100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  In A History of Twentieth-Century British Women Poets, Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle argue that Smith’s subterranean subject is “undisclosed emotional undertow,” a persistent theme of poems by women. The fact that there are no quotation marks setting off what seems to be the dead man’s speech in lines 3 and 4 suggests that the speaker of the poem is ventriloquizing the dead man’s words. This tells us not just about the speaker but also about the ventriloquist. The emotion is thus partly revealed and partly concealed under the surface.

  This deceptive little poem unfolds over three quatrains that rhyme abcb. Rhyming every other line, as in a ballad, gives a feeling of intermittency. In the first stanza, for example, the rhyme scheme disconnects two words, “man” and “thought,” and links two others through a disconcerting near or slant rhyme, “moaning” and “drowning.”

  Notice how the linguistic register of the poem changes in the second stanza. Here the speaker takes on an ordinary social voice, what a couple of British people might say, standing in a crowd on the shore. Thus, the poem moves between speech and commentary. Here are the usual clichés about a person whom they knew a little. He was a “poor chap” who loved “larking,” which is to say that he was something of a prankster, a fellow who concealed his melancholy under a mischievous surface, perhaps like Smith herself. The third line—“It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way”—is by far the longest in the poem and seems a bit drawn out, as if running together an entire conversation. Note too the iron shock of the foreshortened twelfth line, which is the shortest one in the poem: “They said.” The exact rhyme with the word “dead” is inescapable.

  Smith loved Robert Browning, especially his poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” which was ingrained in her memory since childhood. See, for example, her poem “Childe Rolandine.” Smith’s biographer Frances Spalding points out that the dying man in “Not Waving but Drowning” can hear the people on the beach talking about him just as “Childe Roland” overhears a discussion about his burial. In both poems, this adds a ghostly element to the man’s isolation.

  The statement “They said” is immediately countered in the last stanza by an exclamation: “Oh, no no no.” The speaker insists that the drowning man’s heart didn’t give away because the water was too cold for him this one time; no, “it was too cold always.” The man was always out there drowning. The next phrase is parenthetical, “(Still the dead one lay moaning),” and reminds us of his continual suffering. The word “always” emphatically does not rhyme with “life,” but the slant rhyme of “moaning” and “drowning” does recur, once more clinching the connection. So too the poem returns to the startled and aggrieved voice of the drowned one himself, who goes on suffering an isolation that kills. We also recognize that the third line of the poem—“I was much further out than you thought”—is now transformed into the allegorical penultimate line—“I was much too far out all my life.”

  No one ever forgets the final declaration in this poem. It seems there is an element of confession here, as if Stevie Smith was somehow speaking both about someone else and about herself. She kept her nerve and created a fitting epitaph: “I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.”

  Tadeusz Różewicz

  * * *

  “In the Midst of Life”

  (1955)

  Tadeusz Różewicz was a poet of dark refusals, hard negations. He was a naked or impure poet (“I crystallize impure poetry,” he wrote), an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful. He scorned the idea of the poet as prophet and provoked from the margins—a stubborn outsider. He dwelled in uncertainties and doubts, in the insecure, gray areas of life, and stripped poetry down to its essentials: words alone on a page. He was bracingly clear and shunned the floridities, the grand consolations, of the traditional lyric. His characteristic free-verse style was a non-style, a zero-sum game. “I have no time for aesthetic values,” he declared. Rather, he treated modern poetry as “a battle for breath” and wrote with an anxious, prolific, offhanded urgency. He was a wary, bemused seer of nothingness. He is the Samuel Beckett of modern Polish poetry.

  Różewicz belonged to a brilliant generation of Polish poets—the half generation after Czesław Miłosz —initiated in the apocalyptic fires of history. He was a crucial part of the firmament—the “Generation of Columbuses”—that included Krzysztof Baczyński (1921–1944), Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944), and Zdzislaw Stroiński (1921–1944), all of whom died in the Warsaw Uprising, as well as Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska, who survived to become major poets. He grew up during one of the few periods of independence in Polish history and came of age during the horrific years of World War II. Poland lost six million people during the war, nearly one-fifth of its population, and all young writers felt the crushing burden of speaking for those who did not survive the German occupation. Różewicz’s own brother was murdered by the Gestapo in 1944, and he himself served in a guerilla unit of the Home Army. He felt that he had been led to slaughter and yet survived. For him, poetry—or at least one kind of poetry—was murdered during the war. The Holocaust loomed over everything.

  The war was such a traumatic event for the new generation of Polish poets that it called all moral and aesthetic values into question. Those who survived could never believe in the future again. Nor could they revert to traditional forms of poetry. They rejected the aesthetics of elaborate, ornamental, or sonorous language. No more intricate meters and rhymes, no more fancy metaphors. It was as if poetry had to be reinvented from the ground up. Różewicz fostered this distrust of rhetoric. He was among the first to catch the mood, in a stripped-down poetry of drastic simplicity. “I felt that something had forever ended for me and for mankind, something that neither religion nor science nor art had succeeded in protecting.”

  Here is a poem from 1955 that reads like a new kind of primer. It was published in the book An Open Poem (1956) and struck Polish poetry like a thunderclap:

  In the Midst of Life

  After the end of the world

  after death

  I found myself in the midst of life

  creating myself

  building life

  people animals landscapes

  * * *

  this is a table I said

  this is a table

  on the table is bread a knife

  a knife is to cut bread

  people live on bread

  * * *

  man must be loved

  I studied night and day

  what must be loved

  I answered man

  * * *

  this is a window I said

  this is a window

  beyond the window is a garden

  in the garden I see an apple tree

  the apple tree is in bloom

  the blossoms fall

  the fruits form

  ripen

  * * *

  my father picks an apple

  that man picking the apple

  is my father

  * * *

  I sat in the doorway of my house

  that old woman who

  is leading a goat by a rope

  is more necessary

  and more precious

  than the seven wonders of the world

  anyone who thinks and feels

  that she is not necessary

  is a mass-murderer

  * * *

  this is a man

  this is a tree this is bread

  * * *

  people eat to live

  I repeated to myself

  human life is important

  human life is of great import

  the value of life

  outweighs the value of all things

  created by man

  man is a great treasure

  I kept repeating stubbornly

  * * *

  this is water I said

  I stroked the waves with
my hand

  and talked to the river

  water I said

  nice water

  this is me

  * * *

  a man was talking to the water

  talking to the moon

  the flowers the rain

  talking to the earth

  the birds

  the sky

  * * *

  the sky was silent

  the earth was silent

  if he heard a voice

  flowing

  from earth water and sky

  it was the voice of another man

  (Translated by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire)

  A feeling of unreality haunts this poem. The world had come to an end, everything had seemingly died, including the speaker, and yet he somehow finds himself immersed in the flow again, trying to figure things out, creating himself, building life. Różewicz jams together on one line “people animals landscapes,” as if they all are of the same order of reality. The speaker is filled with a sense of amazement too. After all the cruelty, hatred, and destruction, simple things seem somehow to have endured, against all odds. Hence: “this is a table I said / this is a table.” He seems to be reassuring himself of the usefulness and meaning of the most ordinary things: “on the table is bread a knife / a knife is to cut bread / people live on bread.” The objective world alone seems to be real. Or is it?

  The speaker has come through a great trauma and must learn everything again. He distrusts all abstractions, all overarching concepts. He is reciting the ABCs of the Communist glorification of the common man: “man must be loved / I studied night and day.” It is as if he is trying to convince himself of something impossible to believe: “what must be loved / I answered man.” He looks up from his study: “this is a window I said / this is a window.” It is as if by saying something he can reassure himself that it exists. He is stunned that the natural world still seems to be out there: “beyond the window is a garden.” He can see an apple tree, as in the original garden. He also reassures himself that individuals have survived: “my father picks an apple / that man picking the apple / is my father.” Notice the grammatical shift from “my father” to “that man.” Here the emphasis changes from the fact that his father is picking an apple to the fact that the man picking the apple is, in fact, his father. It all has an air of utter estrangement.

  For a moment, the poem takes on an anecdotal quality: “I sat in the doorway of my house.” Like the window, the doorway is a threshold point that connects the inside to the outside, the man to the world. The most radical claim in the poem is that an old woman walking past his house with a goat “is more necessary / and more precious” than even the seven wonders of the world: “anyone who thinks and feels / that she is not necessary / is a mass-murderer.” Różewicz is clearly aware of the extreme nature of his insistent declaration. But the underlying premise doesn’t seem that outlandish—that every person truly matters, that each person must be valued, no matter how simple or ordinary, that the world has seen what happens when we dehumanize people and sacrifice them in the name of an idea. Nothing should be more valuable than a human life. What the war has taught him is that anyone who devalues ordinary individuals as somehow “unnecessary” is complicit in the machinery of mass murder.

  All the while, the speaker keeps trying to reassure himself that “human life is important” because he has seen how unimportant it really is, how easy it was to destroy, how many people had been obliterated. It had become harder and harder to believe the general truism that “man is a great treasure,” which he keeps stubbornly repeating, trying to convince himself. In the next stanza there is also a comic moment when the speaker strokes and pets the water, like an unruly or dangerous animal: “nice water,” he says reassuringly, “this is me.” But, of course, the water is indifferent and does not recognize him. The river is oblivious.

  At the end of “In the Midst of Life,” the speaker goes on talking to the elements, to the universe itself. It all seems completely natural. He doesn’t seem unhinged. But neither is he like the legendary Orpheus, who could animate the world with his music. The water, the moon, the flowers, the rain, the earth, the birds, the sky—none of them speak back to him. The natural world never answers. On the contrary, the only real possibility for communication is with another person, “the voice of another man.”

  “In the Midst of Life” is a poem of great residual bitterness and alienation. It has a desperate clarity. And what Różewicz finally seems to have come to is a carefully qualified ethical stance toward other human beings.

  Dahlia Ravikovitch

  * * *

  “On the road at night there stands the man”

  (1959)

  Dahlia Ravikovitch was one of the leading poets of the so-called Generation of the State, a group of Hebrew writers who came of age following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. She inherited her love of poetry from her father, an engineer who emigrated from Russia via China in the early 1930s. She was six years old when he was killed in a car accident, mowed over by a drunken Greek soldier serving in the British army. Soon afterward, her mother took her to live on a kibbutz without telling her that her father had died. She only learned about it two years later from another kid on the playground. The trauma of his death would be one of the defining experiences of her life—and her poetry.

  Here is an untitled poem from her first book, The Love of an Orange (1959), which was published when she was twenty-three years old:

  On the road at night there stands the man

  Who once upon a time was my father.

  And I must go down to the place where he stands

  Because I was his firstborn daughter.

  * * *

  Night after night he stands alone in his place

  And I must go down and stand in that place.

  And I wanted to ask him: Till when must I go.

  And I knew as I asked: I must always go.

  * * *

  In the place where he stands, there is a trace of danger

  Like the day he walked that road and a car ran him over.

  And that’s how I knew him and marked him to remember:

  This very man used to be my father.

  * * *

  Not one word of love does he speak to me

  Though once upon a time he was my father.

  And even though I was his firstborn daughter

  Not one word of love can he speak to me.

  (Translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld)

  Ravikovitch’s poem has a solid symmetrical structure of four quatrains. It has a cohesive surface and a clear logic. Look again at the beginning:

  On the road at night there stands the man

  Who once upon a time was my father.

  And I must go down to the place where he stands

  Because I was his firstborn daughter.

  Like her contemporary Yehuda Amichai, Ravikovitch was influenced by the English Metaphysical poets, mostly through the advocacy of T. S. Eliot, and learned the language of poetic argument from such writers as John Donne and George Herbert. Here, as in a Metaphysical poem, the language of causality operates throughout. The speaker begins by stating that she must go down to the road precisely because of her identity as an eldest daughter. The language of argumentation gives a feeling of rationality to this poem, but there is also something irrational in its very premise. After all, the lyric is driven by the speaker’s compulsive need to return to the scene of the accident, the spot where her father was killed. It is powered by an obsession, which is repeated night after night, to “go down to the place where he stands.”

  There is a fantastical quality to all of this. The poem begins at an odd remove: “On the road at night there stands the man.” The inversion puts the road first and the man second. And we don’t learn that the man was her father until the end of the second line. Indeed, the father himself becomes an imaginary figure. This seems evident in the fairy tal
e language that opens and closes the poem: “On the road at night there stands the man / Who once upon a time was my father.” This recurs as: “Not one word of love does he speak to me / Though once upon a time he was my father.” Perhaps the man was once a genuine or real father long ago, but now he has been transformed into a ghost keeping watch on the road where he was murdered. And this becomes a sentence for his daughter too, who must always return to the fateful place of the accident. Notice the lack of a question mark in what is seemingly a question: “And I wanted to ask him: Till when must I go. / And I knew as I asked: I must always go.”

  The speaker of Ravikovitch’s poem has a repetition compulsion. She cannot help herself and seems fixated on returning and marking her father’s place so that she can remember him. The site has replaced her memory. Ravikovitch’s translators note that in Hebrew the phrase “marked him to remember” evokes a passage from the Passover Haggadah, where Rabbi Judah created a mnemonic device in order to remember the ten plagues. Whenever she returns, the speaker in the poem feels a vague foreboding, a trace or fear of danger, a ghostly intimation that recalls the day that her father was simply out walking along and was suddenly killed by a car. She was never there to see it. Now she is witness to his erasure.