The Lovely By John Donnelle Analysis
By now, the magnitude of loss has grown almost too great to bear—the speaker has lost cities, realms, rivers, and a continent. These are literally huge things—huger than watches or keys in terms of matter alone—but the speaker is able to wave them off by claiming that “it wasn’t a disaster” to lose these, either. Whether we believe the speaker or not is subjective. Some may read the last line as jovially dismissive as the rest of the speaker’s dismissals to this point—a “whatever,” to use modern parlance. But what is strange in this tercet are the two words that the speaker has avoided mentioning: “lovely” and “miss.” Why “lovely” and not any other adjective—one that could suggest size, like “massive,” or prestige, like “central?” They may not be the prettiest examples, but they avoid emotion, for the most part. So why leave the door open for an
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emotional reading with “lovely” sticking out? Perhaps more clearly, the speaker admits emotion in saying that “I miss them,” suggesting, as Lloyd Schwartz writes, “nostalgia, the pained awareness of loss” (48). The speaker could say some rhythmically equivalent version of “They’re not here” instead, but instead chooses (or cannot help but) admit emotion; “the survival of loss is not altogether as casual as the ironic personal would have us believe,” Schwartz writes (48). This is also visible in the punctuation—the speaker barely interrupted themselves when the poem started, calmly using semicolons and periods to stake out the first stanza. But as the things lost accumulate, more and more commas appear to manage the lists—and then an exclamation point in stanza four, and the almost constant pauses (or hiccups, perhaps) of the commas become noticeable in this stanza—six in just three lines, whereas the previous stanzas had only six total. Something seems very not “casual,” indeed.
But when read for rhyme and rhythm, the stanza could tell another story altogether. This is, after all, one of the few places that the ‘A’ rhyme keeps it together—“vaster” rhymes nicely with “disaster,” save of course for that nagging extra syllable which means nothing to rhyme but does to rhythm. The simplicity of “vaster” keeps the first line in the irregular regular eleven-syllable pattern; “disaster,” similarly, keeps the last line in the same rhythm by virtue of its extra syllable. A balance is maintained between the two lines, but an unequal rhythmic weight is added via those last words. A similar troubling balance occurs in the middle line. The last ‘B’ rhyme keeps the rhyme of the ‘B’ lines together, but does so with the bulky “continent.” In fact, the bulkiness of “continent” helps contribute further to the line’s oddity, as it is the only ‘B’ line of the tercets to not be irregularly regularly regular. By this I mean that the line holds to the eleven-line, irregular regular pattern that the rest of the poem does, so that, for the first time, the middle line of a tercet is just as stable (or irregularly regular) as most of the rest of the poem’s eleven-syllable pattern. What is strange about this is that all of this happens here, right before the explosion of the final quatrain. The pattern stutters for a moment—and in so doing, falls into step. If the poem were to end here, this reading of rhythm and rhyme could be used to show how the speaker finally gets control over it all—sure, they have lost a lot, but by the end they get it together in their own, irregularly regular way. It may be “off,” but they have gained control over it—they choose when it is “off” and when it is “on.” Of course, that does not happen; the villanelle demands a quatrain complete the poem, and in a very specific, measured way.
But the poem does not—in content, rhyme, or rhythm—maintain much sense of measure, at least not in the first two lines. A poem that has tried to keep control suddenly turns toward a “you” in the first line of the quatrain, and admits “love” for that you (or at least its gestures) in the second line. If the speaker has been trying to control their losses to this point, then the “you” erupting onto the scene (via the huge dash) seems to upset the speaker’s control. Their syntax becomes tougher to parse, with an enjambed parenthetical breaking up what ends up being a badly punctuated run-on sentence. And the rhyme, as I have already noticed, slants not only in the ‘A’ rhyme (“gesture”), but the ‘B’ rhyme cannot come up with a simpler word than “evident” to finish the poem. Thus the pattern of the ‘A’ rhyme being “right/wrong” continues here with the slant, just as the ‘B’ rhyme creates the potential for a new pattern of multisyllabic rhymes (were the poem to keep spinning—but of course it does
not).
These two lines are also the final two lines of the poem that do not conform to the irregularly regular, eleven-syllable pattern the speaker creates for themselves—but there is the possibility for more here than just the accounting of syllables. The first and second lines of the quatrain scan and read as follows: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident.” The switch from a mostly iambic mode in the poem to a trochaic meter in the first line of the quatrain suggests that the speaker, too, has shifted. The content of the poem seems to align with this reading: the speaker argues that losing things is easy, but as the magnitude and meaningfulness of the lost things grows, the speaker finally gives way on the most meaningful of all—the “you.” Thus the meter switches accordingly, and even grows an extra foot—the line is twelve syllables, which could represent the speaker’s irregularity finally completing. But then the speaker realizes their error. The hexameter would suggest an addition, that something has been found. The aching loss of the “you” is mirrored in the syllable count because the next line drops both the extra foot and most of its pretense. In perfect, normal, regular iambic pentameter—my students would call this “real talk”—the speaker admits love for the “you” (in their own special way) and also some lying. What the speaker is admitting to lying to is unclear—it is probably about their idea that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” when, as they are about to tell us, it really is hard to master. Those final repeated lines vary widely again—the “disaster” line, we expect, but the mantra line does it too. It subtly shifts from “isn’t hard to master” to “not too hard to master,” which suggests that, yes, actually, it is hard to master the art of losing things. (If a test is easy, we say it “isn’t hard.” If a test is of medium difficulty, we say it is “not too hard.”) The speaker’s recapitulation of the poem’s refrains would thus seem to be a self-correction. I have always read the last two lines as the speaker berating themselves (“Write it!”) to admit that they have lost the “you,” a “you” they loved, and that there is no getting over that loss with this rationalizing mantra or the neat repetition of the villanelle. But the extra trick of the poem is that the poem does not end in normalcy—the last two lines are not in iambic pentameter, but still in the same “irregular regular” form that the speaker has been using to consistently deny their emotions or to refuse acknowledging loss. The rhyme of the final two lines is as exact as when it began. The rules have been—to an extent—followed. Thus the poem seems to suggest a “coming to terms” with the reality of loss while at the same time suggesting that nothing has changed—these lines are still the same amount of syllables. The loss is still there. There is much more grieving to do, more coming to terms with things. Thus the villanelle, in all of its irregularity, fulfills the spinning cycle it suggests—there is no moving on, just a moving.
Conclusion
When the time came to share this interpretation with my students, I led them through all of these formal flags in the poem, and—for once—everyone understood. I said, “Haven’t you—or someone you know—or you’ve seen it on television, even—haven’t you come into contact with someone trying to get over a loss and they just keep denying it?” They all had. I had, too. It was one of those moments where, as a teacher, you know you have the whole room in your hands, and you are all together, there, in that place, thinking the same things, feeling the same way. This, I think, is what a poem can be. I think my mentor was right—a poem does make me “feel” something, but I think it is more than that. A poem has the capacity for this kind of collective experience—this shared feeling about life, or some aspect of it, that the speaker professes and the reader recognizes. That feeling creates this weird and perhaps uncomfortable space of emotional response and intellectual recognition of that—so perhaps that is what my students mean when they say they have no idea what a poem “means” or that they do not “get” poems. Perhaps they do—but it is something that resonates deeper than just the “right answer,” and so it is hard to put into words. To be honest, I sometimes feel right there with them. I still have no idea if this how one should define a poem, how intellectually to put this all, but I certainly know that I felt something in that room—how, I am unsure—and that the poem made it happen.
Implications for Teaching God, how I wish that was how it went. Oh, I taught them all of this form, all right—I was so very excited to get them as excited as I was, again, by all of Bishop’s formal tricks. I thought it would be the perfect middleground between undergraduate students’ fervent desire for “the right answer” that they can commit to memory and regurgitate for full marks, and instructors’ (or, at least, my own) just as fervent desire for students to interpret, to think for themselves, to take a guess at what something means and back that up with support from the text. But once we got to the quatrain, I asked pretty much that same question—“Haven’t you felt like this, too?”—and I let it hang there in the room and I saw it on their faces—“Yes, we have”—and in that split second I could not have felt more disconnected from all of them. I had felt it, too—it was not as if I was the lone person who had not felt loss. But as an instructor, I could not feel confident enough that this hyper-textual reading was enough. Before I could stop myself, I started throwing out contextual, biographical details like the loss of Bishop’s partner so as to possibly inform “two cities” (New York and Santos) and “two rivers, a continent” (the latter, South America; the former, two rivers in Santos) for them. I was badly risking authorial intent, I knew, but I felt desperate to get their attention even though I already had it. I felt like I needed more than the text—and I gave it to them—but when they left the classroom, I felt that very same dread I had felt the first day. Without thinking, I had betrayed not only my lesson plan, but also my wider intentions for the class and my pedagogy; I wanted them to have tools they could use, not facts they could Google.
emotional reading with “lovely” sticking out? Perhaps more clearly, the speaker admits emotion in saying that “I miss them,” suggesting, as Lloyd Schwartz writes, “nostalgia, the pained awareness of loss” (48). The speaker could say some rhythmically equivalent version of “They’re not here” instead, but instead chooses (or cannot help but) admit emotion; “the survival of loss is not altogether as casual as the ironic personal would have us believe,” Schwartz writes (48). This is also visible in the punctuation—the speaker barely interrupted themselves when the poem started, calmly using semicolons and periods to stake out the first stanza. But as the things lost accumulate, more and more commas appear to manage the lists—and then an exclamation point in stanza four, and the almost constant pauses (or hiccups, perhaps) of the commas become noticeable in this stanza—six in just three lines, whereas the previous stanzas had only six total. Something seems very not “casual,” indeed.
But when read for rhyme and rhythm, the stanza could tell another story altogether. This is, after all, one of the few places that the ‘A’ rhyme keeps it together—“vaster” rhymes nicely with “disaster,” save of course for that nagging extra syllable which means nothing to rhyme but does to rhythm. The simplicity of “vaster” keeps the first line in the irregular regular eleven-syllable pattern; “disaster,” similarly, keeps the last line in the same rhythm by virtue of its extra syllable. A balance is maintained between the two lines, but an unequal rhythmic weight is added via those last words. A similar troubling balance occurs in the middle line. The last ‘B’ rhyme keeps the rhyme of the ‘B’ lines together, but does so with the bulky “continent.” In fact, the bulkiness of “continent” helps contribute further to the line’s oddity, as it is the only ‘B’ line of the tercets to not be irregularly regularly regular. By this I mean that the line holds to the eleven-line, irregular regular pattern that the rest of the poem does, so that, for the first time, the middle line of a tercet is just as stable (or irregularly regular) as most of the rest of the poem’s eleven-syllable pattern. What is strange about this is that all of this happens here, right before the explosion of the final quatrain. The pattern stutters for a moment—and in so doing, falls into step. If the poem were to end here, this reading of rhythm and rhyme could be used to show how the speaker finally gets control over it all—sure, they have lost a lot, but by the end they get it together in their own, irregularly regular way. It may be “off,” but they have gained control over it—they choose when it is “off” and when it is “on.” Of course, that does not happen; the villanelle demands a quatrain complete the poem, and in a very specific, measured way.
But the poem does not—in content, rhyme, or rhythm—maintain much sense of measure, at least not in the first two lines. A poem that has tried to keep control suddenly turns toward a “you” in the first line of the quatrain, and admits “love” for that you (or at least its gestures) in the second line. If the speaker has been trying to control their losses to this point, then the “you” erupting onto the scene (via the huge dash) seems to upset the speaker’s control. Their syntax becomes tougher to parse, with an enjambed parenthetical breaking up what ends up being a badly punctuated run-on sentence. And the rhyme, as I have already noticed, slants not only in the ‘A’ rhyme (“gesture”), but the ‘B’ rhyme cannot come up with a simpler word than “evident” to finish the poem. Thus the pattern of the ‘A’ rhyme being “right/wrong” continues here with the slant, just as the ‘B’ rhyme creates the potential for a new pattern of multisyllabic rhymes (were the poem to keep spinning—but of course it does
not).
These two lines are also the final two lines of the poem that do not conform to the irregularly regular, eleven-syllable pattern the speaker creates for themselves—but there is the possibility for more here than just the accounting of syllables. The first and second lines of the quatrain scan and read as follows: “—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident.” The switch from a mostly iambic mode in the poem to a trochaic meter in the first line of the quatrain suggests that the speaker, too, has shifted. The content of the poem seems to align with this reading: the speaker argues that losing things is easy, but as the magnitude and meaningfulness of the lost things grows, the speaker finally gives way on the most meaningful of all—the “you.” Thus the meter switches accordingly, and even grows an extra foot—the line is twelve syllables, which could represent the speaker’s irregularity finally completing. But then the speaker realizes their error. The hexameter would suggest an addition, that something has been found. The aching loss of the “you” is mirrored in the syllable count because the next line drops both the extra foot and most of its pretense. In perfect, normal, regular iambic pentameter—my students would call this “real talk”—the speaker admits love for the “you” (in their own special way) and also some lying. What the speaker is admitting to lying to is unclear—it is probably about their idea that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master” when, as they are about to tell us, it really is hard to master. Those final repeated lines vary widely again—the “disaster” line, we expect, but the mantra line does it too. It subtly shifts from “isn’t hard to master” to “not too hard to master,” which suggests that, yes, actually, it is hard to master the art of losing things. (If a test is easy, we say it “isn’t hard.” If a test is of medium difficulty, we say it is “not too hard.”) The speaker’s recapitulation of the poem’s refrains would thus seem to be a self-correction. I have always read the last two lines as the speaker berating themselves (“Write it!”) to admit that they have lost the “you,” a “you” they loved, and that there is no getting over that loss with this rationalizing mantra or the neat repetition of the villanelle. But the extra trick of the poem is that the poem does not end in normalcy—the last two lines are not in iambic pentameter, but still in the same “irregular regular” form that the speaker has been using to consistently deny their emotions or to refuse acknowledging loss. The rhyme of the final two lines is as exact as when it began. The rules have been—to an extent—followed. Thus the poem seems to suggest a “coming to terms” with the reality of loss while at the same time suggesting that nothing has changed—these lines are still the same amount of syllables. The loss is still there. There is much more grieving to do, more coming to terms with things. Thus the villanelle, in all of its irregularity, fulfills the spinning cycle it suggests—there is no moving on, just a moving.
Conclusion
When the time came to share this interpretation with my students, I led them through all of these formal flags in the poem, and—for once—everyone understood. I said, “Haven’t you—or someone you know—or you’ve seen it on television, even—haven’t you come into contact with someone trying to get over a loss and they just keep denying it?” They all had. I had, too. It was one of those moments where, as a teacher, you know you have the whole room in your hands, and you are all together, there, in that place, thinking the same things, feeling the same way. This, I think, is what a poem can be. I think my mentor was right—a poem does make me “feel” something, but I think it is more than that. A poem has the capacity for this kind of collective experience—this shared feeling about life, or some aspect of it, that the speaker professes and the reader recognizes. That feeling creates this weird and perhaps uncomfortable space of emotional response and intellectual recognition of that—so perhaps that is what my students mean when they say they have no idea what a poem “means” or that they do not “get” poems. Perhaps they do—but it is something that resonates deeper than just the “right answer,” and so it is hard to put into words. To be honest, I sometimes feel right there with them. I still have no idea if this how one should define a poem, how intellectually to put this all, but I certainly know that I felt something in that room—how, I am unsure—and that the poem made it happen.
Implications for Teaching God, how I wish that was how it went. Oh, I taught them all of this form, all right—I was so very excited to get them as excited as I was, again, by all of Bishop’s formal tricks. I thought it would be the perfect middleground between undergraduate students’ fervent desire for “the right answer” that they can commit to memory and regurgitate for full marks, and instructors’ (or, at least, my own) just as fervent desire for students to interpret, to think for themselves, to take a guess at what something means and back that up with support from the text. But once we got to the quatrain, I asked pretty much that same question—“Haven’t you felt like this, too?”—and I let it hang there in the room and I saw it on their faces—“Yes, we have”—and in that split second I could not have felt more disconnected from all of them. I had felt it, too—it was not as if I was the lone person who had not felt loss. But as an instructor, I could not feel confident enough that this hyper-textual reading was enough. Before I could stop myself, I started throwing out contextual, biographical details like the loss of Bishop’s partner so as to possibly inform “two cities” (New York and Santos) and “two rivers, a continent” (the latter, South America; the former, two rivers in Santos) for them. I was badly risking authorial intent, I knew, but I felt desperate to get their attention even though I already had it. I felt like I needed more than the text—and I gave it to them—but when they left the classroom, I felt that very same dread I had felt the first day. Without thinking, I had betrayed not only my lesson plan, but also my wider intentions for the class and my pedagogy; I wanted them to have tools they could use, not facts they could Google.