100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

  “Song” unfolds in a single solid block, one long sweep of lines. Like Louise Glück’s “Night Song,” this poem aspires to be a song, though it is a written lyric, one with characters and a plot, a story-poem. But whereas Glück addresses her sleeping lover, Kelly begins with an urgent address to the reader: “Listen.” This directive recurs three-fourths of the way through the poem with even greater intensity. “But listen,” the narrator declares, “here is the point.” Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner or Primo Levi’s Holocaust survivor, the speaker is collaring us, telling us something important, a story we need to listen to, a moral we need to hear. The long lines of this poem also widen the space for reverie and help create an oracular feeling. We are not listening to a realistic short story, but a visionary or prophetic text.

  “Song” narrates the story of a gang of boys who steal a little girl’s pet goat, behead it, and hang its head in a tree. They do it as a joke, just for the fun of it, but the head and the body of the goat miss each other so much that the goat’s heart is pulled from its body and flies like a bird to its head. That’s where it sings its plaintive song. The boys have walked away, thinking they have washed their hands of their gruesome prank, but instead the slaughtered goat’s head goes on singing to them for the rest of their lives.

  The poem proceeds by a series of strikingly short sentences and fragments. Many are simple and direct. The repetitions create an incantatory effect. For example: “The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks. / The head called to the body. The body to the head. / They missed each other. The missing grew large . . .” Note too how the sentences divide the lines neatly into two halves, lending a steady, even-handed rhetorical authority to this part of the primer.

  As in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room” and Stanley Kunitz’s poem “Halley’s Comet,” whenever Kelly’s poem focuses on the little girl, the writing gravitates toward a child’s vocabulary and sentence structure: “She called / To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called / And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling . . .” At one point it seems a school fundraising drive is being mentioned: “They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.” But by the end of the poem it feels as if we’ve entered an ancient mystery rite.

  Two archaic stories stand behind this poem. One concerns Orpheus, who was given his first lyre by Apollo, the Greek god of music and poetry. Orpheus sang so sweetly that he could charm wild animals and uproot trees. He descended into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, whom he tragically lost, and then vowed never to love another. Later, Thracian women tore him to pieces and flung his head into a river. But his severed head, with its lyre, floated along, still singing mournful songs until it reached the sea. In “Song,” the goat’s head is a kind of Orphic figure; its head continues singing, with a heart-wrenching sweetness, from a tree.

  The goat is also a sacrificial figure, connected to classical tragedy. The word comes from the ancient Greek tragoidia, which derives from the words tragos (meaning “goat”) and ode (meaning “song”). Tragedy means “goat-song.” It originated in ritual hymns sung during the sacrifice of a goat at Dionysian festivals. Goats were sacred to the god Dionysus, who made them his chosen victims (Euripides, The Bacchae, 405 BCE). Sacrifice was a process of identification, and the goat was the embodiment of a god. Kelly updates the tragedy for our time and makes clear that the vile crime is intended as “a silly sacrifice.” The boys had committed an act of gratuitous violence. They would, however, be punished with a never-ending song of loneliness.

  “Song” is a poem of suffering and music. It proceeds from a violent rupture and carries a sense of primal loss. We are told that the goat sang like a night bird and cried like a man struggling for his life. Think of the way the girl cares for her goat, feeding him “warm milk,” singing him songs and brushing his body, dreaming of his growth. Like a mother, she intuitively understands when he has been harmed. So too, at the close of the poem, the song is explicitly compared to “The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.” The liquid l ’s link the “low song” to the “lost boy.”

  The song of the goat is pervaded by a sense of homelessness that is buried inside each of us, a longing for a lost origin, a lost body. This haunting and sacred song may have originated in cruelty, a cruel separation, but it is not cruel, the narrator insists: “no, no, not cruel at all.” She is emphatic about what she knows; hence the quiet drumbeat of the final three declarative sentences: “This song / Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.”

  When you reread the end of the poem, notice the firm enjambment in the penultimate line (“song / is”), the triple repetition of the word “sweet,” and the insistent repetition of the letters t and s, which carry the sounds from one word and sentence to another (“This song / Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness”). The song is not bitter, as one might expect, but ever fresh. The poet did not choose the phrase “her heart” or “their hearts”; she doesn’t refer to “my heart” or “our hearts,” but instead to “the heart.” We have seen from poems by Langston Hughes, Charlotte Mew, and Czesław Miłosz how this usage suggests both the feelings for a loved one and the true core of a person. Instead of the usual locution “the heart breaks,” the poem suggests that “the heart dies,” which is more extreme and overwhelming, dire and fateful. The very human core of us dies from the pained mortal sweetness of the song.

  It is just such a poignant and sorrowful sweetness that Brigit Pegeen Kelly captures in her own beautiful poem “Song.”

  Rosanna Warren

  * * *

  “Simile”

  (1996)

  Rosanna Warren once called writing a poem “a tightrope walk over the abyss,” and that’s probably what many readers felt when they read her lyric “Simile” in The New Yorker in April 2000. I couldn’t have been the only one who opened the magazine and suddenly felt as if I were hovering over the edge of a cliff:

  Simile

  As when her friend, the crack Austrian skier, in the story

  she often told us, had to face

  his first Olympic ski jump and, from

  the starting ramp over the chute that plunged

  so vertiginously its bottom lip

  disappeared from view, gazed

  on a horizon of Alps that swam and dandled around him

  like toy boats in a bathtub, and he could not

  for all his iron determination,

  training and courage

  ungrip his fingers from the railings of the starting gate, so that

  his teammates had to join in prying

  up, finger by finger, his hands

  to free him, so

  * * *

  facing death, my

  mother gripped the bedrails but still

  stared straight ahead—and

  who was it, finally,

  who loosened

  her hands?

  “Simile” has a quiet and deceptive title. We don’t usually expect a poem titled after a figure of speech to take up the subject of death, let alone the death of the poet’s mother. That’s the plangent surprise wrapped inside this poem. The poet uses the drama of a single extended simile to get at something of critical importance. She is trying to think through and understand what happened to her mother as she was dying. The simile is the method of transport.

  Warren has recalled sitting with her mother for a day, a night, and then another day as she was dying of emphysema and pneumonia. The image of the ski jump flashed into her mind at some point as she was watching her mother’s hands gripping the bed railings. She felt that the observation was somehow off limits but several days later scribbled it into her notebook and tucked it away during that hallucinatory period after her mother’s death, the time out of time that follows an intimate passing. It sat in her notebook (and her mind) for several months. At some point,
she permitted herself to look back at the lines and fiddle with them, always troubled by a sense of violation. But the lines seemed more and more like a poem to her, and eventually she persuaded herself that the poem was not a violation but an offering.

  “Simile” is a poem that stakes everything on a single comparison. It telegraphs the fact that it is explicitly going to compare one thing to another. The essence of a simile is similitude (likeness) and unlikeness, urging a comparison. It depends on a kind of heterogeneity between the elements being compared. The simile asserts a likeness between unlike things and maintains their comparability, but it also draws attention to their differences, thus affirming a state of division.

  A heroic simile is one long extended comparison. It is frequently employed in epic poetry, where it intensifies the heroic nature of the subject. Warren is steeped in Homer and Virgil, the Greek and Latin classics, and for years she has taught the epics in translation to undergraduates. She harkens back to the way the epic simile lingers and digresses. The structure of comparison tends to suspend the action, opening an imaginative space. Thus, Homer compares a battle to a snowstorm and Virgil compares the ghosts of the dead on the shores of Lethe to a swarm of bees. Both comparisons are relevant here because Warren’s “Simile” turns out to be a poem with a vertiginous danger at its heart. It’s a short lyric with a nearly epic intention.

  “Simile” stretches a single sentence across twenty lines. It consists of two asymmetrical stanzas. The poem is structured as an argument and moves from the opening word, “As” to the pivotal word, “so.” It is frontloaded—most of the poem is dedicated to the woman’s story of her friend, an Austrian skier facing his first Olympic trial. The poet knows this story well because she has listened to it often. Not until the end of the poem, however, do we discover that the woman who told the story time and again was the poet’s mother.

  The poem focuses on a hard moment of truth. Apparently nothing in the expert skier’s long preparation has prepared him for this epic test. At the crucial moment, he freezes and can’t summon up his many years of training to overcome his fear. Warren builds an overwhelming feeling of drama through the line breaks. Line by line we go, experiencing the story of the skier who “had to face / his first Olympic ski jump,” who looks out from “the chute that plunged / so vertiginously,” who “gazed / on a horizon of Alps.” There is special intensity in giving an entire line to the phrase “training and courage.” A tiny simile is buried inside the larger one: the skier gazes out at the Alps dandling around him “like toy boats in a bathtub.” It all has an air of terrified unreality. But the mountains are not “toy boats,” and the Alps the skier is facing are enormously real. As readers, we feel the pressure as the skier’s teammates pry his hands loose finger by finger, freeing him to make the inevitable jump.

  In Warren’s poem, the crossing of stanzas is hazardous, a giant vault between subjects, almost like launching from a ski jump. The story of the skier is prophetic, it turns out, and foreshadows the real subject of the poem, which is the poet’s mother as she faces an ultimate test, gripping the handrails on her bed, holding on, staring straight ahead into the greatest void of all. She knows that all she needs to do is to let go but can’t bring herself to do it.

  The poem pivots at the end into a question, which is delivered in a series of short staccato lines—“and / who was it, finally, / who loosened / her hands?” The phrase “who was it” harkens back to the skier’s teammates who pried loose his hands, but it narrows the helper to a single unknown person. This isn’t a ski jump but a permanent leap into death, a last letting go. That’s why the word “finally” hovers fatefully at the end of a line. So too does the word “loosened.” This has the feeling of an ultimate or metaphysical question, which is open-ended: At the very end, who—what unnamed force or being—took over the poet’s mother and made her let go? What happens at the precise moment of death? These are questions that no one living has ever been able to answer.

  Frank Bidart

  * * *

  “In Memory of Joe Brainard”

  (1997)

  In Memory of Joe Brainard” is a dedicatory poem for the visual artist and poet Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of fifty-two. Frank Bidart has written three additional elegies for him: “The Yoke,” “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove,” and “A Coin for Joe, with the Image of a Horse; c. 350–325 BC.” He also writes about him at the beginning of part 3 of “The Second Hour of the Night,” where Brainard appears as a figure in a dream and says, “Can I borrow your body?”

  There was, by all accounts, a remarkable sweetness of spirit about Joe Brainard. His imaginative visual work, though close to Pop Art, can’t really be categorized. His underground classic, I Remember, part poem, part prose memoir, has a faux-naïf quality and charm. But it also provides an incisive portrait of an artistic kid growing up in Oklahoma in the forties and fifties, which he juxtaposes with his life as a young artist in New York in the sixties and seventies. John Ashbery called him “that recognizable American phenomenon, the oddball classicist.” There is an openness and spontaneity about Brainard’s work that Bidart has always envied, what he called “its utter directness, unadorned, unaffected candor,” though his own work is weighted by a different kind of guilt-stricken consciousness. It is laboriously made and remade.

  In interviews, Bidart has said that his relationship to Brainard was “more than friendship and less than a romance.” They never became lovers, though for a few years they spoke every day on the phone. Bidart’s poems about Brainard all have the wistfulness of something unrealized, perhaps unrealizable, what the Portuguese call saudade, a nostalgia not just for what was lost but also a yearning for what might have been. They are filled with longing and carry the weight of pained responsibility, which is simultaneously heavy and light. Or, as he puts it in “The Yoke,” “upon my shoulders is the yoke / that is not a yoke.”

  “In Memory of Joe Brainard” first appeared in Desire (1997):

  In Memory of Joe Brainard

  the remnant of a vast, oceanic

  bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)

  * * *

  was in you purity and

  sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN

  •

  When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies

  and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way,

  * * *

  you said It’s a code.

  * * *

  You were a code

  I yearned to decipher.—

  * * *

  In the end, the plague that full swift runs by

  took you, broke you;—

  * * *

  in the end, could not

  take you, did not break you—

  * * *

  you had somehow erased within you not only

  meanness, but anger, the desire to punish

  the universe for everything

  * * *

  not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—;

  * * *

  . . . the undecipherable

  code unbroken even as the soul

  * * *

  learns once again the body it loves and hates is

  made of earth, and will betray it.

  “In Memory of Joe Brainard” is a characteristic Bidart poem. His eccentric, highly self-conscious prosody has always served him as an expressionistic device. He treats the poem as a score to try to fasten his voice to the page. Whereas a poet like Etheridge Knight used punctuation to free his lyrics from the page, Bidart uses it to nail down his poems. The result is that a Knight poem feels oral, something to recite, while a Bidart poem feels scripted, something to read.

  Here Bidart works in irregular free-verse stanzas. He uses short lines and long ones, and he moves between italic and roman type. The punctuation is notably overdetermined. There is a sentence that stops with a period and a dash; one that pauses with a semicolon, followed by a das
h that further disrupts its flow forward; and one that lurches forward despite a dash, a semicolon, and an ellipsis in close succession. The result is a lyric that feels both urgent and interrupted. It continually hesitates in its determined desire to understand something that cannot be understood—or reconciled.

  The poem opens with a strange statement, an italicized fragment. The italic gives the diction a certain pitch, almost like a second voice more heightened than the one in roman type. The first two-line stanza begins with a lowercase letter, as if in the middle of a sentence. The stanza contains a sort of metaphysical observation interrupted by a parenthetical comment: “the remnant of a vast, oceanic / bruise (wound delivered early and long ago).” This primal wound, which somehow came with our birth, occurred so long ago that we can scarcely remember it, though it has left a bruise on each of us.

  The second stanza takes this observation and narrows it down in order to say something specific and psychological about Joe Brainard’s triumph of character—“was in you purity and / sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN.” The hyperbolic capitalization of the word “CHOSEN ” suggests that Brainard protected, nourished, and chose to maintain his purity and sweetness. The fragment ends without a period and never concludes. Bidart has said that he was trying to find words for Brainard’s “combination of wound and grace, wound and wholeness.”