100 Poems to Break Your Heart

by Edward Hirsch

  Weldon Kees

  * * *

  “Aspects of Robinson”

  (1948)

  Weldon Kees invented a self-revealing character named Robinson, a figure known by only his last name, making him nearly anonymous, and thus Kees inscribed the existential dilemmas of American life at midcentury. There are four Robinson poems in all, which date from 1944–49: “Robinson,” “Robinson at Home,” “Aspects of Robinson,” and “Relating to Robinson.” In all of them, Robinson is a figure in absentia, a middle- or upper-middle-class Everyman, a person missing from his own life.

  Kees used himself as a template for his portrait of Robinson, a self-portrait without a self. His first readers immediately noticed a connection to Robinson Crusoe. Robinson is living in Manhattan, but he’s essentially alone on a small island. Scholars have subsequently pointed out that there is an American character named Robinson in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and in Franz Kafka’s Amerika; all these Robinsons drift in and out of an alienating city. Céline’s and Kafka’s modernist Crusoe-like updates are, however, more unprincipled and degenerate than Kees’s bourgeois figure, who more closely resembles T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock.

  Here is “Aspects of Robinson”:

  Aspects of Robinson

  Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin

  Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds.

  Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door.

  The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red.

  This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson.

  * * *

  Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats

  Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down.

  Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath,

  Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour.

  —Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.

  * * *

  Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant.

  Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson

  Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday

  At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?”

  Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall.

  * * *

  Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson

  In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home;

  Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun

  Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward

  The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars.

  * * *

  Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes.

  Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,

  The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-

  Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering

  His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

  “Aspects of Robinson” gives us a figure of social banality, existential terror. Robinson is a postwar man of the world, who lives in the middle ranks. James Reidel, Kees’s assiduous biographer, suggests that Robinson’s “accouterments, pastimes, preferences, drugs, drinks, women, books, and death wish are catalogued and could almost be the precious, fragile, ironic layers that protect the anima within.”

  The poem offers us glimpses, facets, angles, perspectives—the many faces of Robinson. Kees was a cinephile and there’s a cinematic quality to the successive images of Robinson, whom we see in various urban tableaux. The poem itself unfolds in five five-line stanzas. There seems to be something a little beyond reason in the way that Kees pushes past the symmetrical quatrain. The rhythm is mostly a loose iambic pentameter. This poem concerns a figure in social situations. Kees came from Beatrice, Nebraska, and though he met many people during his years in New York, he was never entirely comfortable in the city. He took Eliot’s dim view of a spiritually bankrupt society.

  The novelist Charles Baxter has observed that “Aspects of Robinson” “is a dark cousin of a Frank O’Hara ‘I-do-this-I-do-that poem’: what’s so pleasurable in O’Hara, the flaneur walking down the street and enjoying the sunny spectacle of life, is, in Weldon Kees, drained of all pleasure, like the perceptions of a veteran from World War II, who has been traumatized in some way and can’t enjoy anything, despite the signs and symbols of prosperity and material middle-class life.” As a poem, “Aspects of Robinson” is full of lists, this-and-that, one thing after another, but it’s difficult to make the connection between experiences.

  Stanza 1, scene 1: Robinson is playing cards at the Algonquin, the famous literary hub and hotel. It’s a posh locale. But there’s no natural light, the people outside are “ghosts” blown past the door, and the taxis streak the avenues with garish colors. The city has an air of unreality, the feeling of an urban hell. It’s only a few blocks away but Robinson seems to need a taxi to get to Grand Central Station.

  Stanza 2, scene 2: Robinson has taken a trip out to Brooklyn Heights. He is standing on the roof, looking down at the river. Like figures out of Dante, the boats below “Mourn like the lost.” There’s a kind of discordance to the scene. On the one hand, we seem to be in the middle of a cocktail party. A foolish osteopath dressed for golf is talking about an old tourist trip to Russia, which would have been more remarkable in 1948 than it is now. On the other hand, Robinson is standing on the spot where someone committed suicide: “Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson.” Robinson is addressed at the end of the sentence rather than at the beginning. Indeed, his name opens and closes the first two stanzas with a kind of insistence, as if to prove he exists.

  The next three stanzas present us with a catalog of Robinson’s daily life. The tempo speeds up and the poem takes on a notational, almost ethnographic quality. It’s described in present participles, as if filmed from above: Robinson walking in Central Park, admiring a large caged animal; Robinson buying the dailies; Robinson on the phone politely accepting an invitation. Robinson sitting by himself at Longchamps, a New York restaurant whose walls were covered with versions of Degas’s paintings of the Longchamp racetrack. When a friend complained to Kees that Robinson wouldn’t be sitting alone in a fashionable restaurant staring at the wall, Kees replied that he could see the point, “even though I have empirical proof that this happens frequently enough: often you get seated at a crummy table where there is nothing else to stare at except a wall—and sometimes when very tired and too much involved with people and things, a wall is just the ticket.”

  Robinson is getting around, keeping up appearances, but in the fourth stanza, we get the dark underlying truth: “Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson / In bed with a Mrs. Morse.” Kees uses the adulterous Mrs. Morse here as a prop, a move he got from Eliot: “Has anyone ever mentioned that Eliot uses people frequently as objects?” he wondered. The people have names, but they are practically anonymous. Robinson starts the morning in floral swimming trunks, looking out at the waves, but he ends it in bars on the East Side. At home in bed, he tries to decide whether to read the fashionable historian Toynbee, who is primarily known for his twelve-volume Study of History, or simply take a luminol and drop off. Kees loved crime novels and certainly knew that luminol is often used to detect blood at crime scenes. Note how he has also been building up and pressing down on the sound of the letter l: “elephant,” “Hello,” “love,” “well,” “alone,” “Longchamps,” “luminol.” The sound helps thread together the various glimpses of Robinson, who can barely hold himself together.

  The last stanza unfolds in one long sentence fragment, which provides, as the poet Dana Gioia puts it, “an anatomy, simultaneously individual and impersonal, of contemporary alienation.”

  Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes.

  Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down,

  The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief-

  Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering

  His
sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

  The various brands—the “Glen plaid jacket,” “Scotch-grain shoes,” “oxford button-down,” and so on—have a satirical bite. The expensive watch silently winds itself, the season turns to spring, and everything is renewed, except Robinson. Hence the telling line break on the word “brief- / Case.” The poem closes with its only end-rhyme: “brief” and “leaf.”

  The existential despair that flows beneath this poem is stated outright in the last line. Everything Robinson does and wears covers up “His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.” The word “usual” is cuttingly well placed here. It suggests that Robinson is not at all unique. He’s not the only one roaming the streets and the subways, drinking in bars, traveling back and forth to a white-collar job. There are a million Robinsons out there. Weldon Kees was nearly one of them.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  * * *

  “The rites for Cousin Vit”

  (1949)

  The rites for Cousin Vit” is the sixth piece in a sequence of fifteen poems called “The Womanhood” in Gwendolyn Brooks’s second book, Annie Allen (1949), which traces the life of a young woman growing up and coming into her womanhood in a Black working-class neighborhood in Chicago during and after World War II. Annie is the unnamed, nearly absent speaker, who serves as a stand-in for Brooks herself:

  The rites for Cousin Vit

  Carried her unprotesting out the door.

  Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her,

  That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,

  The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before.

  Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,

  She rises in the sunshine. There she goes,

  Back to the bars she knew and the repose

  In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes.

  Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.

  Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,

  Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks

  Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks

  In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge

  Of happiness, haply hysterics is. Is.

  Brooks delivered her “rites” in the form of an elegiac Petrarchan sonnet, which divides into an octave (with the rhyme scheme abbacddc) and sestet (efggef ). The durable sonnet form has been transformed over the centuries. Now the scene has shifted from Italy to Chicago and the heavenly Laura has been replaced by the earthy Cousin Vit. Indeed, the sonnet form has been stretched to accommodate its fiery subject. The poem has a vernacular streak, an elliptical syntax, and a vital energy delivered in a skillfully balanced and brisk iambic pentameter.

  Brooks told the interviewer Studs Terkel that Vit was based on a friend of hers “who had the irrepressibility that seems unconfinable even in death.” Brooks took her name from the Latin word vita, meaning “life.” Vit seems larger than life, too vigorous to die. Brooks elevates her to a “cousin” and thus claims the disreputable Vit as a necessary part of her extended family. Cousin Vit is getting her last rites, but she is also getting her human rights.

  The poem begins with two sentence fragments, in which a first-person subject, an “I” or “We,” is implied but not stated. The two first lines begin emphatically with stressed past-tense verbs, the second one followed by a stressed adverb: “Cárried,” “Kícked báck.” The focus is on Vit being carried out the door in a casket. The door is a threshold, the coffin a container: “But it can’t hold her.” The second line is enjambed, as if lineation can’t hold her either; the tense immediately changes from past to present. Vit had a rebellious spirit that couldn’t survive in a world of “stuff and satin aiming to enfold her.” The words “hold her” cling tightly to “enfold her.” Vit may have been haphazard, but she wouldn’t likely be hemmed in by mere mortality.

  We notice how the unnamed narrator mutters to herself and nods her head: “Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise . . .” The critic John Gery suggests that this playful line “subverts any profound sense of grief or loss at Vit’s departure” and “undermines our ability to take her life too seriously.” But playfulness doesn’t automatically mean mockery. On the contrary, the narrator doesn’t seem to be mocking Vit’s life so much as recognizing and celebrating it. Yes, Vit may have been an outlaw, Brooks seems to suggest, shaking her head, but she was our outlaw.

  What the narrator “surmises” is that Vit “rises in the sunshine.” The next phrase has a cinematic quality: “There she goes.” Vit is off to the places she frequented. Notice how the fragment stands apart at the end of the ninth line: “Must emerge.” There’s no apparent religious context to the poem, but the down-to-earth and sensuous Vit is implicitly, metaphorically, even sinfully being compared to the risen Christ. This refers us back to the title and gives a surplus of meaning to the word “rites,” a solemn ceremony for a not very solemn person.

  The risen Vit returns to her old sketchy haunts, the bars and “love-rooms.” The way that the narrator describes Vit’s dancing is especially noteworthy (Brooks fills the line with a single clause and makes much of the s and sh sounds: “Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss”) because it connects Vit both to Eve and to the serpent. She is part of “the womanhood.” Vit drinks wine (notice how the s and sh sounds slur in “Slops the bad wine across her shantung”), which makes for a kind of secular communion, and shamelessly gossips about subjects large and small (“talks / Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework”). She is tied to the neighborhood, the community, and, instead of going quietly to the cemetery, she “walks”—notice the emphatic enjambment—“In parks or alleys.”

  In a giddy, over-the-top way Brooks presses the h sound in the last two lines: “comes haply on the verge / Of happiness, haply hysterics is.” The word “haply,” which means “perhaps,” seems cheerful in such proximity to “happiness.” But that happiness is not quite attained. There is an excessive wildness in the word “hysterics,” which points to the way that Vit lived, “on the verge,” and presumably how she died.

  The last word, “Is,” half-rhymes with “hiss,” the most disjunctive rhyme in the poem. A sentence unto itself, it abruptly cuts off the poem. “Is.” A verb alone. Being itself. Two contradictory positions are being simultaneously embraced here. On one hand, the poem is evidently an elegy, a last rite. On the other hand, it also suggests that Vit still exists—she is too unruly to be contained. As a poem, “The rites for Cousin Vit” simply refuses to accept that someone so alive could consent to the indignity of being buried, and so it becomes an elegy that denies death.

  Stevie Smith

  * * *

  “Not Waving but Drowning”

  (1953, 1957)

  All poets are misfits and oddballs, but there is something especially discomfiting and even improbable about the English poet Stevie Smith. “Who and what is Stevie Smith?” Ogden Nash asked in a Dorothy Parker–esque moment: “Is she woman? Is she myth?” Wearing a childlike pinafore and white lace stockings, telling a puzzled reporter, “I’m probably a couple of sherries below par most of the time,” chanting or singing her poems in a high, off-pitch voice at poetry gatherings in the 1960s (“She chanted her poems artfully off-key, in a beautifully flawed plainsong that suggested two kinds of auditory experience,” Seamus Heaney once said: “an embarrassed party-piece by a child halfway between giggles and tears, and a deliberate faux-naif rendition by a virtuoso”), she seems so unlikely and, in retrospect, necessary: a welcome tonic, a heartbreaking brightness we were seeking all along. We still relish this figure, who arrived like a Blakean thunderclap with all the freshness, frivolity, and forthrightness of childhood, with all the sad and caustic insight of long experience. Thinking about her elemental poems, which are so cheeky and rash, so stingingly honest, impertinent, and deathward-leaning, so filled with mordant wit and comic desperation (“learn too that being comical,” she explains in a poem about Jesus, “does not ameliorate the desperation”
), I keep wanting to adapt something Randall Jarrell once wrote about Walt Whitman. Someone might have put on her tombstone STEVIE SMITH: SHE HAD HER NERVE.

  Stevie Smith understood that a lot of people carry around a sense of sad deficiency. They pretend to fit in, though in truth they don’t feel at home in the world at all. They keep up a semblance of normalcy, but sometimes, as she said, “they get tired and the brave pretense breaks down and then they are lost.” Here is her lethal masterpiece, “Not Waving but Drowning,” which she wrote during a low ebb in April 1953. She published it a year later and then revised it as the title poem of her fifth book, Not Waving but Drowning (1957):

  Not Waving but Drowning

  Nobody heard him, the dead man,

  But still he lay moaning:

  I was much further out than you thought

  And not waving but drowning.

  * * *

  Poor chap, he always loved larking

  And now he’s dead

  It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

  They said.

  * * *

  Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

  (Still the dead one lay moaning)

  I was much too far out all my life

  And not waving but drowning.

  Smith got the idea for this twelve-line poem from a newspaper report about a man drowning. You can feel the grave submarine laughter and the plunging depths behind its fatal misunderstanding. We are meant to be disconcerted by its comic awfulness, by the spooky fact that the man in the poem is already dead but still moaning, still suffering. Will May, the editor of All the Poems of Stevie Smith, points out that in a typed draft Smith accompanied the poem with the illustration of a man being hauled from the water, but later replaced it with the purposely disjunctive drawing of a bedraggled girl. She is shown from the waist up, her wet hair hanging over her face. This is a sly, androgynous way of crossing genders, suggesting that the drowned man is also a drowned woman.