The Heart of American Poetry by Edward Hirsch

Author:Edward Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2022-02-02T18:54:57+00:00

It was winter. It got dark

early.

The brief hesitation on the word dark is disquieting. You are almost unaware of how casually the language has drifted to the child’s vocabulary: “The waiting room / was full of grown-up people.” The narrator sounds like a soon-to-be-seven-year-old when she parenthetically boasts: “(I could read).”

This newly initiated reader is riveted by the photographs and fascinated by images of “nature”: a volcano spilling over, two adventurers or hunters standing next to “a dead man slung on a pole,” and, most shockingly, babies with pointed heads “wound round and round with string” and “black, naked women with necks / wound round and round with wire / like the necks of light bulbs.” She is stunned to see the women so bound up and exposed, irremediably—horrifyingly—marked by gender. I would call her experience “uncanny,” which, as Freud described it, “is the name for everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret and has become visible.” She is glimpsing what was not intended to be seen—at least by her. It is likely that she was also embarrassed by her newly awakened sexual attraction to women’s bodies. That would be one reason that she was “too shy to stop.”

Turning away, the speaker looks at the cover of the magazine, fixing it in her mind—a marker of ordinary time, which she is about to leave. She is moving outside the yellow margins, as it were, outside the date, as she passes from external eyesight to internal vision. As in Wordsworth’s Prelude, the word Suddenly marks the crisis point in the poem, delineating a thresh­old experience.

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