… all lit up this weekend.

This poem by Jane Kenyon, titled “Alone for a Week,” demonstrates the weird, affecting, tightly-packed emotional power of the short, subtly rhymed, lyric. Read the poem intact here; I pick it apart below. (For another example of the suggestive power of the well-conceived short lyric, go here.)

I washed a load of clothes
and hung them out to dry.
Then I went up to town
and busied myself all day.

[Load/clothes. Dry/day. There’s a simple, almost singsongy feel to these opening lines. But the rhyme and assonance are subtle; and perhaps the almost entirely monosyllabic words have more to do with sadness and emptiness – an inability to say much under the circumstances – than with simple songs.]

The sleeve of your best shirt
rose ceremonious
when I drove in; our night-
clothes twined and untwined in
a little gust of wind.

[Rose/drove/clothes/ceremonious: She’s working that lamenting open O. As she returns from town she looks at the clothesline on which the clothes are bouncing in the wind. The sleeve of her absent husband’s shirt rises to greet her. His best shirt; he puts on his best to greet his beloved wife. At least she sees things this way – a way of conveying how strongly she misses him, her imagination and yearning animating his clothing, willing him somehow to be there. our night- / clothes twined and untwined… A passionate couple, a passionate image. She moves from his solitary ceremonious greeting to the two of them entwined.]

For me it was getting late;
for you, where you were, not.
The harvest moon was full
but sparse clouds made its light
not quite reliable.

See the delicate scheme of almost rhymes? The way so many of these lines end on a light, tentative T? Late/not/light. Tentative T, its recurrence somehow carrying a sense of her fragility, her condition of sensitive waiting, of gingerly moving in the world, of trying to busy herself in the absence of her lover. Even the condition of being in different time zones seems to her full of pathos, mystery, and a touch of the grotesque: How can we, so close, be so astronomically apart? That full harvest moon will carry the real freight of her fright (harvest/sparse; light/quite — still working the rhyme and assonance), because here in the countryside it should cast a full rounded light, a species of reassurance, the two of them a passionate fullness. But under the clouds it’s unreliable; and so she feels uncertain in her life, separate, unsteady on her feet.

And now for her wonderful final lines, as she moves inside and tries to go to sleep.

The bed on your side seemed
as wide and flat as Kansas;
your pillow plump, cool,
and allegorical…

Allegorical! Talk about ending on a great word.

Let’s see: First off, notice all of those Ls: flat/pillow/plump/cool, and then allegorical, all plumped with Ls. The move from T to L makes all kinds of sense as she stops trying to tap out a busy moment-to-moment life and sinks into la-la land, languor, lullaby land, Lethe, the land of liquid Ls. Flat and Kansas (how long and dull the distances between us!) will do for assonance; and we have a full final rhyme, cool/allegorical. The pillow unflattened and unwarmed by his head, but so rich with his having been on it, with his not being on it, lies beside her madly transmitting meanings – madly allegorical as in say the allegory of the cave in which she subsists, darkly, her fantasy willing the cloudy inanimate world to materialize her lover…