In the Nursing Home

Kenyon, Jane

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by:
Dittrich, Lisa
  • Date of entry: Oct-21-1996

Summary

A very short poem, describing the increasingly circumscribed life of a dying woman in a nursing home, a woman who "is like a horse grazing / a hill pasture that someone makes / smaller by coming every night / to pull the fences in and in." The final lines are a moving plea for God to bring the woman to a gentle death.

Commentary

The poem is like a brief prayer, and death is summoned as a merciful end.

Primary Source

Otherwise: New and Selected Poems

Publisher

Graywolf

Place Published

Saint Paul, Minn.

Edition

1996