Last night I had the pleasure of hearing one of Marty McConnell’s newer poems, from her series-in-progress exploring fidelity. In this poem, the speaker is addressing her lover, who is leaving for a short trip. Aside from McConnell’s always-lovely image work, the poem stood out to me for how it uses structure, simile and symbol rhetorically.
In the poem, the speaker begins with a series of what are more or less literal images — (“our bodies toss toward each other in the night,” etc). Once the speaker begins to use figurative language, she makes what seem at first to be expected comparisons — “we are like our fathers,” and the symbolic image of the horses in the field: “the horses face each other in the field, daring each other to run.”
In the beginning of the poem, every sentence contains either a coordinating conjunction or dependent clause, which does several things: 1. underscores the speaker’s own ambivalence about not only what is happening, but also what it means, 2 it acts as a structural symbol for the the several dualities in the poem: the speaker’s internal struggle to identify as someone who is faithful, and two characters, who are joined together in love, but are also discrete people, and 3. creates a particular music we start to expect. When this suddenly doesn’t happen at “Do horses dare?” the sudden shift in sentence structure makes the statement stand out. The speaker then makes several such short, direct statements, mostly in the middle of the poem.
And it’s what these statements are doing that drives the poem to an unexpected place. The question, “do horses dare?” and the subsequent questions and observations (“we are not our fathers,” etc) unpack the previous section’s figurative language. The speaker disassembles her own myth-making about the relationship because though the narrative she first created will describe the relationship, she is not satisfied with what that description will allow her to make her lover’s absence mean.
She wants it to mean something more. So, she rejects the impulse toward romantic myth-making, and, under the guise of being empirical, leans toward a new set of images altogether, ones more mundane in construction, but also more capable of performing the task she wants them to: making the lover’s leaving understandable as a vehicle for her own transcendence away from the past faults hinted at in the end.
This disassembly is mirrored in the poem’s second half; for most of it, we are given a string of short declarative statements comprised of only one clause. As the poem progresses toward the end, though, the speaker begins to construct her single-clause sentences more and more like they are clauses in her compound or compund-complex sentences at the poem’s beginning. At the end, she leaves us with one final compund-complex: as the speaker’s lover’s plane is taking off, we get a sentence that syntactically and grammatically makes a pair out of the two characters again.
The poem itself, being divided into two parts, therefore has a rhetorical parallelism: first the speaker makes similes and symbols for us, then she unpacks them and ultimately creates new ones, giving the poem a feeling of winding and then unwinding, which feeling is enhanced by the dancing from complicated to simple sentences structures and then back to complicated again.
I think we are meant to know the speaker is a writer. That she makes so much of language use, and that the poem itself relies so heavily on grammar and structure to make its meaning is amplified by the image the speaker uses to generate the new myth of her relationship: that of writing a word on her foot (and here’s where I geek out even more about how the grammar and structure underscore the poem’s movement and meaning: in the most important and last of the single-clause sentences, the speaker, alone now, writes a single word on a single foot. Contrast that with the image of the two horses, who the speaker asserts cannot speak to each other.)
She is a writer, and like many of us, cannot always get out of her own head. She wants this absence to mean something more than simply an absence, and more importantly, wants it to take her somewhere new. She hints at this with: “I know what it is to be faithful.” One gets the sense that the speaker is so troubled by this leaving, and finds it so important to create a new myth about her lover’s absence because she has been unable to do so well in the past. Her solution is to write “home” on the sole (and note the obvious homophone association with soul — this reminds me of a passage in the Christian Bible, in which St. Paul argues that spiritual maturity is like having God’s law written not on tablets of stone, but on one’s heart — the speaker is coming to adulthood in this way — figuring out how to use language to change her innermost being). This final image, of a word on the bottom of a foot, paired with that of an airplane taking off, creates a mirror image, “home” coming down in a footstep, “love” going up in an airplane, home being that which grounds us, after all, and love, that which can takes us away and out of ourselves, to new selves, to new grace.