100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  At home or on the street,

  Going to bed or rising:

  Tell them to your children.

  Or may your house fall down,

  May illness make you helpless,

  And your children turn their eyes from you.

  (Translated by Jonathan Galassi)

  Levi was primarily a prose writer. A chemist by profession as well as by temperament, he likened writing poems to an irrational illness, “the fruit of emotionality,” which sometimes came over him. Yet intermittently he felt the need to write poems and often compared himself to Coleridge’s ancient mariner because of his compulsion to tell his story to everyone he met. “I had a torrent of urgent things I had to tell the civilized world,” he said. “I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore.” Though the German philosopher Theodor Adorno notoriously declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Primo Levi profoundly disagreed. “Soon after the war,” he said, “I thought that poetry was more appropriate than prose to express what I had inside of me. By saying poetry I am not thinking of lyrics. In those years I would have amended Adorno’s statement: After Auschwitz, we cannot write poems except about Auschwitz.”

  When Levi changed the title of his poem from “Psalm,” a sacred song or hymn, to “Shemà,” he also changed its emphasis. The later title refers to a specific text known as the Shemà, which is the most common Jewish prayer. Levi learned this prayer as a twelve-year-old boy studying for his bar mitzvah in Turin. It begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.” Beyond this well-known first line the Shemà is a central prayer in Jewish services, consisting of three paragraphs drawn from three different passages in the Torah.

  Because the word Shemà means “listen” or “hear,” the title of the poem also constitutes its first command. The poem starts with the word “You” and goes on to address this “you” as its intended listener. Who is this “you” who is supposed to listen? The traditional Shemà is addressed to the Jewish people, starting with Moses’s own words in the Torah: “Shemà Yisrael” (“Listen, Israel”). Levi’s Shemà identifies, in its first four-line stanza, a much broader intended audience: anyone who is safe, living in “heated houses,” where they can “come home at night to find / Hot food and friendly faces.” The stanza ends with a colon, indicating that the poem has finished specifying who should listen and that the message to them now follows.

  The longer second stanza is indented for emphasis and divided into two equal five-line parts. Both begin with the word “Consider,” the second command of the poem. The first half asks us to contemplate “if this is a man.” Notice the repetition of the word “Who” at the beginning of the next four lines. Levi purposely employs anaphora (the repetition of the same word at the beginning of a series of lines), which is one of the poetic strategies seen in the lists and catalogs of the Hebrew Bible. Rather than use punctuation to end-stop the lines, Levi enjambs them, so that the list runs together, as if to express the speaker’s outrage: “Who toils in the mud / Who knows no peace / Who fights for half a loaf / Who dies at a yes or a no.” The list creates a portrait of sorts—the verbs progress from “toil” to “know” to “fight” to “die”—which forces us to consider if “this” creature, who “toils in the mud” without rest like a driven animal, who has been reduced to starvation, and whose life hinges on the whims of others, is still a human being.

  The second half of the stanza asks us to contemplate “if this is a woman.” Rather than repeat “Who” at the start of each line, Levi paradoxically uses “With,” followed by another enjambed list, this one composed of things the woman does not have: “no hair and no name,” “no more strength,” “empty eyes and a womb as cold / As a frog in winter.” Once more the list forces us to contemplate whether “this” creature, who is all lack, all emptiness, without memory, vision, or hope for the future, is still a human being. And hauntingly, the “womb as cold / As a frog in winter” contrasts with the “heated houses” and “Hot food” of the people being addressed in the first stanza.

  The last stanza returns to the left margin and begins with the word “Ponder,” the poem’s third command. Levi’s speaker wants readers to think about the fact that a man and a woman endured circumstances so harrowing as to dehumanize them completely. The next five lines draw directly from Deuteronomy 6:6–7; these verses also make their way into the traditional Shemà:

  And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:

  And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk

  of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way,

  and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

  With the fourth command of the poem the speaker insists that we should “Carve” his words into our hearts. He intentionally uses a verb that invokes cutting into something with a sharp object to inscribe it, a potentially violent and painful marking. Levi famously told the interviewer Ferdinando Camon that the Holocaust sewed a yellow Star of David not only on his sleeve but also on his heart. Therefore, he wants everyone to bear on their very hearts the knowledge of the atrocities done to innocent people in this malignant era and to carry this knowledge wherever they go, during all times of day.

  In the final command of the poem, “Tell them to your children,” the speaker instructs readers that it is not enough to carve his words into their hearts so that they will remember the horrors of the past; additionally, they must make sure to pass on the story to future generations, to keep the memory alive. He ends the poem in a near-biblical fury with a three-line curse, which he wishes on anyone who dares to forget: “Or may your house fall down, / May illness make you helpless, / And your children turn their eyes from you.” Levi’s speaker, in this fierce warning, reminds us that if we take for granted our “heated houses” and “friendly faces,” if we forget the suffering endured by the man and the woman, this anti-Adam and anti-Eve in the hellish anti-garden of the Holocaust, we will lose our houses, our health, and our future, as our children will no longer recognize us.

  The traditional Shemà in many modern contexts has been understood as a declaration of unity or oneness, whether divine or human; conversely, Levi’s lyric manifesto meditates on the nothingness of human beings who have been reduced to something less than human. He thus changes the very direction and nature of the original prayer. In doing so, though, and by calling the poem “Shemà,” he also reminds us that that the Shemà is the prayer that is recited not only at bedtime in observant Jewish households, but also at the threshold of death, a place from which he has recently returned. This poem stands as a prayer for all those who crossed that threshold in the horrific years of the Holocaust, so that they will be remembered.

  Nzim Hikmet

  * * *

  “On Living”

  (1948)

  Nâzım Hikmet is one of the great Turkish poets of social consciousness, a figure comparable, say, to the Spanish poets Federico García Lorca and Miguel Hernández. Like them, he was a Whitmanesque poet of the empathic imagination who felt his way into the lives of other people, and who put his wild creative energies at the service of a humane vision. Hikmet was politically minded and devoted to the international left, had a Romantic inclination to utopianism, but was temperamentally allergic to authoritarian constraints on the literary imagination. He was an iconoclastic Marxist who valued people over ideology; ultimately, his political and artistic stance put him at odds with Turkish authorities.

  In January 1938, Hikmet was arrested on a trumped-up charge of inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt because military cadets were reading his poems. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. In his Memoirs, Pablo Neruda recounts Hikmet’s story of how he was treated after his arrest:

  Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nâzım was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship’s
bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength failing him. The stench made him reel. Then the thought struck him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to see me drop, they want to watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remember, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people’s battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the filth and his torturers.

  It’s no accident that Hikmet finds, through singing, the strength to frustrate his captors’ desire to destroy him. Just as an act of creative, melodic self-expression helped the poet overcome this miserable situation, a similar act, writing poetry, helped him endure years of imprisonment. His translator Mutlu Konuk points out that in prison Hikmet began to write more directly, more seriously, less topically. Over a thirteen-year period of incarceration he composed some of his greatest short lyrics as well as his long, collage-like epic poem, Human Landscapes from My Country. Here is his free-verse manual for living:

  On Living

  I

  Living is no laughing matter:

  you must live with great seriousness

  like a squirrel, for example—

  I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living,

  I mean living must be your whole life.

  Living is no laughing matter:

  you must take it seriously,

  so much so and to such a degree

  that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

  your back to the wall,

  or else in a laboratory

  in your white coat and safety glasses,

  you can die for people—

  even for people you’ve never seen,

  even though you know living

  is the most real, the most beautiful thing.

  I mean, you must take living so seriously

  that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—

  and not for your children, either,

  but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,

  because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

  II

  Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—

  which is to say we might not get up

  from the white table.

  Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad

  about going a little too soon,

  we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,

  we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,

  or still wait anxiously

  for the latest newscast . . .

  Let’s say we’re at the front—

  for something worth fighting for, say.

  There, in the first offensive, on that very day,

  we might fall on our face, dead.

  We’ll know this with a curious anger,

  but we’ll still worry ourselves to death

  about the outcome of the war, which could last years.

  Let’s say we’re in prison

  and close to fifty,

  and we have eighteen more years, say,

  before the iron doors will open.

  We’ll still live with the outside,

  with its people and animals, struggle and wind—

  I mean with the outside beyond the walls.

  I mean, however and wherever we are,

  we must live as if we will never die.

  III

  This earth will grow cold,

  a star among stars,

  and one of the smallest,

  a gilded mote on blue velvet—

  I mean this, our great earth.

  This earth will grow cold one day,

  not like a block of ice

  or a dead cloud even

  but like an empty walnut it will roll along

  in pitch-black space . . .

  You must grieve for this right now

  —you have to feel this sorrow now—

  for the world must be loved this much

  if you’re going to say “I lived” . . .

  February 1948

  (Translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

  Hikmet called poetry “the bloodiest of the arts,” by which he meant that poetry strikes at the most painful and vulnerable aspects of our lives, pierces the protective emotional layers we hide behind, and draws blood. In titling his poem “On Living” Hikmet cuts straight to the most basic question about our existence: how should we live? The poem consists of a three-part argument that attempts to answer this question and, in doing so, to persuade the reader, and the poet himself, of the rightness of his thinking, his experience. For this reason, he speaks in a tone of openhearted didacticism, as he intends for the poem to instruct.

  Part I tackles the question of how to live in the first two lines: “Living is no laughing matter: / you must live with great seriousness.” The speaker addresses a “you” in a somewhat relaxed manner, as if chatting with a close friend; however, despite this seemingly casual way of speaking, he continually hammers home the point that “you” must live “seriously.” Repeating the phrase “for example,” Hikmet outlines four scenarios of serious living. The first, amusingly, is to live “like a squirrel.” He explains this odd simile: “I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living, / I mean living must be your whole life.” Here in microcosm is his overarching argument, which seems deceptively simple yet strangely difficult to achieve, that one must live with intense commitment, with one’s full attention on living.

  The second scenario positions the reader with “hands tied behind your back, / your back to the wall,” like a prisoner about to be executed; the third locates the reader as a scientist “in a laboratory, in your white coat and safety glasses.” Hikmet’s speaker then posits a standard by which to determine whether a person, whatever their situation, indeed lives seriously: engaging in life “to such a degree / that . . . you can die for people— / even for people you’ve never seen.” Serious living thus involves solidarity with others and a willingness to die, while recognizing that life is “the most beautiful thing.” The fourth scenario envisions the reader, grown older, ready to “plant olive trees” in order to keep engaging with life, culminating in the idea that “although you fear death you don’t believe it, / because living, I mean, weighs heavier.” Part I ends on the premise that, despite humans’ awareness of their mortality, faith in the act of living must outweigh fear of death.

  It’s interesting to note how the poem mimics the poet engaged in the act of thinking. The repeated use of the qualifier “I mean” suggests that he’s refining his argument as he’s writing the poem. Varied line lengths, dropped lines, and jagged spacing across the page likewise give the impression of thinking in action. Note the expressive spacing he uses to describe the person to be executed:

  that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,

  your back to the wall,

  Like the Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, one of his models, Hikmet exploits the visual resources of typographical design throughout the poem to re-create the movement of his argument and to isolate phrases for emphasis.

  Part II begins with the line “Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—”; immediately we can see that Hikmet has changed tactics. The “I” and the “you” of Part I have become a communal “we,” and the use of “for example” to introduce a particular scenario becomes “Let’s say we’re.” After elaborating on a scenario related to illness—“which is to say we might not get up / from the white table”—the speaker concludes that nonetheless “we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told.” In other words, even as we face imminent death, we still align ourselves with life. He repeats this “Let’s say we’re . . . we’ll still” mode of argument in the second scenario: “Let’s say we�
�re at the front . . . / we’ll still worry ourselves to death / about the outcome of the war.” The final scenario of this part takes on a special significance and authority, a deeper depth charge, since it is clearly his own:

  Let’s say we’re in prison

  and close to fifty,

  and we have eighteen more years, say,

  before the iron doors will open.

  We’ll still live with the outside . . .

  Part II concludes by restating the poem’s thesis on how to live: “I mean, however and wherever we are, / we must live as if we will never die.”

  In Part III, Hikmet again changes perspective, dropping the personal pronouns and personal scenarios for a more impersonal, totalizing view of death: “This earth will grow cold.” Both scenarios in this final section imagine earth utterly devoid of life, and the poem becomes an elegy for the planet. In luminous images the speaker describes this future lifeless earth as “a gilded mote on blue velvet” and “like an empty walnut” rolling along in darkness. After acknowledging and envisioning this bleak future, he calls upon us to grieve now for the end of all life on earth. The last lines of the poem bring back the “you” and the “I” to clinch his argument about the way we should live: “for the world must be loved this much / if you’re going to say ‘I lived’ . . .” The poet who suffered years of imprisonment and torment by his captors nonetheless understood, and urgently wanted others to understand, that the way to live, the way for life to overshadow death, is to love.