Summary:

The speaker describes cleaning out the house of a friend/relative who has recently died. She rewards each small accomplishment in her sorting through of the dead woman's possessions by eating one cookie from a tin of homemade cookies that was sent by the woman's cousin before she died. As she reaches the end of her cleaning, the speaker takes the last cookie from the tin: "I took it up / and sniffed it, and before eating it, / pressed it against my forehead, because / it seemed like the next thing to do."

View full annotation

Summary:

A very short poem, in which the speaker, sorting through old china, finds a dead friend/relative's gravy boat "with a hard, brown / drop of gravy still / on the porcelain lip." This discovery leads the speaker to truly grieve the loss of this person in a way she hadn't before.

View full annotation

Summary:

Angelou’s four stanza poem is narrated by an elderly person, probably a woman. In each of the stanzas, the proud and forthright speaker dismisses the desire to stay alive. She sizes up her circumstances pragmatically--the inconveniences and disabilities. She can no longer bother with the print that has become "too small," the food that is "too rich," the tiring concerns of her children, and, finally, the weariness of life. Each is addressed in its own stanza, but the concluding refrain is the same; she will give up reading, then eating, then listening--and then life. "Today," she says rather convincingly in her final line, "I’ll give up living."

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator is watching his "grey-haired neighbor" starting on an early-morning run "anti-clockwise around the block," trying to turn the clock backwards in pursuit of youth and health. The narrator sees this as the age-old quest for virility, satirically recalling historic figures who sought to preserve or enhance their sexual prowess. But he recognizes that these are supremely human impulses--"Don't mock, only the young don't wish to be younger." He muses that perhaps the current fads of jogging and health food are better than some of the more gruesome practices in which mankind has been known to engage.

View full annotation

Summary:

The Birth, appropriately, is the last of the three birth-cycle poems in The Annals of Chile, Muldoon's latest collection. The three together (all annotated in this database--see Sonogram and Footling) celebrate three aspects of the gestation and delivery of the poet's new daughter.

Beginning with the poet's donning a scrub suit ("lime-green scrubs"), the poem quickly explodes into a festive pyrotechnics that reminds one of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joyce: ". . . the windlass-women ply their shears / and gralloch-grub / for a footling foot, then, warming to their task, / haul into the inestimable / realm of apple-blossoms and chanterelles and damsons / and eel-spears. . . . "

It takes courage and skill to carry off such a verbal tour de force but Muldoon aptly does so, charging the poem with the newness, sheer power of wonder, and joy of loving a thing for itself that his daughter's birth means to him. This is a joyous poem that can almost visibly demonstrate to students how poetry gets its job done. It may even make more than a few try their hand.

View full annotation

Summary:

Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland's most prominent poets. He is a poet's poet, celebrating language, Irish culture and Ireland in almost every word. In "Footling", "Sonogram" (the preceding poem), and "The Birth" --all from his latest collection, The Annals of Chile--Muldoon is apparently chronicling the recent growth of his family in a poetic triptych of power and inventiveness. "Footling" describes the seeming reluctance of the poet's daughter to venture forth and breach the "great sea-wall" in order to "take a header" into the great "ground swell (italicized) of life." See this database for annotations of Sonogram and The Birth.

View full annotation

Summary:

The narrator lies in a hospital room, across the hall from the entrance to the Intensive Care Unit. He imagines what goes on beyond that door--"beep-machines, a blur / of women and men in white frocks." He wishes that he had a better, less frightening view of the world. Staring at the door, however, he sends his wish to the Intensive Care patients "that your lives be again and again / limned by dawn."

View full annotation

Summary:

Uncle Jimmie is slowly dying of cancer, "the rat that gnawed away behind his ears." Jimmie believes that cancer is part of nature and must, at some level, be accepted. At first he permits surgery--they removed his ear and cheek and upper lip--but he eventually concludes, "Stop cutting . . . let / me go to earth and snow and silver trees." However, Aunt Flo will not let him go; she reads St. Paul and prays for his recovery.

Next the surgeons remove Uncle Jimmie’s tongue (without his consent?), but his eyes "kept pleading: Stop the cutting, let me go . . . ." So then they removed his eyes. Finally, "a specialist / trimmed away one quarter of his brain ... " Jimmie is left with no memory, lying in bed among his tubes, while Auntie Flo "comes every day / to read to bandages the Word Made Flesh, / and pray, and pay the bills . . . . "

View full annotation

Summary:

This poem is in the voice of a faith healer who calls upon the reader to witness the marvels of God's healing power, a holy power that shows the terrible evil embodied in the theory of evolution: "Darwin's demon apes of hell / howl the name of blasphemy." The narrative centers on a young boy with diabetes, whose father brings him to be healed. He and his father prayed and their faith grew strong; "he threw away the pills, those ugly / relics of his doubt-- / and the boy cried out, rejoicing!"

Later, though, during the night, the boy became ill again and begged his father for the pills. But the congregation prayed and the father's faith held . . . and the boy died. The healer rejoices, though, because "he is not dead--the boy / only sleeps in the Lord." The healer believes the child died because " Darwin's great beast" rose that night and "passed his hand over the boy's / sick faith."

View full annotation

Summary:

This long poem tells a story within a story. The framing story is Charles Darwin falling asleep and thinking, "as he always does, of animals . . . . " His dream turns into the story of the Deluge and Noah and his ark. Poor Noah is a bumbling 600 year old man, who much against his own inclinations, is told by God to build the ark and, later, to stuff it with a pair of every kind of animal. Well, Noah's sons think this whole project is stupid, but they eventually go along with it.

The most difficult part was finding and capturing the animals, two of every species, including in the end, "sixteen thousand hungry birds / lusting for the eighteen hundred thousand insects, / and the twelve thousand snakes and lizards / nipping at the seven thousand mammals, / and everyone slipping and sliding around / on the sixty-four thousand worms / and the one hundred thousand spiders--." When the deluge began and the waters rose, the ark floated past all the desperate, dying people, until the last woman "holding her baby over her head" went under "and God was well pleased."

View full annotation