was characterized by a visionary and emotional style that
stressed intuition and feeling as the primary sources
of truth and meaning. From Poe’s haunting ghost
stories to Whitman’s poetic vision of the self as the
universe, writings with a romantic influence tended
to explore the various aspects of the creative spirit.
Emerson’s philosophy, which became associated with the system of thought known as transcendentalism, was extremely influential over
Whitman and other American writers. Like romanticism, transcendentalism valued the examination of nature and the exploration of the self as the
path to knowledge. Although Emerson was heavily influenced by European romanticism, his philosophy differed from the European tradition in a
number of ways, including its conviction that people are fundamentally good. One of the most important of these distinctions is Emerson’s concept
of “self-reliance,” which refers to the necessity of
individualistic faith in one’s self, including one’s
unique convictions and inner beliefs.
Emerson is credited with making transcendentalism popular in the United States, although other
New England philosophers such as Henry David
Thoreau made influential contributions to the movement. Whitman was inconsistent in his acknowl-
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edgement of their influence over him, but Emerson’s ideas and transcendentalist theories are noticeable throughout his work. Much of Whitman’s
poetry, including “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is invested in the concept of self-reliance,
and he consistently explores and tests the transcendental as a source of knowledge and meaning.
The American Civil War
There had long been tension between the slaveowning South of the United States and the North,
which had abolished slavery by 1804, but the issue
came to a head in the volatile presidential campaign
of 1860. After Abraham Lincoln of the Republican
Party won the election, in which the major issue
was the expansion of slavery into the western territories, South Carolina voted to secede from the
Union, largely because it feared the Republicans
would attempt to abolish slavery in the South. After failed negotiations and the further secession of
the other southern states, the Civil War began in
1861, when the Confederate army attacked Fort
Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The larger,
industrial North hoped for a quick end to the conflict, but the South proved to have better generals
and a greater conviction to fight, and the bloody
war dragged out over five years until Confederate
General Lee finally surrendered to General Ulysses
S. Grant in 1865.
The Civil War was an extremely traumatic and
devastating conflict that affected nearly all aspects
of American life and had longstanding consequences. For example, although Lincoln had reassured the newly formed Confederacy that he had
no intention of abolishing slavery in the South, he
delivered the Emancipation Proclamation to free
the slaves in 1862 after the Union army won a particularly horrific battle in Maryland. The war was
of utmost importance to Whitman, who worked for
the government in Washington, D.C. during the
conflict and tended to thousands of wounded soldiers. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
originally appeared in Drum-Taps (1865), a collection largely inspired by the poet’s Civil War
experiences.
Astronomy
The mid to late nineteenth century was an active and exciting time for astronomy. In 1838,
F. W. Bessel made the first measurement of the distance from the earth to a star, and the planet Neptune was discovered in 1846 based on a position
calculated by J. C. Adams and U. J. J. Leverrier.
Also, technological advances in photography and
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1860s: The Republican Party and President
Abraham Lincoln are known for their opposition to slavery, support of the Union of the
States, and pro-business fiscal policies.
Today: The Republican Party and President
George W. Bush are known for their social
conservatism, tax cuts, and increased military
spending.
• 1860s: Astronomical science is making major
advances due to technology. For the first time,
scientists are able to identify elements present
in the sun’s atmosphere.
Today: Technology allows astronomers to identify the furthest planetoid in our solar system,
send robotic probes to the surface of the planet
Mars, and see almost as far in space as the location of the “Big Bang” that is thought to have
started the universe.
spectroscopy were making it possible for scientists
to study the stars and planets more thoroughly than
ever before. Instead of merely charting the paths of
astronomical bodies and their distances from Earth,
astronomers were beginning to find out about their
physical composition. In 1858, German physicist
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff discovered that every element has a unique fingerprint of spectral lines.
Based on this discovery and his observation of the
spectral lines revealing the presence of sodium in
the sun’s atmosphere, Kirchhoff thus made the first
claim that elements found on Earth are also present
in space.
Critical Overview
Whitman created a sensation in the literary community from the publication of the first edition of
Leaves of Grass in 1855, but his poems were extremely controversial, and he was abused by critics throughout his career. When Drum-Taps was
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• 1860s: Homosexuality is entirely taboo, and
few, if any, public personalities such as
Whitman could admit to being gay without
fear of severe reprisal from the government and
the public.
Today: American society is increasingly accepting of homosexuality, but homophobia continues to be a major problem. Politicians such
as President George W. Bush are currently calling for a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage.
• 1860s: The United States is a divided country,
plagued by a bloody war between the States.
Today: Public opinion is divided on many domestic and international issues despite the
patriotism following the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks and the United States’ invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq.
published in 1865, reviews in the United States
tended to be mixed, although critics such as John
Burroughs, in his article “Walt Whitman and His
Drum-Taps,” were struck by this volume and began to recognize Whitman as a unique and powerful American poet, praising “the rugged faith and
sweet solemnity we would describe in DrumTaps.” The anonymous New York Times reviewer
of November 22, 1865, on the other hand, was
among the many critics who continued to find
Whitman’s poetry obscene: “we find in them a
poverty of thought, paraded forth with a hubbub of
stray words.”
Negative reactions to Whitman’s poetry, both
in the United States and abroad, continued to be
problematic. In June of 1865, Whitman was fired
from his government job because former Senator
James Harlan discovered a copy of Leaves of Grass
in Whitman’s desk and found it obscene. The early
1880s saw an increased acceptance of Whitman as
a brilliant and important poet, in part because of
the support of the major publisher James Osgood.
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But the District Attorney of Boston banned the
1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, and Whitman refused to omit the objectionable material. Forced to
withdraw further printings with Osgood after the
banning, Whitman was nevertheless able to sign a
contract with the Philadelphia publishing firm,
Rees, and sell many copies based on positive reviews and the notoriety from having been banned
in Boston.
It was not until after Whitman’s death, however, that the barrage of negative criticism against
him ceased. Then, from the 1890s onwards, Whitman began to be recognized as the quintessential
American poet, a reputation he continues to enjoy.
Throughout the twentieth century, critics concentrated on Whitman’s innovations in language and
structure, his politics and understanding of union
and democracy, and his spiritual and romantic philosophy. Today, critics are increasingly interested
in the historical dimension of Whitman’s poetry as
well as in the ways it engages with the theme of
sexuality. “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,”
now included in the “By The Roadside” section in
Leaves of Grass, is widely anthologized and sometimes included in discussions of Whitman as a poet
of science and Whitman as a poet of luminosity.
Criticism
Scott Trudell
Trudell is an independent scholar with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses the place of Whitman’s
poem within Leaves of Grass as a whole in order
to explore the context of its themes of personalism
and spiritualism.
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” is included in the “By the Roadside” section of Leaves
of Grass in accordance with Whitman’s wishes,
since this was the poem’s location when Whitman
declared that all future printings should match the
1892 edition. The poem had not always been in this
group, however; it was originally published in the
separate Civil War collection Drum-Taps and was
included in the “Drum-Taps” addendum to the
1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Then, in the 1871
and 1876 editions, the poem was printed in the
“Songs of Parting” section, the final group in the
collection. It was not until 1881 that it was placed
into the miscellaneous “By the Roadside” group,
where it remained in subsequent editions.
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In fact, ‘When I
Heard the Learn’d
Astronomer’ not only
hesitates to accept science,
it warns that science is
actually a distraction from
the vital spiritual
significance to be gained
from the stars.”
This shifting place of “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer” in Whitman’s major work is
important because it reveals, in a way, what kind
of poem it was to the poet. Leaves of Grass is not
simply Whitman’s collected poetry; it is the representation of his self and the seed of his eternal selfexpression—he even considered the work a bible
for the new America and numbered verses in the
1860 edition as if they were biblical passages. The
wide range of themes and issues in the collection
were arranged in an order that was vital to Whitman’s self-understanding. A poem’s group and
previous groups can help to highlight some important aspects of its meaning and thematic context.
Drum-Taps, published in 1865, was essentially
a Civil War collection, and its main themes were
related to the long and bloody conflict between the
northern and southern States, including the war’s
implications for individuals and for the country.
This became more true when the collection was incorporated into Leaves of Grass and certain poems
were placed into more appropriate groups. Nevertheless, although a wide variety of ideas extended
from this main theme and many poems in the final
“Drum-Taps” group initially seem not to have anything to do with the Civil War, each poem does relate in some way, directly or indirectly, to union,
division, war, and death.
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” appears to be one of the poems that is unrelated to
the Civil War, but its themes of personalism and
spirituality actually have much in common with the
central preoccupations of the “Drum-Taps” group.
The individualism and democratic ideals inherent
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s last major philosophical
volume, Conduct of Life (1860), contains many of
the views that were so influential over Whitman.
Stressing the importance of self-reliance, the book
also reveals Emerson’s romantic aesthetic theory.
• Leaves of Grass (1892), Whitman’s life work
and one of the major achievements in American
literature, contains many famous sections, such
as “Drum-Taps,” “Memories of President Lincoln,” and “Songs of Parting.” The final poem
of “Inscriptions,” “Song of Myself,” is one of
Whitman’s most influential longer poems.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Evening Star”
(1827) is a compelling meditation on astronomy
that relates to love and other themes. It is an
in Whitman’s personalist philosophy are evident in
this poem particularly with the phrase “wander’d
off by myself.” Whitman was a firm supporter of
the Union of States, an idea that he connected to
the unity of the self, but some of his poems also
reveal an amount of sympathy for the individualistic fervor of the South. Throughout “Drum-Taps,”
the poet examines the freedom and power of the
individual in relation to the unity of the whole and
the will of the collective. Similarly, “When I Heard
the Learn’d Astronomer” highlights the stress between the self-referential and even contained
method of science, and the intuition and romantic
knowledge of the individual.
In the interplay between the individual and the
collective, the stars are a consistently important image. In the “Drum-Taps” group, they are normally
a vision of eternity and almost unattainable unity,
as in the poem “Bivouac on a Mountain Side,”
which ends: “And over all the sky—the sky! far, far
out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal
stars.” The moon is also an important image of eternity, frequently associated with death and spirituality, asked to “bathe” over the dead and called
“sacred” in the “Drum-Taps” poem “Look Down
Fair Moon,” and referred to as “ghastly, phantom”
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important poetic vision of the night sky by an
earlier American romantic writer who was an
important influence on Whitman.
• Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick
(1851) is the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of
the white whale. Its symbolism and romantic undercurrent are vastly different in style from
Whitman’s work, yet the writers were contemporaries and explored some of the same themes.
• Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
(1895), like Whitman’s Drum-Taps, deals directly with the horrors of the Civil War, but its
approach is quite distinct and in many ways reveals the developments in the American literary
scene during Whitman’s later years.
and “Immense and silent” in the poem “Dirge for
Two Veterans.” Although it is difficult to find the
presence of death in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” it is certainly true that the stars represent mystical and individual spirituality in the poem.
Nevertheless, the poem did not genuinely fit in
the “Drum-Taps” group, and by 1871 Whitman had
placed it in the “Songs of Parting” group, the final
section of Leaves of Grass, whose most important
themes are death, eternity, and the future. “Songs
of Parting” is a far-reaching and extensive group of
poems that are also insistently self-conscious and
introspective, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” particularly in its final image, has much
in common with the idea of a combination of eternity and individualism. Although “Songs of Parting” only mentions the stars once in passing, it does
describe space as the “sphere of unnumber’d spirits” in the poem “Song at Sunset,” while “As They
Draw to a Close” contains the provocative line,
“Through Space and Time fused in a chant, and the
flowing eternal identity.”
Thus, with its speaker’s mystical and spiritual
identification with the stars, which represent a kind
of limitless unity that the lecture room cannot
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provide, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
does have a substantial connection with the “Songs
of Parting” group. As the structure of the poem emphasizes, meaning and knowledge are firmly associated with the stars, which are the location of
endless and “flowing eternal identity” here and in
“Songs of Parting.” After withholding any imagery
of nature from the first quatrain in the lecture room,
Whitman saves a vision of space for the very last
word of the poem, setting the image of the stars
alone by preceding them with “perfect silence” and
following them by the end of the text. While the
scientists are left applauding themselves in the lecture room, the speaker and the reader are left with
this striking impression of endless, spiritual space.
The visionary group of “Songs of Parting,”
however, whose poems either transcend the particular issues of the day or use them (as in “Ashes of
Soldiers”) to comment on eternal themes, remains
slightly inappropriate for “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer.” Although the poem’s final
image and its romantic, spiritual emphasis have
much in common with the main themes of the
final group, its meditation on the mathematical
method of the astronomer is out of place. The questions that Whitman asks about science and his criticism of the containment of the lecture room are
too earthly and specific a commentary to belong
with the transcendental “Songs of Parting.”
The poem therefore needed to find another
group, one that was appropriate for its commentary
on contemporary scientists as well as its spiritual,
eternal vision of meaning. At first it might seem
that, with his taste for broad and seemingly distinct
ideas that come to be unified, Whitman might have
considered any number of groups for the poem.
And there are many occasions for a poem that
blends scientific and spiritual themes; as Whitman
suggests in his 1876 “Preface to Leaves of Grass
and Two Rivulets,” “Modern Science” is an extremely important aspect of “the Spiritual” and “the
Religious”:
Only, (for me, at any rate, in all my Prose and Poetry,) joyfully accepting Modern Science, and loyally
following it without the slightest hesitation, there remains ever recognized still a higher flight, a higher
fact, the Eternal Soul of Man, (of all Else too,) the
Spiritual, the Religious—which it is to be the greatest office of Scientism, in my opinion, and of future
Poetry also, to free from fables, crudities and superstitions, and launch forth in renewed Faith and Scope
a hundred fold.
Offering key insight into the coexistence of
scientific methodology and spiritualism in “When
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I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” this thought emphasizes that science is not necessarily discounted
or dismissed when Whitman is thinking about spirituality and eternity. It also suggests that science
may be an extremely important step, even a vital
step, in making progress in spiritual endeavors.
It is important to recognize, however, that this
thought does not account for the ambivalence about
science and the dissatisfaction with the methodology of the lecture room in “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer.” It is far from clear whether
this poem actually “joyfully accept[s] Modern Science,” as Whitman claims the groups of Leaves of
Grass accept it “without the slightest hesitation.” In
fact, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” not
only hesitates to accept science, it warns that science is actually a distraction from the vital spiritual
significance to be gained from the stars. Far from
assisting the ultimate goal of romantic knowledge,
science appears entirely self-absorbed and unhelpful even as a link to the “higher flight” of the “Spiritual.” Instead, the poem serves to censure the
shortsightedness of science and its unenlightening
mathematical breakdown of the natural world.
“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,”
therefore, ultimately fits best in “By the Roadside,”
the miscellaneous group of Leaves of Grass that is
disconnected from many of Whitman’s overarching themes and does not necessarily reinforce the
value of unification predominant in the other
groups. As Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett’s footnote in the 1973 Norton Critical Edition
of Leaves of Grass claims: “The group is truly a
melange held together by the common bond of the
poet’s experience as a roadside observer—passive,
but alert and continually recording.” Like the other
poems in “By the Roadside,” “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer” presents a speaker who is distanced from the unity of all things, and who is admonishing and discontent in his observations about
the world around him.
With its speaker “tired and sick” of the scientists that, to Whitman, do not see the ultimate goal
or value of science—a speaker who is “unaccountable” and cannot see the unity of science and
spirituality—the poem rightly belongs in the “By the
Roadside” group. This is not to say that the themes
of the poem that resonate with the preoccupations of
the “Drum-Taps” and “Songs of Parting” groups
have somehow become unimportant, or that a poem’s
group somehow fixes its meaning. But the context of
the individual poem within Whitman’s unified work
is vital to the chord that it strikes with the reader, and
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it is only from the wayside group of Leaves of Grass
that “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
achieves its full resonance as a mystical vision that
is nonetheless a very real and specific commentary
on the failings of contemporary science.
Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on “When I Heard the
Learn’d Astronomer,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson
Gale, 2005.
Sources
Burroughs, John, “Walt Whitman and His Drum-Taps,” in
Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by
Kenneth M. Price, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp.
123–30; originally published in Galaxy, Vol. 2, December
1, 1866, pp. 606–15.
Review of Drum-Taps, in Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by Kenneth M. Price, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 118; originally published in the New
York Times, November 22, 1865, p. 4.
Whitman, Walt, Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on His Art, Criticism, edited by Sculley
Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, Norton, 1973, pp. 264,
271, 300, 320–21, 494, 501.
—, “Preface to Leaves of Grass and Two Rivulets,” in
Leaves of Grass: Authoritative Texts, Prefaces, Whitman on
His Art, Criticism, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W.
Blodgett, Norton, 1973, pp. 746–56.
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A s t r o n o m e r
Further Reading
Allen, Gay Wilson, The New Walt Whitman Handbook,
New York University Press, 1975.
This useful reference guide to Whitman is the work
of one of his most influential twentieth-century critics and biographers.
Beaver, Joseph, Walt Whitman: Poet of Science, King’s
Crown Press, 1951.
This study explores a number of scientific themes that
relate to “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”
Gay, William, Walt Whitman: His Relation to Science and
Philosophy, Firth & M’Cutcheon, 1895.
Gay provides an early analysis of Whitman’s contribution to scientific and philosophical fields.
Loving, Jerome, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself,
University of California Press, 1999.
Loving presents a thorough biography of Whitman.
Reynolds, David S., ed., A Historical Guide to Walt
Whitman, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Reynolds places Whitman into the political, literary,
and social context of his era with a collection of
interdisciplinary essays.
Thomas, M. Wynn, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry,
Harvard University Press, 1997.
Thomas’s book discusses Whitman’s self-conception,
his nostalgia for the past, and the changes in his poetry after the Civil War.
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Why The Classics
“Why the Classics” appeared in Zbigniew Herbert’s first English translation of his poetry, Selected Poems, published in 1968. As is often the
case with poetry, it is not clear exactly when the
poem was written, only when it was finally published. Herbert began writing as a teenager, but he
was 44 years old when Selected Poems was published; therefore, this poem might have been written at any point during those years. The primary
themes of the poem—honor, responsibility, artistic
authority, and experiences of the exile—are topical to the post World War II era but might also echo
some of the realities of life in an oppressive communist state. Accordingly, this poem reflects many
of the concerns that Herbert felt about society, especially a society in which his own culture had been
destroyed by invading armies. Herbert has often
used classical references and ideals in his work. His
reliance upon classical works reveals Herbert’s
view that classical literature is an effective way to
study and learn from the events of the modern
world. Herbert was criticized for the inclusion of
so much from classical antiquity in his poems. This
poem shows one way that he chose to refute this
criticism. Herbert’s poem also exposes the keen
disappointments of someone who thought that
modern leaders have not learned from the examples of history.
Zbigniew Herbert
1968
In “Why the Classics,” the author uses irony and
models from classical history to point to the failings
of modern military leaders he believes do not take
responsibility for their own military failures. Using
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Herbert’s poetry, which often turns to the past for
inspiration and lessons to which a modern world
might look for guidance.
Author Biography
Zbigniew Herbert
the fourth century B.C. historian and general, Thucydides, as an example, Herbert uses the first section
of the poem to establish the ideal model: a leader
who willingly accepts responsibility for failure, even
when the responsibility for such failure is not clearly
determined to have been the leader’s fault. In the
second section of the poem, Herbert compares this
ideal model with the leaders and generals of more
recent wars, who have no sense of accountability for
the actions of their armies. Instead of accepting responsibility, leaders blame anyone or anything rather
than blame themselves. In the third section, Herbert
turns to literature and art that fails to relate the truth
of injustice and instead wallows in self-pity and
superficiality. Taken as a whole, Herbert’s poem
makes effective use of ancient history as a way to
criticize Herbert’s own world. Instead of the restraint
and honesty of Thucydides, his modern counterpart
is alternately arrogant, petty, and without talent.
Herbert believed in the value of classicism,
with its emphasis on aesthetics, clarity, symmetry,
and long-established forms. Certainly, it is reasonable to assume that Herbert’s early life, marked by
invasions, war, and loss of his homeland, all contributed to his reliance on classical antiquity in his
poems. Classical thought provides not only a paradigm of excellence but also a model that has
proved enduring. “Why the Classics” is typical of
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Zbigniew Herbert was born on October 29, 1924 in
Lwow (or Lvov), a city that was located in Eastern
Poland and that later became a part of the Ukraine.
Herbert was the son of a banker and professor, and
the grandson of an Englishman, thus accounting for
Herbert’s very English surname. He was not even
fifteen years old in 1939 when the Red Army invaded his city, as part of an agreement with Hitler.
By 1941, when Nazis invaded the city, Herbert’s
city had become a concentration camp. Eventually
Herbert joined the underground Polish Home Army
and became actively involved in an anti-Soviet resistance movement after the Soviets recaptured
Lwow in 1944, which was then annexed to the Soviet Union. After most of the Polish Home Army
died during the Warsaw massacre of 1944, Herbert
moved to Krakow, where he began his studies in
law and philosophy at the University of Krakow.
Herbert completed a master of arts in economics in
1947 and then began studying at the Copernicus
University in Torun where he completed a law degree in 1948. Herbert next enrolled at the University of Warsaw where he earned another master of
arts degree in 1950, this one in philosophy.
Herbert was seventeen when he began writing
poetry, but it was 1956 before his first book of poetry, A String of Light, was published in Poland. This
publication was a result of the liberalization of communist rule that permitted the publication of the first
books of Polish poetry since the communists began
to rule Poland. In the fifteen years prior to the publication Herbert wrote poetry, but the Nazi occupation, which was quickly followed by Stalinist rule,
meant the censorship of all literary publishing.
After the relaxation of communist rule, Herbert began traveling outside of Poland and often
visited England and Western Europe. A second volume of poetry, Hermes, a Dog and a Star, was published in 1957, and a third volume, Study of an
Object, was published in 1961. Herbert next turned
to prose and published a book of essays, Barbarian in the Garden in 1962. The poem “Why
The Classics” appeared in Herbert’s fourth volume
of published poetry, Inscription, which was translated and published in English in 1968 as Selected
Poems. Herbert is probably best known for Pan
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Cogito, published in 1974 and then translated into
English as Mr. Cogito for its 1993 publication. His
last book of poetry, Elegy for the Departure and
Other Poems, was published in 1999.
Herbert married Katarzyna Dzieduszyska
April 30, 1968. He was the recipient of many
awards and honors, including the Polish Institute
of Arts and Sciences Award in 1964, the Nicholas
Lenau Prize in 1965, the Alfred Jurzykowski Prize
in 1973, the Petrarch Prize in 1979, the Bruno
Schulz Prize in 1988, and the Jerusalem Literature
Prize in 1991. For many years, Herbert and his wife
lived outside Poland, first in West Berlin (1973–
1981) and later in Paris (1984–1990), but Herbert
and his wife always returned to Poland, where he
was considered to be one of Poland’s greatest postwar poets. Herbert died on July 28, 1998 in Warsaw, Poland.
Poem Summary
Lines 1–8
In “Why the Classics,” Herbert impresses on
the reader the importance of modern military leaders to learn accountability and honor from historical military leaders. Thucydides was a general and
historian who initially participated in the lengthy
war between Athens and Sparta and who later wrote
a history of the Peloponnesian War. In the fourth
book on the war, Thucydides relates stories of the
battles and sieges in which he fought, and he also
tells of his own efforts to survive the plague, a disease that decimated the Athenian population. According to Herbert, in his history, Thucydides
includes the speeches that were made before battles, and he also relates the diplomatic side of the
war, the spying and intrigue that are rarely included
in histories written about great warfare. Herbert
mentions these details because they establish the
thoroughness of Thucydides’s work. Then Herbert
moves to the important point that he wishes to make
about the great historian. In his history, Thucydides
also included the details about his failures, even
though the “episode is like a pin / in a forest.” According to Herbert, Thucydides’s failures, though
small when taken in context of his great accomplishments, are important to remember because of
their final cost to the great historian and leader.
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element to understanding why Herbert admires
Thucydides. In 424 B.C., Thucydides, who had
seven Athenian ships under his control, failed to
arrive in time to save his own home city of Amphipolis from an invasion by the Spartan general,
Brasidas. This failure resulted in the loss of several
nearby towns, whose inhabitants grew afraid that
they would also not be rescued. Because of the fall
of Amphipolis, Athens was forced to sign an
armistice with Sparta that called for a truce of one
year. The truce did not last, of course, and eventually the war resumed and Athens was defeated.
With time, Brasidas came to be regarded as the
founder of Amphipolis. Thucydides took responsibility, although it is unclear whether he was at fault
for the fall of Amphipolis. He was exiled as punishment, and when he wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, he included the details of his own
failure to save his city. Herbert briefly summarizes
these events in lines 9 through 11. Next, Herbert
explains that Thucydides paid the debt he owed to
his city “with lifelong exile.” Thus when Herbert
uses Thucydides, he argues that even though acknowledging a failure will result in extreme punishments, such as banishment, an honorable leader
will do so because it is the honorable action to take.
Lines 14–15
In the final two lines of the first section Herbert reveals his own pain as an exile. His own city
of Lwow was a victory prize for the Soviets at the
end of World War II. As a Pole, he can no longer
claim his own birth city, and while his actions did
not result in the loss of Lwow to Poland—only the
Soviets can claim responsibility for this loss—
Herbert does feel pain that he could not save his
town. His own culture has been destroyed, wiped
clean by an invading army that has no respect for
the history of the city or country. Herbert especially
feels anguish since his own attempts at resistance
were not successful. In 1944 when the Soviets reclaimed Lwow from the Nazis, Herbert became active with the anti-Soviet resistance and joined the
underground Polish Home Army. Herbert makes
the connection between the classical and the modern in his poem, just as Thucydides was unable to
save his city, Herbert was unable to save his own
city. Like the Athenian historian, Herbert lived out
his life as an exile. As he states in line 15, Herbert
knows the price of exile.
Lines 9–13
Lines 16–22
The history that Herbert references in this section is important to know because it is a significant
In the second section of “Why the Classics,”
Herbert moves to a comparison between Thucydides
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and those generals and leaders who fight modern
wars. Herbert is deliberately vague in this section.
Since he never specifies name, nationality, or period,
his comments about modern leaders might be applied to all leaders who blunder ahead, causing loss
of life and honor, and who fail to acknowledge their
mistakes or take responsibility for their losses. In
lines 16 and 17, Herbert imagines the generals of
“recent wars,” who if they suffered a loss such as
the loss suffered by Thucydides, would instead
“whine on their knees,” while they also extol “their
heroism and innocence.” Today’s generals would
lament their losses, claim they had done their best,
and then accuse others for their failures. Lines 20
through 22 explain Herbert’s opinion that the generals of the “most recent wars” (line 16) blame either their subordinates or their colleagues, who are
supposedly “envious.” They even blame fate, those
“unfavourable winds” that the ancient Greeks
thought could shape one’s destiny.
Lines 23–26
Thucydides, however, did not blame the winds
of fate or those other generals who might have offered assistance but who did not, or his men, who
perhaps slowed his arrival. Herbert reminds his
readers that Thucydides offered only facts and no
excuses: “he had seven ships / it was winter / and
he sailed quickly.” And still he was too late. Herbert offers only the facts, which are not mitigated
by excuses or blame. Unlike those generals of recent wars, Thucydides accepts his responsibilities
as a leader. Amphipolis was his home, and he could
not save it. He resisted the opportunity to rewrite
this history and mitigate his blame. Thucydides was
a writer of history, and as such, he might certainly
have downplayed his own blame but Thucydides
did not choose to do so. Herbert admires this honesty, which while so important to an Athenian general who lived nearly 2500 years ago, is absent,
Herbert feels, in modern generals.
Lines 27–34
In the third section Herbert expands on his
comparison by calling upon the poet, who like
those modern generals, also fails to show restraint
and who fails to engage in poetic honesty. The third
section of Herbert’s poem appears to suddenly
change topic, but in fact, the topic remains the
same, although the example used to examine it has
shifted. Herbert moves from generals to poets. According to Herbert, poetic verbosity has replaced
talent, and self-pity has become art. The greatness
of the poet has been reduced to “a small broken
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soul / with a great self-pity.” Herbert suggests that
the poet of today has ceased to focus on strength,
and the reader is now subjected to weeping lovers
in dirty hotel rooms. These final lines point to an
important element of Herbert’s poetry—the poet
has a responsibility to illuminate injustice and create change. Rather than leaving a great legacy, Herbert states that all modern poets are leaving behind
are images of dirty wallpaper and unhappy love affairs. The ancient Greek poets wrote of great battles and wars. Thucydides is perhaps better known
as a historian than as a general. His History of the
Peloponnesian Wars is a legacy that outlived the
loss of his city, his supposed failures in battle, and
his exile from his beloved native town. But today’s
poets will leave no such legacy according to Herbert’s poem. Rather than great generals and poets,
who in times past sought to inspire, the modern
world offers weak generals and poets suffused with
superficiality. It is worth noting that Herbert was
often criticized for his inclusion of classical ideals
in his poems, this poem shows one way that he
chose to refute this criticism.
Themes
Classical Ideal
The classical ideal has traditionally been a concept by which people use the Ancient Greeks as a
model to define what is valued in a society; often
this is purity and integrity. An element of this idea
is the classic hero, who provides a model of heroism and bravery for modern mankind. Greek myths
were very important to Herbert and their influence
permeates many of his poems. In “Why the Classics,” Herbert uses Greek history to defend his use
of Greek myth in so many of his poems. He finds
that the ancient Greeks had much to teach us about
modesty and about restraint. Rather than brag about
exploits that did not happen or blame failures on
others, the ancient Greek general Thucydides displayed a quiet acceptance and bravery in his defeat. Herbert uses the model of Thucydides to
illustrate the weaknesses of modern generals who
use bluster to hide their defeats, rather than look to
the classical model for inspiration.
Exile
Herbert knows something of exile, having suffered exile for much of his own life. Herbert first
experienced exile as a youth when his hometown
was repeatedly invaded during war and later
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Topics
For Further
Study
• Even under communist rule, the Roman
Catholic Church continued as an important
force in Poland. Research the role that the
church played in the years between 1944–1989,
and describe some of the ways in which the
church maintained such an important presence
in the country.
• Solidarity was a national confederation of trade
union led by Lech Walesa. Investigate the role
that Walesa and Solidarity had on the end of
communist rule. In what ways did labor unions
challenge communism?
• Mahatma Gandhi argued that civil disobedience
and non-violent protests were an effective way
to create social change. In Poland, the Roman
Catholic Church used non-violent means to help
rid Poland of the communist regime. Find other
examples of how non-violent protests have
changed government doctrine or even toppled a
harsh regime.
annexed to the Soviet Union at the end of Would
War II. When the city of Lwow became a concentration camp for the inhabitants, Herbert became an
exile within his own city. Even after moving to
Krakow and later to Warsaw, Herbert became a de
facto (not formally recognized or legally, but in fact
a reality) exile while living in his own country; he
was disinherited from his own culture and from the
expression of his talent. Because of communist oppression, poets could not publish their work, and
so Herbert wrote for fifteen years before his first
book of poetry could be published. He became an
exile from Poland as he moved around Western Europe looking for more literary freedom. Herbert’s
intimate knowledge of the life of an exile can be
found in lines 14 and 15 of “Why the Classics.”
Herbert identifies with Thucydides, who suffers a
lifelong exile from his native city. In his absence
from his native city, Herbert understands well that
“exiles of all times / know what price that is” when
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• Under communist rule, women had a great deal
of equality, primarily because they were considered valuable labor. The communists also had
models for feminine behavior with regard to the
raising of children and a woman’s role within
the family. Investigate how women’s lives
changed after communism ended in Poland.
Was there more equality? Or less?
• Traditionally, art and theatre have been the primary media for protest in an oppressive government. Herbert was unable to publish his first book
of poems until after restrictions were eased in
1956, but, previously, writers had long been considered important national treasures, and many
streets were named after Adam Mickiewicz, a
nineteenth-century poet in the Romantic tradition.
Locate some examples of poetry written by Mickiewicz and Herbert and compare the two poets for
similarities and differences. Try to compare two
or three poems by each author. In what ways are
the events of each poet’s life reflected in his work?
Thucydides makes the honorable choice in accepting responsibility. Herbert, of course, could have
returned to his native city, but he would no longer
be Polish and his cultural history would no longer
exist. And as a citizen of the Ukraine, his freedoms
would be even more limited. The inclusion of the
words “of all times” link Herbert’s experiences to
those of Thucydides. For Herbert the choice is
every bit as much an ethical choice as the one that
Thucydides makes and the use of “price” makes
clear that for Herbert the price was as dear as for
Thucydides.
Honor
Honor for Thucydides and Herbert is closely
linked to their lives in exile. Exile is the punishment
for honorable behavior. This is true for both men.
Thucydides chose to do the honorable thing and take
responsibility for the fall of his city. He could have
blamed others, blamed the weather, blamed shifting
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winds or the Greek gods for their lack of help. Herbert describes this in his poem through the use of
very matter-of-fact language: “Thucydides says
only / that he had seven ships / it was winter / and
he sailed quickly.” Lines 23–26 offer no excuses,
only the notation that Thucydides did the best he
could do. It was not enough and the city fell. Honor
demands accountability and the Athenian leader
proved that he could be trusted. Herbert also demonstrated honor as a poet. Under communist rule, poets could write on accepted topics, often flowery
praises of their government. At the very least, poets were expected to keep quiet about oppressive
governments. Herbert refused to keep quiet. He often worked at menial jobs because he would not
write what the communist government wanted him
to write. His opposition to communism meant that
his work was excluded from publication and he was
denied membership in the Writer’s Union.
Doing the honorable thing certainly led to
Thucydides’s inclusion in Herbert’s poem. According to Herbert, Thucydides is a model for honorable
behavior that modern generals and leaders would do
well to emulate, and Herbert sees this honorable behavior as a model for his own life. For instance, Herbert concludes his poem with two stanzas that link
poetry and artistic honesty with this example of ancient Greek honor. Herbert accuses modern poets of
wasting their talents on weeping lovers “in a small
dirty hotel.” These subjects are a “great self-pity.”
As a result, Herbert asks, “what will remain after
us?” These poets will leave no legacy of great works
for history to judge as did Thucydides. Clearly Herbert wants more for himself. He immerses his poem
in the ancient Greek tradition because this time
and Thucydides have maintained their importance
throughout history. According to Herbert, honor,
whether revealed in a poet or a general, offers a
model for modern man, generals, and poets.
Irony
In contrasting Thucydides’s admission of responsibility to that of modern generals and leaders,
Herbert uses irony to strengthen his argument and to
point to the deficiencies of modern leaders, who all
too often extol virtues they do not possess. In the first
section of his poem, Herbert lists the trials that beset
Thucydides as a general. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, he describes “battles sieges plagues,”
all of which he endured as a leader. Moreover, he
also endured the “dense net of intrigues of diplomatic
endeavours” during his many years of warfare. Herbert says that his one loss, the failure to save his native city of Amphipolis, was only a very small part
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of this great leader’s experience. Hebert calls this loss
“like a pin / in a forest.” There is great irony in this
comparison of a pin to a forest. The use of “pin”
makes clear how great Thucydides’s victories were
when compared to this one loss. His willingness to
claim responsibility for the loss of Amphipolis is only
another measure of his greatness. Thus, Thucydides’s
legacy becomes more than his exile from his native
city; his honesty and integrity are more significant
legacies, and the reader knows this because Thucydides’s only mistake was “like a pin / in a forest.”
In the second section of the poem, Herbert offers a contrast. In this section his use of ironic language makes clear why Thucydides should be
admired and why many modern leaders and generals would do well to look to the past to learn how
a general should be expected to behave. Herbert
points out that if placed in the same situation, “generals of the most recent wars” would “whine on
their knees before posterity” to create a legacy they
have not earned. Rather than accept their failings,
these leaders “accuse their subordinates,” their “envious colleagues,” and the “unfavourable winds,”
all of which derailed their victories.
The words from line 22 are especially ironic.
Thucydides might, indeed, have blamed the winds or
the gods, as was the custom in Athenian society. Thus
Herbert’s choice to include this reference to “unfavourable winds” is especially ironic and on two levels. On the first level, modern generals rely upon
satellites, computers, and especially wartime intelligence derived from spies, who are far more sophisticated than those employed by the Greeks during the
fourth century B.C.E. Fate, or “unfavourable winds,”
is of little consequence in modern warfare. On the
second level is the more humorous meaning in “unfavourable winds,” which implies more than just air
or the movement of air; it also implies gaseous air,
the more foul-smelling air of betrayal. Herbert felt
very strongly that classical literature could be used
as a way to understand the events of the modern
world. Sometimes the use of ironic language can aid
in that understanding by pointing out the ridiculousness of someone’s actions—in this case, the actions
of modern leaders and generals who are incapable of
accepting responsibility for their mistakes.
Style
Classicism
In poetry, the term classicism means a reliance
on traditional forms to produce poetry in which the
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meaning is clear and in which there is a parallelism
of thought. Classicism might also include an adherence to the rules and values of ancient poets and
writers. In Herbert’s poem, these aesthetic ideals are
revealed in several ways. There is a parallelism between the comparisons drawn between Thucydides
and recent generals. In addition, Herbert’s poetry is
very clean, the meaning easy to derive. The most
confusing element, in fact, is in the last section that
refers to modern poets. Since Herbert is extolling
the virtues of the classic ideal within his poem, his
use of confusing language when discussing modern
poets, whose topics are as meaningless as their poetry, becomes an example of the value of classicism.
Finally, Herbert uses ancient Athenian events and
personages as a way to establish classical Greek society’s value in a modern world.
Imagery
Imagery refers to the images in a poem. The
relationships between images can suggest important meanings in a poem, and with imagery the poet
uses language and specific words to create meaning. For instance, Herbert includes images from
Thucydides’s wartime experiences. These images
of “battles sieges plague” serve to create specific
ideas about the general. He has been tested in war,
and he has survived. When called upon to accept
responsibility for loss, he has done so, and he has
accepted the punishment received—exile from his
native home. The contrasting images that Herbert
offers are of the generals of recent wars. Herbert
says that these men “whine on their knees,” a striking image of cowardice. These men would not take
responsibility for their losses; instead they would
blame others for their own faults. The use of such
words as “accuse,” “envious,” and “unfavourable”
help to create clear images of Herbert’s meaning.
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Thucydides’s failing is insignificant when considered in the context of his many victories. Placing
the conclusion of the metaphor on the next line
helps to sustain tension in the poem.
Lyrical Poetry
Lyric poetry describes poems that are strongly
associated with emotion, imagination, and a songlike resonance, especially when associated with an
individual speaker or speakers. Lyrical poetry
emerged during the Archaic Age. These poems
were shorter than the previous narrative poetry of
Homer or the didactic poetry of Hesiod. Since lyric
poetry is so very individual and emotional in its
content, it is by its very nature also subjective.
Since Herbert admired the early Greeks so much,
it is understandable that he would also use a poetic
form that originates with the Greeks. Lyrical poetry is also the most common form of poetry, especially since its attributes are also common to
many other forms of poetry. Herbert’s poem combines many of the attributes of lyrical poetry, with
its emphasis on honor and bravery and perseverance and the concerns of the individual as a member of a society.
Motif
A motif is the central image that recurs
throughout a poem. The motif can be a theme, a
particular character or image, or even a metaphor
or analogy that is the basis of the poem’s narrative.
In Herbert’s poem, the central motif is that classical literature can be an important means to understand the events of today. Specifically, Herbert
argues that an ancient Greek general and historian
like Thucydides is an honorable model for modern
generals and leaders and even poets, whose work
is without honor or lasting legacy.
Line Breaks
Poetic Form
Line breaks are a defining element of poetry.
They are one characteristic that is used to create
meaning or to direct emphasis on an idea, to create a rhyme or rhythm, or to create a specific appearance on the page. Herbert uses line breaks to
create meaning and to emphasize ideas. Abrupt
lines, such as line 25—“it was winter”—create an
image of hardship, and yet the simplicity of the line
also makes clear that Thucydides did not make excuses for his failure to save his city. Herbert also
uses the line break to create tension in lines 7 and
8. For instance, “the episode is like a pin” leaves
the reader waiting for the conclusion of the
metaphor “in a forest,” which makes clear that
The word “poem” is generally assigned to
mean a literary composition distinguished by emotion, imagination, and meaning. But the term poem
may also fit certain designated formulas, such as a
sonnet or a couplet, which are defined by length
and or a rhyme scheme. A poem may also include
divisions into stanzas, a sort of paragraph-like division of ideas, and may also include a specific
number of stressed or unstressed syllables in each
line. Herbert’s poem does not make use of a set
number of syllables per line and does not employ
specific defining characteristics, as does a sonnet;
however, his poem does meet many of the other elements that define poetry, especially the notion of
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compactness and concreteness of language. Every
word in Herbert’s poem suggests an image or idea,
and nothing is wasted. Modern poetry has moved
from the strict formulas of the early poets, but even
the contemporary poet still strives for an impassioned response to his or her poem. And like the
earliest poetry, modern poetry is still highly
individualistic.
control of publishing, Herbert paid for his opposition through the suppression of his writing. When
one considers how easily and quickly Poland first
succumbed to the Nazis and then later to the Soviets and how the Red Army occupation led to so
much violence, it is little wonder that Herbert held
modern generals and leaders in such contempt.
Living in Warsaw
Historical Context
Postwar Communism
Herbert was well known for his opposition to
communist rule, and since there is no absolute date
for the composition of “Why the Classics,” one
place to begin a study of the historical events that
might have influenced Herbert is with communism
in Poland following World War II. Initially, Poles
welcomed the Red Army when they entered in 1944
and liberated the country from the Nazis, but the
welcome turned bitter when Polish women were
raped and their towns were looted by drunken soldiers. When the German massacre of Warsaw occurred during the summer of 1944, the Soviets
failed to help, even though their army was just outside the city. The thousands of Polish lives that
were lost were of no consequence to the Soviets.
The Polish Home Army, the resistance movement
that Herbert helped to found, was almost completely obliterated in the massacre in Warsaw.
At war’s end there was very little of Warsaw
remaining. Effort needed to be put into rebuilding
the city, which was nearly abandoned, depleting
much of the people’s spirit for actively resisting
communism.
Herbert was living in Krakow in the closing
days of World War II, and the population of
Krakow was particularly defiant in the face of communist rule. The city had a strong Roman Catholicbased population and had become a center for
intellectuals, who did not readily accept Soviet rule.
The deportation of Krakow’s young men to Soviet
work camps further angered the population. Food
was scarce, wages were low, and health care was
poor. During the years immediately following the
end of the war, Herbert witnessed active resistance
and open defiance to the communists, but within
two years of the occupation, the Poles in Krakow
began to accept the inevitability of communist rule.
This was something that Herbert could not tolerate, and he continued to protest long after other
voices of protest had silenced. Because of the tight
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By the late 1940s, Herbert had moved to Warsaw, a city that lay in ruins after the Nazi occupation during the war. More than 90 percent of
Warsaw was destroyed during the war, and initially, there was a plan to just abandon the city and
let it lay in ruins. People lived in the ruins and tried
to patch things as best they could. Soon however,
and in the immediate postwar years, many Poles
left the countryside and moved to Warsaw, and the
city was eventually rebuilt upon the ruins of the old
city. The result was that areas of the new city were
elevated by several feet, since in many cases old
buildings were just leveled, and their debris was
not carted off to other sites but became a foundation for new buildings. The communists looked to
build functional buildings and were not interested
in aesthetics. The new buildings were often drab,
modern constructions, and streets were renamed to
honor communist ideals. The communist government, located in the Soviet Union, cared little for
Polish history or culture and there was little effort
to restore the beauty of Warsaw. Poland became a
satellite nation of the Soviets, with little sensitivity for the Polish people. There was little free enterprise and a corresponding drop in the standard
of living. Even though the government tried to control any attempts at free thought and expression of
ideas, Warsaw did manage to become a center of
culture and education.
This oppression began to lift in 1956 after Stalinism was officially condemned in the Soviet
Union and the official Soviet regime that had been
governing Poland was replaced by a new Communist leadership who made efforts to separate Poland
from the Soviet Union. Many political prisoners
were granted amnesty and the restrictions on publication of art and literature were eased. For Herbert, these changes meant that he could finally
publish his first collection of poetry. It is worth noting, however, that in 1968 this same government
brutally suppressed student demonstrations calling
for democracy, the end of censorship, and an end
to government sanctioned anti-Semitism. Herbert
could not have failed to note Poland’s long and difficult journey to freedom, which would take many
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Compare
&
Contrast
• 1950s: The Warsaw Pact is signed binding the
Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites,
including Poland, together in a military alliance.
The member countries include Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic
Republic (East Germany), Hungary, Poland,
Romania, and the Soviet Union. This alliance
allows the Russian Red Army to maintain a presence in each country and is meant to parallel the
NATO alliances formed at the conclusion of
World War II.
Today: Although the Warsaw Pact is officially
renewed in 1985, it has begun to dissolve. In
1968, Albania is the first country to leave. Over
the next twenty-five years, several other countries also choose to leave the alliance, and, in
July 1991, the Warsaw Pact is officially dissolved. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary,
and Poland join NATO. In 2004, Bulgaria, Romania, and several separate member states of the
former Soviet Union also join NATO.
• 1950s: Nikita Khrushchev condemns Joseph
Stalin, and in response, the old Polish-Soviet
regime is deposed and a new less rigid communist regime is installed. This results in the easing of censorship and publishing restrictions.
Today: By 1968, the new communist regime in
Poland proves itself to be equally oppressive as
more years. “Why the Classics,” was published in
1968, the year that the government began to use violent oppression to maintain control. Herbert had
witnessed similar events many times since 1939
and had significant experience with political and
military suppression of the people.
Critical Overview
In the introduction to Herbert’s Selected Poems, in
which “Why the Classics” was published in 1968, Al
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the old government, but, eventually, communism ends in Poland. Today, there are far fewer
countries under communist rule than in the years
immediately following the end of World War II
when communism is seen as a threat that may
engulf many more countries. Communism is
still a controlling force in China, Cuba, Laos,
North Korea, and Vietnam.
• 1950s: Mother of Kings, a novel about the dangers of communism, is published in Poland by
Kazimierz Brandys. The publication of this
novel reflects the easing of censorship restrictions under the more relaxed communist rule. It
is made into a film in 1982 but is not shown
until 1987 when communism is close to an end
in Poland.
Today: It can be difficult to comprehend living
in a country where censorship restricts the publication of materials that are considered inflammatory, controversial, or provocative in any
way. Officially, state censorship in Poland ends
in 1990, and, within two years, nearly 1,000 periodicals are being published, including more
than 200 newspapers. However, censorship is
not completely gone from Poland. For example,
state censorship occurs in March 2003 when the
government attempts to stop a journalistic probe
of corruption in state run radio broadcasts.
Alvarez states that Herbert is an exception to the notion that there is a split between poetry and politics.
Alvarez explains that generally the language of modern poetry does not go with the language of modern
politics. Poetry, according to Alvarez, is filled with
complexities and tension, while politics is rhetoric
and clichés. Most often modern political poetry can
be effective, but it is not good poetry. However, Alvarez finds that Herbert is “an avant-garde poet
whose experiments and precise, restrained rhythms
have sent Polish prosody off in a new direction.” According to Alvarez, Herbert’s use of classicism is
a way of coping with an out-of-control world, a
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“minority politics of sanity and survival,” that maintains the political opposition to which he has assigned
himself a role. These same attributes were also noted
when Herbert was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in
May 1991. In an article printed in the Jerusalem Post,
a staff reporter noted that the prize jury “cited Herbert’s poems as expressing the struggle for freedom
and individuality ‘in all circumstances and against all
odds’ through an unusual combination of sophistication and honesty.” In receiving this award, Herbert
joined several other illustrious recipients, including
writers Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, and
Simone de Beauvoir.
One way to judge a poet’s importance in the
world of literature is through the obituaries printed
after his death. Herbert’s passing was the occasion
of several prominent obituaries, one written by poet
and literary critic, Adam Czerniawski for The Independent in London. Of Herbert’s use of the classics, Czerniawski writes that “Herbert uses the
heritage of Western history, culture and religion in
a dynamic, dialectical way. He demonstrates that
the past can illuminate the present, and that in the
process the past can also be reinterpreted.” Czerniawski also observes that Herbert, more so than
any other notable poet of his country, “is more
closely identified with the ideological conflicts of
the Cold War.” These words of tribute are easily
identified in Herbert’s poem “Why the Classics,”
with its model of honor derived from classical antiquity and the poet’s concerns with the duty of the
poet to create poems that have social and cultural
importance. Like Thucydides, Herbert succeeded in
creating a lasting legacy through his words. In an
obituary written for The Guardian, Neil Bowdler
writes that “Herbert was recognized by critics as
one of Poland’s four great post-war poets.” Two of
the four poets, Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, were Nobel laureates and thus Herbert’s
importance in the canon of Polish poetry cannot be
diminished with time.
Criticism
Sheri E. Metzger
Metzger has a doctorate in English Renaissance literature. She teaches literature and drama
at the University of New Mexico, where she is a lecturer in the University Honors Program. In this essay, Metzger discusses Herbert’s use of classical
history in his poem and the way in which the poet
uses Greek history to teach modern lessons for both
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poets and generals about personal honor, social responsibility, and the importance of truth in poetry.
It would be nearly impossible, and no doubt a
pointless exercise, to try and separate Herbert’s
poem “Why the Classics” from the historical, cultural, and social events of the author’s life. Herbert’s experiences during several invasions, a major
war, and the communist takeover of Poland have
permeated much of his poetry, and “Why the Classics” is no exception. Historians estimate that more
than 50 million people died during World War II,
and the number of post–World War II victims to
communist oppression has never been accurately
calculated. Such massive numbers are overwhelming, so how then can a poet even make sense of
such needless slaughter? Just as important, mankind
must wonder how human beings could have permitted and in some cases even encouraged such carnage. Within the brevity of thirty-four lines,
Herbert attempts to make ancient history relevant
in a post-war world where destruction and death
have so recently occurred on such a massive scale.
Instead of merely accepting the inevitability of poor
leadership and government that he has witnessed,
Herbert’s poem presents an answer to the question
posed by the verse’s title about why the classics
still have a place after so much destruction and
death have encompassed the world. Through the
ancient example provided by Thucydides, Herbert
suggests an ancient historical model of personal
honor, veracity, and nobility that the poet finds
lacking in leaders of the modern world.
In a 1987 essay, “Zbigniew Herbert, the Poet
as Witness,” critic and Herbert translator Bogdana
Carpenter states that events during the ten years
prior to the end of communism in Poland served to
create a sense of social obligation on behalf of Herbert to serve as witness to the truth of what was
happening under such a repressive and destructive
regime. Carpenter suggests that this obligation became particularly crucial during the period when
martial law was imposed in those final years under
communist rule, and that any writer would become
“not only an artist but also a witness” to these
events. According to Carpenter, Herbert used his
poetry as a way to provide testimony. In one sense,
his work becomes a historical record of injustice
and oppression. While Carpenter’s comments are
certainly an accurate reflection of the influence of
communist rule on Herbert’s poetry, it is equally
clear from the Herbert poem under consideration
that the poet felt a strong sense of obligation long
before the events of the late 1970s and 1980s
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occurred. One way to consider the sense of importance that Herbert felt during the postwar years is
to consider his use of Thucydides as the model of
honor and repute on whom Herbert rests his poem’s
main premise. Herbert begins “Why the Classics”
with two important lines: “in the fourth book of the
Peloponnesian War / Thucydides tells among other
things.” These opening lines establish that Thucydides is also a writer, that he was recording history,
and that the events that Herbert focuses upon were
only a few “among other things.” And thus Thucydides was also a witness who felt compelled to be
honest and completely forthright about his own
failings. He is a model for all who would give testimony to the truth of what they have witnessed.
Carpenter suggests that the lack of media freedom under which Herbert lived and wrote and the
restriction of all communication to official communist doctrine created “a new function [for the
poet] to fulfill, a function that is normally reserved
for history and the media—to provide information,
and to give an undistorted account of a situation or
of events.” Herbert confirms this new function in
“Why the Classics” when he relates in lines 23
through 26 that Thucydides provided an undistorted
account of his own battle experiences in the failure
to save his native city if Amphipolis. Herbert writes
that “Thucydides says only / that he had seven ships
/ it was winter / and he sailed quickly.” There is no
embellishment of facts, no effort to put forth excuses, and no official regime reinterpreting contemporary events; there are only the brief historical
facts of the unfettered historian who has failed in
his mission. Herbert compares Thucydides’s brief
words and his unwillingness to excuse or embellish
the events with modern generals and leaders who
“whine on their knees before posterity.” The “posterity,” of course, is the historical record, which in
Poland has frustrated Herbert with its failure to report the truth. Rather than admit to mistakes, Herbert observes that recent generals “accuse their
subordinates.” They accuse “envious colleagues”
who must be contained if deficient generals are to
continue in their leadership role. These modern generals even accuse “unfavourable winds” for having
thwarted their successes. What these contemporary
leaders fail to do is what Thucydides so willingly
chose to do—report the truth.
Herbert does not see the ancient world as irrelevant to the present. In a 1980 essay, “Zbigniew
Herbert and the Imperfect Poem,” John and Bogdana Carpenter offer some insight into Herbert’s
thoughts about the importance of history and how
it might be used to guide modern generals. The
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Through the ancient
example provided by
Thucydides, Herbert
suggests an ancient
historical model of personal
honor, veracity, and
nobility that the poet finds
lacking in leaders of the
modern world.”
Carpenters write that “For Herbert, history is a continuum, a web with an infinite number of seams
leading into other seams.” One way that this idea
is exemplified is in Herbert’s use of General Thucydides. It does not matter to Herbert that his model
lived nearly 2500 years ago; instead, what matters
is the importance of Thucydides’s behavior under
the pressure of war. Thucydides is honorable in accepting responsibility for his losses in battle, something that Herbert sees as seriously lacking in
modern generals. The Carpenters point out that
Herbert’s use of classical history demonstrates that
“the living and the dead form the same mortal, human community.” The Carpenters also note that
this “‘living’ presence of the dead” adds “a remarkable degree of generality and breadth” to Herbert’s poems. His poems have applicability for all
audiences, across all time. For Herbert, the events
of the Peloponnesian War and the behavior of
Thucydides are part of the continuum of history
that can guide modern generals. This merging of
time adds a tension to “Why the Classics” that
would be missing if Herbert simply delivered his
ideas as a lecture-like poem on the failings of modern generals. Instead, Herbert reaches back in time
for an indisputable model of honor who can serve
as a paradigm of integrity for those who most need
a lesson in nobility. At the same time, Thucydides’s
story offers more than a simple lesson. As the Carpenter team note, “the fact that we are alive does
not make us superior to the dead in any way.” In
fact, Herbert’s poem suggests the alive are very
much inferior. It is this opposition between the classical ideal and the failings of a modern world that
Herbert captures so clearly in his poem.
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What
Do I Read
Next?
• Barbarians in the Garden, published in English
in 1986, is a collection of Herbert’s essays and
serves as a record of his travels through much
of Europe. Many of the essays focus on art and
architecture.
• Herbert’s Report from the Besieged City, published in English in 1986, uses poetry to illuminate life in a city under invasion. Other poems
offer reflections on composers like Beethoven
and Schubert.
• Postwar Polish Poetry (1984), edited by Czeslaw
Milosz, is an anthology that contains Milosz’s
translations of poetry by twenty-one major
Polish poets.
borska and Clare Cavanagh, is an anthology of
more than twenty-nine poets whose works were
written in the 1970s and 1980s, as Poland was
emerging from communism.
• Five Centuries of Polish Poetry, 1450–1970
(1979), edited by Jerzy Pietrkiewicz, is an anthology that traces Polish literary history over
the past 500 years.
• Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems
New and Collected (1998) is a collection of the
poet’s older poems as well as sixty-four newly
translated poems.
• Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule (1992), edited by Wislawa Szym-
• A Book of Luminous Things (1998), by Czeslaw
Milosz, is a collection of clear, easy to read and
understand poetry that should appeal to lay-level
readers.
Herbert does offer a solution for modern man’s
failings, and the answers lie with each individual
within the memories of ancient stories and history
of those who have lived before. There is no evidence that Herbert ever met Joseph Campbell
(1904–1987) or that the poet was influenced in any
way by Campbell’s writings on heroes and myth,
and yet Herbert’s use of Greek classicism shares
some commonalities with Campbell’s ideas about
the role of classical stories and myth in modern
lives. Campbell, who is well known as a writer on
mythology and comparative religions, lived during
much of the same period as Herbert. Campbell is
often considered to be an authority on the history
and importance of myth and, in particular, on the
role of ancient stories and myths in modern life.
Like Herbert, Campbell thought that modern men
could look into the past to find answers to the present, and like Herbert, Campbell believed in the
temporal convergence of past and present.
In “First Storytellers,” part of an extended interview with journalist Bill Moyers, Campbell links
the ancient stories and myths to modern life. Because so many of the early stories are about death,
war, growing old, and finding mankind’s place in
a social order, myths help men respond to the uncertainties of life and to the realities of life. Campbell says that the past is a part of living, that “the
nerves in our body carry the memories that shaped
the organization of our nervous system to certain
environmental circumstances and to the demands
of the organism.” The past cannot be separated
from the present. In other words, mankind can find
the answers to modern problems by searching the
past, which is encoded within each person. Herbert’s merging of past and present is especially notable in lines 14 and 15, in which the poet writes,
“exiles of all times / know what price that is.” The
choice of two words, “all times,” links past and present, and the use of “know” makes clear that this
is knowledge that is within, not knowledge that is
taught. This knowing is the convergence of all
times, from the wars of classical Greece and even
earlier to the modern time of contemporary wars
and oppression.
This merging of past and present works in Herbert’s “Why the Classics” in the weaving of time
between past and present. The first thirteen lines of
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the poem focus on Thucydides and the past. Then
the next two lines, with the words “of all times,”
serve as a bridge to the present. With the following seven lines, Herbert takes his reader into the
present before returning to the past for another four
lines. Then in the final eight lines of the poem, the
reader is once again transported into the present.
The reader is constantly moving in time and is
forced to recognize that past and present have become one entity. Bogdana Carpenter, who has devoted significant time to the study of Herbert and
his poetry, argued in a 1983 essay, “The Barbarian
and the Garden: Zbigniew Herbert’s Reevaluations,” that Herbert’s attitude toward the past is not
passive. He uses the past to recreate the present,
and yet, Herbert never makes the poem more important than history. Art is never more important
than integrity. Just as Thucydides suffered exile for
the truth, Herbert was willing to suffer for the truth.
In the final eight lines of the poem, Herbert
links the responsibility of ancient and modern generals to the obligations of the artist. Herbert finds
no great legacy in “lovers’ weeping / in a small
dirty hotel / when wall-paper dawns.” This is not
the truth; it is the “self-pity” that infuses many
modern poets. There is no glory in suffering and
there is nothing to be learned. As Carpenter notes,
there is “only a sober determination not to avert the
eyes” for the poet. Herbert cared about injustice
and about human rights. His own work went unpublished because he could not ignore the injustices that he witnessed through invasions and war.
Herbert, declares Carpenter, is a poet who functions as witness, who feels “his duty is to give testimony,” to speak for those who have suffered and
to be as honest as Thucydides, who also suffered
for truth. For Herbert, according to Carpenter, “poetry must be subordinate to truth, and truth is faithful to reality.” Herbert’s poetry does not let history
hide under excuses or fate. For him, Thucydides’s
experiences in the past are infused into the experiences of those writers who live in the present and
who find their duty in bearing witness to the truth.
In her 1983 essay, Carpenter states that Herbert takes an active approach to art and the past.
Rather than simply appreciating the past, Herbert
demands “an effort of re-creation” that makes the
past the present. Rather than be isolated from history, as Poland was under communist control, Herbert remains open to the past, which is always a
part of the present. In “Why the Classics,” Herbert
succeeds in bringing an ancient historical figure to
life. Thucydides is more real than the modern generals of the poem, who remain only vague carica-
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tures of what they should be. Had these generals
only looked inward to find the past, they might have
avoided the failures of the present. By the end of
the poem, the reader sympathizes with this longago historian who suffered so much for his honesty. Herbert succeeds in making the past the
present, and the reader is the better informed for
his having done so.
Source: Sheri E. Metzger, Critical Essay on “Why the Classics,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.
Stanislaw Barańczak
In the following essay excerpt, Barańczak examines various critical responses to and classifications of Herbert’s poetry and concludes that
Herbert’s poetry is “a ‘tragic vision’ recounted in
the Classic style.”
It is oddly paradoxical that the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert which inspired a number of brilliant
comments from the leading Polish critics has also
fallen victim to so many stereotypes and oversimplifications. The latter, a product of Poland’s literary criticism ad usum delphini—offered by popular
periodicals, school textbooks, literary compendia,
and radio or television programs—circulate widely
and sometimes border on either a complete misunderstanding or a deliberate misappropriation. Let
us first gather a few typical examples of such runof-the-mill opinions on Herbert’s work:
Herbert [is] a poet of classical equilibrium, skeptical,
stoical philosophy, ironic distance.
Herbert the humanist and intellectual feels close to
every epoch. He communes with the word of antiquity like a man who perceives and experiences the
uninterrupted continuity of human history.
Herbert’s poetry refers to cultural tradition in a broad
sense. It makes ready use of allusions to antiquity
and the European classics, in order to discern in the
images and situations recorded by the Mediterranean
tradition the questions and the answers that can interest con