Ryan Lim (14)
P4
Passing Through
- on my seventy-ninth birthday
Nobody in the widow’s household
ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke
in a fire at City Hall that gutted
the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report
or a five-year old White Male sharing my mother’s address
at the Green Street tenement in Worcester
I’d have no documentary proof
that I exist. You are the first,
my dear, to bully me
into these festive occasions.
Sometimes, you say, I wear
an abstracted look that drives you
up the wall, as though it signified
distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much
as being who I am. Maybe
it’s time for me to practice
growing old. The way I look
at it, I’m passing through a phase:
gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim
of me is always yours;
nothing is truly mine
except my name. I only
borrowed this dust.
Stanley Kunitz
The poem is about the gradual disintegration of an elderly man’s lack of identity, to the extent that the self-subversive take towards his own identity, progresses and transcends to the physical. The tone of the poem is that of a very passive nature, and the speaker as depicted in the poem is shown to be very accepting of his circumstances. The overall mood of the poem is that of a very sombre nature, yet the way in which it is presented to the reader is calm and tranquil in its gloominess.
The poem depicts two timelines; one where the speaker was a five year-old adolescent, and in the present, where is a soon-to-be-79 year-old elderly man. In the first stanza of the poem, the timeline that is set for the context of the poem is when the speaker was an adolescent, and it depicts the start of the speaker’s disintegration of his unique, individual, identity. It presents to the speaker’s feelings to the reader, as to how his unique, individual identity was removed from him at a very young age. It is implied that it began with the death of his father, as the speaker lived in “the widow’s household”, and it is suggested that the speaker’s family is in a state of emotional turmoil. It is also stated that anniversaries or celebrations dedicated to commemorate special events are obliterated from the speaker’s family or household, possible because of the demise of the speaker’s father. It is suggested that the loss of the father figure had a very impact on the family to the extent of the speaker’s mother neglecting her son and denying her son the small pleasures of life. In the line “I would not admit I cared that my friends were given parties” it shows that the speaker wishes that a party would be thrown for his birthday.
