Essay on "Jane Hirshfield's "This Morning"

Essay 5 pages (1865 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

So this last word "chuff" is perhaps the clue to the shock of the final two lines of the poem, where the poet admits "Tonight, though, everything's different. / Tonight I want wheels." The first of these two lines perhaps sums up the theme of the poem in the words "everything's different" -- that is, after all, what the poem wishes to imagine, what it would be like for a human to experience everything different about the human condition. The irony is that the four legs have been troped as an image of stability, a thing that cannot be knocked down, that carries more weight and stands more firm than a two-legged thing. But the poem's concluding line chooses to imagine, and wish for, the precise opposite of this four-legged solidity -- it chooses to imagine a mobility that has been perhaps hinted at by the word "chuff" and its implied locomotive. The poem's final line suggests that the human imagination is never satisfied even once it has inhabited an alternate possibility -- by first imagining what it would be like to have four legs as a greater source of stability and certainty, it then imagines what it would be like to have four wheels as a source of faster mobility and escape. As the poem concludes on this sudden change of image, we feel that the poet herself has developed wheels and sped off into the distance -- the change of image, however, is hinted at from the very title of the poem. It was this morning that Hirshfield wanted four legs -- it is the last two lines that employ anaphora on the word "tonight" (which chimes with "two legs" while contrasting with "this morning") in order to suggest that the one constant in human existence is the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. By the time the poem has fully explored the morning-thought of four legs, the image is inhabited, and provides a new place to be traveling away from -- so the sudden change from legs to wheels in the conclusion not only justifies the poem's abrupt ending, but also dramatizes it fully.

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