100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Harryette Mullen’s social critique in “We Are Not Responsible” is scarily insightful, inspired, ominous, and unnerving. And it holds us responsible.

  Galway Kinnell

  * * *

  “Shelley”

  (2004)

  The poems in Galway Kinnell’s late books often press down on uncomfortable personal truths. They are gutsy, honest, discomfiting. The method tends to be stichic; the poems unspool in long, unbroken sections. You can feel the pressure of consciousness bearing down, a thirst that cannot be filled, a sense of time running out. My favorite of these guilt-ridden poems of reckoning is called simply “Shelley.” It unfolds in a single sentence that cuts across three stanzas. It manages to encapsulate a surprising amount of information in thirty-seven lines.

  Shelley

  When I was twenty the one true

  free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,

  Shelley who wrote tracts advocating

  atheism, free love, the emancipation

  of women, and the abolition of wealth and class,

  a lively version of Plato’s Symposium,

  lyrics on the bliss and brevity

  of romantic love, and complex

  poems on love’s difficulties, Shelley

  who, I learned later—perhaps

  almost too late—remarried Harriet,

  then pregnant with their second child,

  and a few months later ran off with Mary,

  already pregnant with their first, bringing

  along Mary’s stepsister Claire,

  who very likely also became his lover,

  * * *

  and in this malaise à trois, which Shelley

  said would be a “paradise of exiles,”

  they made their life, along with the spectres

  of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine,

  and of Mary’s half-sister Fanny, who, fixated

  on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits

  of adored but neglected children

  conceived almost incidentally

  in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s

  Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley

  and sent out to foster parents, Mary’s

  Clara, dead at one, her Willmouse, dead at three,

  Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely

  Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” but then

  left behind, dead at one and a half,

  and Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,

  whom Byron packed off to the convent

  at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

  * * *

  and in those days, before I knew

  any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,

  who thought he was following radiant desire.

  Kinnell recalls here that when he was twenty years old the only true “free spirit” that he knew about and looked up to was the quintessential Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the advocate of “atheism, free love, the emancipation / of women, and the abolition of wealth and class . . .” As a budding American Romantic, Kinnell was at one time obviously steeped in Shelley’s work since he encapsulates here so much of Shelley’s poetry and prose. The biographer Richard Holmes states that “Shelley’s conception of love lies at the heart of his radical views on social justice, political liberty, and poetry itself,” and that specific “conception of love” informs this poem.

  Shelley’s work has often spoken to young poets, and Kinnell certainly wasn’t the only twenty-year-old who devoured “The Necessity of Atheism” and “The Defence of Poetry,” and memorized Shelley’s short poems, and studied his graceful translation of Plato’s Symposium, and grappled with his “complex poems on love’s difficulties,” such as “Epipsychidion” (1821), which begins:

  My Song, I fear that thou wilt find but few

  Who fitly shall conceive thy reasoning,

  Of such hard matter dost thou entertain; . . .

  Kinnell’s purpose is not really to summarize Shelley’s works, which kick off the poem, but what Kinnell later learned about Shelley’s biography. That’s even more enlightening. The speaker repeatedly invokes Shelley’s name (“Shelley who . . .”) and takes what he learns personally; this information has come to him “perhaps / almost too late.” The line break forces us to hover over the word “perhaps” and then hesitate at the qualifying adverb “almost.” The recognition seems to arrive at the latest possible moment for it to still make a difference. I read this poem when I was fifty-four years old, but I wish I had found it when I was twenty-nine, Shelley’s age when he died.

  In several early, somewhat strained versions of the poem, Kinnell focused on himself and “the temporariness of the liaisons / of my youth.” He swiped at Freud as “the bookish / inexperienced patriarchal doctor of Vienna,” guiltily referred to his mother (“I took it upon myself to say goodbye / and leave her”), and swerved to Shelley only at the end of the poem. He closed by telling a small part of Shelley’s story as a way to explain his own temporary liaisons. But over the course of three or four drafts Kinnell kept expanding the part about Shelley, thus gradually reversing the focus. Shelley’s biography takes over the poem and becomes the focal point, a kind of counter–instruction manual. The poet’s own experience becomes a leitmotif, a touchstone to the poem, its secret mechanism.

  The final poem recounts the wreckages of Shelley’s life, the list of women and children that he loved and used up, discarded and destroyed, in his quest for art, his “pursuit of Eros.” It’s a capsule biography with a driving focus. The poem heats up in the second stanza, recounting what happened to the small clan in Italy, which Shelley called a “Paradise of Exiles,” a shared sense of perfection leavened with a shared feeling of alienation. At this time and place his work reached its greatest heights. But “Paradise of Exiles” gathers ironic meaning as the poem’s speaker drills down into the dire and tragic consequences for so many who were part of Shelley’s circle. Kinnell coins the phrase “malaise à trois,” a variation on the harmonious romantic and sexual relationship denoted by “ménage à trois” (meaning “household of three”) to suggest something discomfiting and unhealthy about the relationships within Shelley’s trio. But it’s Kinnell’s own discomfort that comes through in the list of the people left out of the magic circle, those who couldn’t bear to be sacrificed, the suicides, the “spectres.” The list of children’s deaths makes for harrowing reading.

  The poem ends not by romanticizing Shelley but by condemning him—and Kinnell’s younger self. Notice the emphasis on the word “thought” in the last lines: “and in those days, before I knew / any of this, I thought I followed Shelley, / who thought he was following radiant desire.” Kinnell explores the gap between what Romantically minded poets might think they are doing in the name of art and the damage they actually inflict. The gap matters. “Radiant desire” doesn’t excuse personal failings; it has consequences for everyone involved.

  Kinnell works through to the conclusion that it’s not simply the work, but the work in tandem with the life, that matters for the creative artist. He dramatically lays out an ethic for the artist’s relationship to other people. Perhaps his poem “Shelley” should be required reading for poets of all ages.

  Vijay Seshadri

  * * *

  “Aphasia”

  (2004)

  The speaker in Vijay Seshadri’s poems is a skeptic and a seeker, a wry, self-scrutinizing, keenly observant, abashed, bemused, and conflicted figure. He is prone to melancholy questions, troubled by his own thoughts, susceptible to daydreaming, determined to figure things out for himself, to sum them up, to find words for them. That gives special resonance to the poem “Aphasia.”

  Aphasia

  His signs flick off.

  His names of birds

  and his beautiful words—

  eleemosynary, fir, cinerarium, reckless—

  skip like pearls from a snapped necklace

  scattering over l
inoleum.

  * * *

  His thinking won’t

  venture out of his mouth.

  His grammar heads south.

  Pathetic his subjunctives; just as pathetic

  his mangling the emphatic enclitic

  he once was the master of.

  * * *

  Still, all in all, he has

  his inner weather of pure meaning,

  though the wind is keening

  through his Alps and his clouds hang low

  and the forecast is “Rain mixed with snow,

  heavy at times.”

  “Aphasia” is a tenderhearted poem about a person with aphasia. It’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, worried, and mournful. It’s both sharp and affectionate about someone the speaker knows well enough to love, though Seshadri carefully conceals the identity of the person he is describing. He doesn’t name him or tell us their exact relationship. Elsewhere he has commented that the poem was prompted by the incipient aphasia of an older friend whose language gifts were extraordinary. But he ended up creating a fictional character in the poem.

  Aphasia, which impacts the part of the brain responsible for language, is a medical condition that, for anyone who loves language and uses it with care, seems especially cruel, and ironic. That’s the case for the subject of this poem. He can’t retrieve the right words; his own language has turned against him. Think of the poet Jack Spicer’s extraordinary line: “My vocabulary did this to me.”

  Seshadri is a canny formalist. Here he has developed his own rhyme scheme—abbccd—in an eighteen-line poem of three symmetrical sextains, or six-line stanzas. The first and last lines of each stanza pointedly do not rhyme, and, in fact, the end-words don’t seem to have any connection at all (“off” and “linoleum,” “won’t” and “of,” “has” and “times”). The second and third lines, however, do rhyme (“birds” and “words,” “mouth” and “south,” “meaning” and “keening”), and so do the fourth and fifth lines (“recklace” and “neckless,” “pathetic” and “enclitic,” “low” and “snow”). The inside lines link up, while the outside lines are purposely discordant. The rhyme scheme echoes and enacts the condition of the man the poem is about, who is somehow intact and keeps his “pure meaning,” though he has lost his outer bearings.

  The poem begins with an extremely direct short sentence: “His signs flick off.” The man’s brain is a machine whose signals are broken. Semiotics is the science of signs, and so there is a semiotic undertone to the word “signs.” It’s as if the streetlamps have gone dark. The slang meaning of the phrase “flick off,” a vulgar insult, seems to apply here.

  The second line starts to create a portrait of someone who cherished the names of birds and savored “beautiful words.” Seshadri then gives us a list of four different kinds of words—two are exotic, two are familiar. These are words the poet seems to savor as much as his subject does, and thus each one is a sign pointing in two directions, a kind of double tell: “eleemosynary” (relating to or dependent on charity; charitable), “fir” (a kind of evergreen tree), “cinerarium” (a place or receptacle for depositing the ashes of cremated people), and “reckless” (heedless of danger or the consequences of one’s actions). The reader begins piecing together the picture of a person who is charitable but would never want to depend on charity, who loves trees and is precise about naming them, who knows what it means to find a place for the cremated ashes of the dead, and who may or may not have been heedless, but is now unhappily exposed to danger. These words come to stand for all the other words that, in Seshadri’s precise simile, “skip like pearls from a snapped necklace / scattering over linoleum.” There is a kind of violence to the image of a “snapped necklace” and the sounds of words, precious things, scattering across the floor.

  The middle stanza is the heart of the poem. The opening two lines characterize the situation. “His thinking won’t / venture out of his mouth” is an apt description of aphasia. A person with this condition may be able to think his thoughts, but he can no longer say what he thinks. Words become garbled. Notice how the sentence breaks in two and thus enacts the condition it is describing. The thought pauses or hesitates on the word “won’t” and then tumbles over. The speaker then details how the grammar “heads south.”

  There is something ruthless in the gaze of the poet; he doesn’t flinch from emphasizing and using the word “pathetic”—twice: “Pathetic his subjunctives; just as pathetic / his mangling the emphatic enclitic / he once was the master of.” The speaker and his subject share a world of linguistic reference, but one of them can no longer realize that knowledge. Being unable to control one’s subjunctives is particularly painful. This verb mood is used to suggest something hypothetical, something wished for in the future, in contrast to what is already true. The word “enclitic” is a linguistic term for a word that is pronounced with so little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word (think of the n’t in can’t). Someone who had mastered “the emphatic enclitic” (the words mimic the meaning) is someone who subtly emphasized what is almost never emphasized. This precise verbal tactician is now rendered “pathetic,” someone to be pitied, when he mangles his old linguistic trick. The sentence ends by focusing on his loss of mastery.

  The third stanza, a single flexuous sentence, structurally turns and introduces the language of argumentation, as in an English Metaphysical poem: “Still, all in all . . .” The man with aphasia is still intact as a person, he has his own “inner weather of pure meaning.” In his own mind he knows what he means. He is stalwart; he hasn’t lost himself. But things outside are different. As a poet, Seshadri seems alert to his own phrasing, and the phrase “inner weather” triggers the closing extended metaphor, or conceit, of the poem:

  though the wind is keening

  through his Alps and his clouds hang low

  and the forecast is “Rain mixed with snow,

  heavy at times.”

  The poet externalizes the idea of “inner weather” and uses the language of a weather forecast to describe the extreme peril of the situation for the man exposed by his own condition—as if he is lost in a mountainous region, his own Alps, and a hard winter is coming in.

  Mary Szybist

  * * *

  “On Wanting to Tell [ ]

  About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes”

  (2004)

  Mary Szybist’s poems often seem close to prayers. “I have always been attracted to apostrophe,” she told the Paris Review, “perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level—it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. Still, some kinds of articulations can get us closer to such connections—connections between very different consciousnesses—and I think the linguistic ranges in poetry can enable that.”

  Here is “On Wanting to Tell [ ] About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes,” which appears in her book Incarnadine (2013). It is an apostrophe, or failed apostrophe, because, as the title suggests, she very much wants to speak to a friend who turns out to have died. Yet over the course of the poem she speaks to him anyway.

  “On Wanting to Tell [ ] About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes”

  —how her loose curls float

  above each silver fish as she leans in

  to pluck its eyes—

  * * *

  You died just hours ago.

  Not suddenly, no. You’d been dying so long

  nothing looked like itself: from your window,

  fishermen swirled sequins;

  fishnets entangled the moon.

  * * *

  Now the dark rain

  looks like dark rain. Only the wine

  shimmers with candlelight. I refill the glasses

  and we raise a toast to you

  as so and so’s daughter—elfin, jittery as a sparrow—

  slides into another lap
>
  to eat another pair of slippery eyes

  with her soft fingers, fingers rosier each time,

  for being chewed a little.

  * * *

  If only I could go to you, revive you.

  You must be a little alive still.

  I’d like to put this girl in your lap.

  She’s almost feverishly warm and she weighs

  hardly anything. I want to show you how

  she relishes each eye, to show you

  her greed for them.

  * * *

  She is placing one on her tongue,

  bright as a polished coin—

  * * *

  What do they taste like? I ask.

  Twisting in my lap, she leans back

  sleepily. They taste like eyes, she says.

  “On Wanting to Tell” [ ] About a Girl Eating Fish Eyes” is an elegy that leaves out the name of the person who has died. The brackets in the title suggest that the person is now gone; a kind of blankness comes with the obliteration of death. The withholding of the name emphasizes the absence of the dead—where the deceased person ought to be, there is instead an uncomfortable space. The title marks the desire at the heart of this poem: the poet wants to tell a surprising story to a friend who is no longer there to relish it.