A List of Favorite Poems
Poems and Analyses
Table of Contents
- “Buddy” by Susan de Sola
- “Hey Dwyane” by James Kimbrell
- “Spat” by Caroline Bird
- “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs” by Christian Wiman
- “The Sick Rose” by William Blake
Each poem will be followed by a short analysis.
Buddy
By Susan de Sola
Buddy had loved me long, but from afar.
We never even kissed. His job was cool,
projectionist at the makeshift movie-house
we had in our sandy, summer island village,
collecting reels by wagon dockside, barefoot
like all of us, to play them from the booth.
A self-described “kraut-mick” among the cultured
Upper West Side Jews, he’d smoke some weed
while spools unrolled, his perch a sweetened pot-
head’s den, eye level with projector-beam.
July of Fonda’s Julia; “Jason’s” screams,
a rich aroma of weed caught in his beard —
a fun ascent, to see the movies bent.
I never took his thing for me for real.
I think for Buddy stoned was steady-state
and being straight became like being high.
He said sharp things that made me laugh and wince.
The finest points of girls I knew he labeled
“bodacious tatas,” “tiny hineys” or worse.
He’d lead his blonde-haired collie up the stairs.
(Like all the dogs he’d owned he named her Christy.)
Then high up on the roof we’d sit and talk
and watch the sun spill pink across the bay.
Next spring, hearing that I was newly single,
he surprised me in my dorm, at posh Bryn Mawr.
He’d travelled all that way by motorbike.
He caused a stir. Not knowing what to do,
I took him to the cafeteria,
big Bud absurd with pint of milk and tray,
and slight young preppy fellows gathered round.
One said to me: “I like him. He reminds me
of guys I used to work with, building, summers.”
Our small buzz of celebrity. We went
to town en masse for pool and dollar beers.
Tall, side-burned Bud in checks and biker leather,
the sum and magnet of our bourgeois dread,
but there was something wholesome to him always.
He slept on my best girlfriend’s floor, without
complaint. I realize now he’d hoped for more.
I didn’t think about the miles he’d traveled,
his long-held dream deferred, or aim… busted.
Then one July he met my wilder sister,
gestured at me and said to her, “I’ve been
in love with Suze, this woman here, for years” —
and then he bedded her instead. She was
perhaps a bit more than he’d bargained for…
“I won’t touch that wild cat again,” he said.
Next day, he seemed worn-out and quite undone.
In August, he deflowered a friend of mine,
she dying to be unburdened, then ashamed
that it was Buddy — Buddy! — who’d been her first.
Then Grandma passed away, and I lost touch —
the place no longer mine. In later years,
I went back once, with husband, kids, and sank
in memory. I saw Bud there in town,
where you see everyone in local bars.
Still bearded, but now trim and clean in linen
shirt and cool white jeans, he looked quite well.
We drank some whiskey-sours; he filled me in.
He’d married and was happy, risen to
a Fire Department Captain in the city.
Like many boys, he’d dreamed of fighting fires.
“But me, I guess I never grew up,” he grinned.
Some years went by. I heard he’d died, a heedless
mix of medicine and nightly drink.
Died in his chair, still upright, not yet forty.
He’d always liked his substances. He’d claimed
that they “enhanced” his life. What had he needed
in grown-up years after the youthful weed?
A drink or two each night no matter what?
How strange that some small pill had felled my friend,
one strong enough to hoist up hose and ladder,
to carry men through flame, to breathe through smoke.
Chivalric Buddy, unafraid of fire,
yet quenched in liquor, his exit sudden, unplanned.
I recall his kindness, tilted nose, the mystery
that was his face (like many bearded men),
his soft blue eyes, the big and solid frame.
I wonder now, what was his name — his real name?
I wish that I had asked him. I would ask
him now: Buddy, tell me, what’s your name?
Analysis
“Buddy” could encapsulate many of the poetic love cliches — the unrequited, the misappropriated, the unrealized— but it is especially a story of untimely love.
Buddy never grows up. He says this about his career fighting fires, a kid’s dream, but even his name is a whimsical nickname, and a reflection of his nature. At the end of the poem when Suze says “Buddy, tell me, what’s your name?” she is not wishing to know Buddy’s name for practical use (he’s dead, therefore his name is moot) but is asking how much was left to mystery for the purpose of keeping their relationship magically illusory and without end. Keeping a possibility in existence. This is exemplified at the end when Suze proclaims, “The mystery that was his face (like many bearded men),” and, of course, in the fact that they never slept together throughout their ambiguous relationship. They were scared of disillusionment. The two knew each other for a long time, but from a very controlled perspective, just as Susan writes in her first line, “Buddy had loved me long, but from afar.” He even ended up sleeping with her sister, maybe because he believed it would be a similar experience to sleeping with Suze. He was always approaching life, but never wanted to directly face it, whether the ‘it’ was love or mortality. Was always trying to find an ethereal, transcended state of living. Through drugs, through watching movies, through fighting fires (almost touching death). Maybe he was bored, but maybe he was afraid too.
A reader should also notice that Suze never said she loved him. They both were afraid of a possible loss, so they suffered deprivation, keeping themselves apart rather than trying to date and possibly breaking apart. The poem is layered in different forms of loss (Suze’s grandmother dies, virginity is taken, and Buddy dies). But depending on the loss, it was caused either by Suze and Buddy’s lack of commitment (such as Buddy having sex with her friend, and eventually her sister, to replace her) or serves as a reminder that time does not keep moving forward for an individual, it is something continually lost (shown by the grandmother’s death).
Buddy fought fires, but he was always cool. He loved Suze but slept with her sister. His name was Buddy, what you call a friend, but this relationship was no simple friendship. He always avoided what he feared by substituting it with something more hazardous, more volatile. Buddy is an untimely love poem, a proclamation acknowledged too late, but it also shows that loss is never untimely — it’s timeless. As timeless and inconvenient as love.
The Sick Rose
By William Blake
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
Analysis
Although debated, the most obvious diagnosis for the sick rose is love sickness and a first sexual experience (deflowering). Although the other interpretation is the literal death of someone beautiful, it is more likely that Blake is referring to the death of something beautiful — purity.
The first stanza is a possible proclamation of guilt, with the worm being a phallic symbol and the rose representing female genitalia. But even though Blake thinks that taking virginity is equal to killing a woman’s purity and innocence, he still wishes to, which he feels equally guilt about. As Oscar Wilde said, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” It is this initial guilt that, in the second stanza, is forgotten in a moment of pleasure. In the second stanza, the “crimson joy” could either represent the blood after breaking the hymen or simply lust. In either interpretation, it is clear that although Blake feels ultimate pleasure in what he first sees as a corrosive action.
Of course, the poem could refer to a beautiful woman (presumably a woman, at least), described as a rose, and that death, in the middle of the night has come for her. The worm, in this case, represents decay; the crimson, anger; and the bed simply is the woman’s place of death. Relief is felt at her death because she no longer feels pain, but there is still an understandable sadness over her loss, just as in the first interpretation the sadness is over her loss of virginity.
Hey Dwayne
By James Kimbrell
--Reunion, Class of ’85
Didn’t you shoot the water tower with a dart gun?
Didn’t you join the Masons? Didn’t we walk down
the swamp road and spew pot smoke into each other’s faces
concurrent with hyper-ventilation? Didn’t I fall down
for a minute, then wake in awe of Def Leppard,
loblolly pines like compass needles fucked with
by the wind-magnet? Didn’t we go to three funerals
that Saturday? Didn’t we sit in the abandoned
tractor trailer shifting the dead gears? Didn’t they
sound like a hailstorm of horse teeth? Didn’t the well water
taste like matchheads? Wasn’t our team sponsored
by the sawed-off light of the turpentine factory?
Didn’t our coach point to the example with a busted
car antennae? Didn’t we ride your Kawasaki in the rain
all the way to Turkey Fork in December? Didn’t the gray sky
leave a skid mark on the ridgeline? Wasn’t there
supposed to be a bonfire at the bridge, but the boat-
ramp gate was welded shut, and the weedy beach
was empty, but for an x of smoldering driftwood?Analysis
“Hey Dwyane” is a poem that can be taken for face value, much like an elongated version of “We Real Cool;” as in, it’s fun until you’re done. This doesn’t mean the poem is simple though, just that it’s a poem written to remind the reader of their specific memories. It doesn’t want you to learn, it wants you to remember.
Spat
Caroline Bird
‘It’s me or the dog,’ she laughed,
though by ‘dog’ she meant ‘void’
and by ‘laughed’ I mean ‘sobbed’
and by ‘me’ she meant ‘us’
and by ‘she’ I mean ‘you’
and by ‘or’ she meant ‘and.’
‘It’s us and the void,’ you sobbed.
Analysis
Like uncomfortable silence or passive aggressiveness or knowing that the motif of red in a novel has a figurative meaning without an explicit note telling the reader this, humans have an understanding of each other unparalleled. In Stephen King’s book, The Shining he says that everyone shines a little, that empathy allows us to understand what other people are thinking, even if the real human shine is less extreme than it is in The Shining. “It’s me or the dog,” is not the real problem in this situation. It’s likely that both characters feel unvalidated and isolated from each other. Their lack of communication is a symptom of this problem, and during these weak times in communication, they have to make inferences that are either hurtful or useful in these instances. They are trying to keep something together that is unraveling as quickly as the original statement. “It’s me or the dog,” she laughed. But it’s not a joke, it’s you outside pressures coming to destroy us, it’s not an ‘or’ but an ‘and,’ it’s us rather than each individual. “It’s us and the void.”
All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
By Christian Wiman
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being …
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.
Analysis
In “All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs,” Christian Wiman asks to what degree we get a choice in what we believe. Is it in our genetics, “God whomps on like a genetic generator;” who we’ve come from, the location we’ve come from, our predispositions? Social constructs, like diets? Insecurities, like feeling old, and dying your hair or marrying a woman much younger than yourself? Is it how we age and the experiences that we have?
And how much of our worst moments, the times when we renounce self-control, is abnormal from our regular person. How much of was always silently lurking? And most importantly, how much of ourselves are composed of/constructed by the people we love.
