100 Poems to Break Your Heart Read online

  The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look

  Of gray discovery

  Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all. I’m old.

  * * *

  And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral

  I went to yesterday.

  My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,

  Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body

  Were my face and body.

  As I think of her I hear her telling me

  * * *

  How young I seem; I am exceptional;

  I think of all I have.

  But really no one is exceptional,

  No one has anything, I’m anybody,

  I stand beside my grave

  Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

  “Next Day” unfolds through ten shapely, symmetrical six-line stanzas with cuttingly abbreviated second and fifth lines, which rhyme throughout. These are practically the only rhymes until the end of the poem, and each one has its own poignancy. As the poem progresses, the reader starts to anticipate the connections. Most of them link subjects as well as sounds, almost telling a story in themselves as “wisdom” rhymes with “become,” “wish” is tied to “womanish,” and “years” to “strangers.” The word “taken” morphs into “mistaken,” “water” links to “daughter,” “maid” to “afraid,” and “me” to “discovery.” The final two rhymes bring finality: “yesterday” connects to “body” and “have” falls into “grave.”

  “Next Day” is a dramatic monologue. We hear in it the plaintive intelligence of a suburban housewife who wants to be seen and heard. Jarrell may have been making a male assumption here—that a woman can’t bear the way she has become invisible to others. The poem begins on a light note; it has a humorous detachment, a comic self-consciousness. The speaker puns on the obsessively cheerful names of household detergents (Cheer, Joy, All). She makes a sly connection between the purchased and the purchasers, the “Cornish game hens” and the “slacked or shorted, basketed, identical / Food-gathering flocks.” The poem pivots on the word “overlook” and ruefully quotes William James’s pragmatic idea that “Wisdom”—notice the emphatic line and stanza break—“Is learning what to overlook.” Thus, the aging speaker, who seems to have read James’s Principles of Psychology (volume 2, chapter 22), wryly accepts that “I am wise / If that is wisdom.” These witticisms are so characteristic of Jarrell himself that it seems he has tellingly projected and inscribed his own voice onto the voice of a woman at the supermarket, who has his own wit and knowledge. The mask slips.

  So much of this poem is about what can’t be overlooked. The speaker notices that the boy carrying groceries to her car doesn’t see her. She has now become sexually invisible. The wild feelings she once had, the accidental ecstasies she stumbled upon in her youth, seem to leave nothing behind. Her own erotic past has suddenly become remote (“It was so long ago, back in some Gay / Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know”). This throws her into a dizzying sense of abandonment and loss, and so she especially misses her daughter, who is away at school, her sons, who are also away at school, and her husband, who is away at work. She is a person of privilege—she has a maid, after all, and a dog for company—but that doesn’t rescue her from the brutalities of aging. The speaker wants desperately to be seen; though she is gendered as an ordinary woman, the wistfulness seems to be Jarrell’s own:

  As I look at my life,

  I am afraid

  Only that it will change, as I am changing:

  * * *

  I am afraid, this morning, of my face.

  The poem hits a higher pitch in the final two stanzas. It takes on an anecdotal quality as the speaker suddenly remembers going to her friend’s funeral the day before. Immediately the title, “Next Day,” comes into focus. The ruthless insight and the depth of ordinary courage it takes for the speaker to recognize herself in her dead friend, as her dead friend, to confront her own bewildering and commonplace fate, almost seem heroic. The poetic technique operates in such a seamless and unassuming way that it’s easy to overlook: look at how the rhetorical argument relentlessly pushes the voice to its heart-rending conclusion, as in a Shakespeare sonnet (“And yet”; “But really”), and note the timely, ferocious progression of triple adjectives in the fourth line (“Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body”). It’s worth pausing to unpack the indignity implied in these three successive adjectives. First, the friend was undressed, or stripped down (we recall how earlier in the poem the speaker has remarked, “How often they have undressed me, / The eyes of strangers!”). But instead of being the object of a fantasy, she has now been operated-on, that is, subjected to a failed surgery or surgeries. Finally, she is dressed again, though now as a corpse. It’s hard to ignore the implication that food is also dressed—that is, cleaned and prepared. This secondary meaning seems to apply since the speaker in the supermarket has stated outright that for so many years she “was good enough to eat.” Jaunty surface meets sinister undertow as the speaker equates her friend’s dead body to herself. So too the rhymes in the last stanza of “Next Day” act as a ghostly haunting of sounds; it’s not just the irrefutable connection of “have” and “grave,” but also the identical rhyme on the word “exceptional” and the off-rhyme on the words “anybody” and “solitary” that drive home the inexorable truth: “no one is exceptional, / No one has anything, I’m anybody.”

  It was characteristic of Jarrell to put his technique in the service of what he took to be an ordinary woman’s voice. Jarrell’s poem is not authentic or convincing because he learned about and understood female experience per se, but because he credited himself with what he called “a semi-feminine mind,” and he mined his indeterminate sexual identity to project himself into another skin, another body, another self. He used all the imagination and technique available to him to propel himself across a divide, which is to say that he both recognized and displaced himself in the guise of an unnamed woman coming home from the supermarket.

  J. V. Cunningham

  * * *

  “Montana Fifty Years Ago”

  (1967)

  J. V. Cunningham was a poet and scholar of scrupulous exactitude. He had a rigorous intelligence, a full command of the classical tradition, and a dry, demanding sense of poetic form. He was committed to what he called “the bare plain style,” poetry freed from ornamentation, and prized clarity as well as brevity. “The mature style is what we could call the plain style if we met it in the Renaissance,” his mentor Yvor Winters wrote in “The Plain Style Reborn” (1967). Cunningham’s poems are quietly moving too. Like Ben Jonson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, two of his primary models, or Edgar Bowers and Thom Gunn, two of his contemporaries, he often generalized the situations in his poems, though the feeling is personal and somehow breaks through. As Gunn said about Fulke Greville, “the generality is a summation of experience and not an evasion of it.”

  Here is “Montana Fifty Years Ago,” a poem of heartache that concludes Poems and Epigrams (1960–1970). It is written in blank verse so skillfully varied that it sounds like natural speech. There is a deft syncopation between the sentences and the lines.

  Montana Fifty Years Ago

  Gaunt kept house with her child for the old man,

  Met at the train, dust-driven as the sink

  She came to, the child white as the alkali.

  To the West distant mountains, the Big Lake

  To the Northeast. Dead trees and almost dead

  In the front yard, the front door locked and nailed,

  A handpump in the sink. Outside, a land

  Of gophers, cottontails, and rattlesnakes,

  In good years of alfalfa, oats, and wheat.

  Root cellar, blacksmith shop, milk house, and barn,

  Granary, corral. An old World Almanac

  To thumb at night, the child coughing, the lamp smoked,

  The chores done. So he came to her one night,

 
To the front room, now bedroom, and moved in.

  Nothing was said, nothing was ever said.

  And then the child died and she disappeared.

  This was Montana fifty years ago.

  Cunningham’s bare-bones style was well-suited to his evocation of Montana in the past. He told an interviewer that the poem refers to the dry-land ranch where he spent each summer, growing up in Montana. “The poem ‘Montana Fifty Years Ago’ is an attempt to summarize not so much my own experience, but to put into form the kind of situation out at the ranch.”

  “Montana Fifty Years Ago” is a companion to his poem “Montana Pastoral,” which also derives from those summers on the ranch, which, he took care to note, was thirty-six miles from Billings, over the rimrock in the Wheat Basin Country. Both poems are rugged western pastorals—rural, spare, unsentimental. The speaker is at a remove from the people he is writing about. Cunningham wrote “Montana Fifty Years Ago” in 1967, which sets the scene in 1917, part of a remote western world, far from the raging war. He was six years old at the time of the poem’s events. He was fifty-six and teaching Renaissance literature at Brandeis University when he wrote it.

  The poem comes full circle. It begins by naming a state (Montana) and a time (Fifty Years Ago), which was far off but still possible to remember, and concludes by summarizing it (“This was Montana fifty years ago”). It dramatizes a situation that stands for the whole. The very name of the woman in the poem, Gaunt, marks her as a type. We understand immediately that she embodies the characteristics of gauntness. One thinks of her as extremely lean and angular, probably haggard, like Dorothea Lange’s photograph of a migrant mother. According to The American Heritage Dictionary, the secondary meaning of the word gaunt is “bleak or desolate,” and that applies here too. Gauntness implies privation, being too thin, the opposite of maternal fecundity. It evokes an era.

  The opening line sets the scene with a chiseled and concise sentence: “Gaunt kept house with her child for the old man.” The relationship is transactional. The woman and her unnamed child are compared to their destination. She is “dust-driven as the sink / She came to,” the innocent child “white as the alkali.” This strange chemical comparison suggests that the child is like white alkali, a mixture of salts that forms a white crust on the soil. Since the mother is like the sink, it may be worth mentioning that an alkali can also be defined as a base that dissolves in water. The old man who owns the place is never named. We never learn the name or even the gender of the child, who is thus something of a generic figure. The poem seems to be saying: these are the sorts of people who lived there then, this was the place.

  Cunningham characterizes a rugged world. What the land was like, what grew there, what stood on the property. Much of the poem turns out to be a series of short catalogs. He renders in sentence fragments a world of tasks, hard work, open country. By the end of the day, there is nothing to do but thumb a dated World Almanac. The chores are done, the child sick. The poem employs a highly condensed plot: a nearly anonymous woman with a child arrived to do the cooking and cleaning for an old man who simply moved into her room, which therefore became their bedroom. What was their relationship? Was it anything more than a convenience, two people huddled for comfort in a lonely place?

  We have no idea how these people felt about their situation because ev-erything was unspoken between them. The poem concludes with three one-line sentences, each neatly balanced and end-stopped, each a declaration unto itself.

  Nothing was said, nothing was ever said.

  And then the child died and she disappeared.

  This was Montana fifty years ago.

  Why is this reticence so heartbreaking? Because no one ever spoke of what was happening to them; because a child died and the mother disappeared, without saying a word, and was never heard from again; because an old man was deserted and once more left to endure an unspeakable loneliness. It’s not just the suffering of these three unnamed people we are talking about, who fall outside of recorded history; it’s all of Montana in 1917, a bleak and beautiful western world, now forever gone but captured in a short poem.

  W. S. Merwin

  * * *

  “For the Anniversary of My Death”

  (1967)

  W. S. Merwin’s work reached one of its peaks in his bleak, apocalyptic book The Lice (1967). The ruthless authenticity, the stark, stripped-down style and prophetic feeling, the utter seriousness and desperate sense of a coming extinction, what one critic calls its “cool radiance,” enlarged the sense of what poetry can do in the world, which seemed as if it were coming to end. The book has the feeling of last things. “If I were not human I would not be ashamed of anything,” Merwin confesses (“Avoiding News by the River”); “I who have always believed too much in words” (“Fly”).

  The Lice was also the first full-length book in which Merwin dropped punctuation entirely. Like the French poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Follain, whom he translated, he would never pick it up again in poetry. He had come to believe that poetry, more so than prose, has a strong relationship to the spoken word. Using punctuation felt like the nailing the words to the page. Rather, he sought the movement and lightness of the spoken word. So too he had found a way to make silence an integral part of his music.

  There was also a new metaphysical dimension to some of his poems, such as “For the Anniversary of My Death”:

  For the Anniversary of My Death

  Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

  When the last fires will wave to me

  And the silence will set out

  Tireless traveler

  Like the beam of a lightless star

  * * *

  Then I will no longer

  Find myself in life as in a strange garment

  Surprised at the earth

  And the love of one woman

  And the shamelessness of men

  As today writing after three days of rain

  Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

  And bowing not knowing to what

  “For the Anniversary of My Death,” which is carefully divided into two parts, like a theorem in algebra, has a clear and clever premise, a universal recognition. Every year we pass our death-day, just as we do our birthday, but without knowing it. We can never mark this fateful day in advance. An anniversary is usually something we celebrate, but this one goes unnoticed. In fact, it will be unknown to us until the very end. Realizing this, we must now approach every day with a sense of unease and awe.

  Merwin’s poem of self-mourning begins with this recognition (“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day”) and immediately moves into the realm of farewell on a cosmic scale. The images are elemental, the abstractions immense: the “last fires” that wave, the silence that sets out like the beam of a remote star. A “lightless star,” an apparent oxymoron, is a dead star. Silence is characterized as a “Tireless traveler.” We usually associate tirelessness with human beings who work energetically, continuously. But here silence is the one who is indefatigable. The end of everything is undeniable. The universe is filled with an eternal chill.

  An intricate web of sound operates throughout the first stanza. There is also a stateliness to the rhythm. Listen to the alliterations: “will wave,” “silence will set,” “Tireless traveler.” The vowel sounds, especially the long a’s and i’s, carefully echo each other in these five end-stopped lines. Merwin is known for his piercingly plain style, but the thickness of sounds here seems more reminiscent of Tennyson or Dylan Thomas.

  “For the Anniversary of My Death” is structured in such a way that it reads like a thirteen-line sonnet, what the poet John Hollander deemed “thirteeners.” The first five-line stanza characterizes what happens every year. The imagery, though, places us outside of time, in the realm of eternity. There is an enormous leap, a decisive break, between the two parts of the poem, like a space for meditation. The second eight-line stanza shifts the poem on the wo
rd “Then.” This word is consequential. The poem now focuses on the period after the speaker will have died. Contemplating his own death, he finds himself cherishing the earth as he knows it, enumerating what will be lost. He characterizes life as something he found himself wearing like “a strange garment,” which can—which must—be taken off. Recall that César Vallejo described how his upper arm bones could be put on and taken off like a shirt or a jacket—a strange garment—in “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone.” The physical or bodily recognition of death estranges experience; hence, “Then I will no longer / Find myself in life as in a strange garment / Surprised . . .” The act of being surprised takes over the speaker—and the poem.

  Merwin specifically contrasts the “love of one woman” to the larger “shamelessness of men.” He notes the singing of the wren, the ongoing falling of the rain. Indeed, the song of the wren begins at the precise moment that the rain ceases. Like John Keats in his last desperate fragment, “This living hand,” Merwin now brings the writing of poetry itself into the poem with sudden immediacy: “As today writing after three days of rain.” It is as if the ceasing of the rain finally enabled him to contemplate the hard truth of his own mortality. It focuses attention on the moment, and he becomes fully present to himself: “As today writing after three days of rain / Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease / And bowing not knowing to what.” In the end, everything will be lost. This reality heightens the ways in which the earth continues to astonish us.

  “For the Anniversary of My Death” is an elemental poem. There is a sense of inscrutability in the way it ends. The closure is open-ended since Merwin finds himself unexpectedly bowing, out of respect, as if in prayer, to some greater unnamed force, some large and unknown mystery.