When I read Lucille Clifton’s “I am accused of tending to the past” I am reminded of why we as a collective humanity read poetry. Clifton distills the elements of our human condition that transcend time—like history, reproduction, care, and the power of language and punctuates these elements with inventive brevity. To me, this poem is a reckoning with how we relate to time and language (though most poems are, of sorts, I think). All in one stanza, Clifton guides us from kinds of pasts towards a singular propellant future. She frames this aim through a semi-abstract narrative thread of “accusation.”
I am fascinated by the way Clifton works with tenses in this poem. We encounter the first verb of the poem in the first line: “I am accused.” The present passive sparks a sense of detachment and establishes a position where the speaker’s agency is undermined, at first. This creates a linguistic umbrella under which the action in the poem is happening to the speaker of the poem, though this is quickly complicated.
What the speaker is accused of is not what one would typically expect to be rendered as a crime: the speaker is accused of an action of care. The phrase “of tending” uses the verb “tending” in the present participle form. The preposition “of” often links to a gerund or present participle, so in this case, “tending” functions as a gerund (a noun-like verb form), meaning the act of taking care. How could this be rendered as an offense? I believe our answer lies in the line break.
Clifton continues the sentence, but the mood shifts. The speaker develops the charges of the accusation in the subjunctive mood. “As if” repeats an implication of uncertainty and calls to claims without proof. This is a language of uncertainty and hypothesis. Here, a question is starting to bubble: who is the accuser?
Not the speaker. The answer to the accusation is a clarification of certainty in the simple past tense: “i did not.” The next sentence makes another refinement: “the past” versus “this past.” “This past” is something the speaker attends to—guilty not as charged—and is something that the poem implies to be both inherited and made, from “a monstrous unnamed baby” to a feminine ideation as “more human now.” In other words, the speaker is refuting the claim that would position them as someone in a position of more power, almost on a level of the “divine” maker or sculptor (Clifton was deeply religious), and supplants a preeminent “the past” with “this past”: referential, relational, and exacting a different kind of power.
Though this seems to be a feature of all of Clifton’s poems, capitalization becomes a distinct choice when it is sparingly employed. At the crux of this power is language and the power of naming. Clifton calls it “History” with a capital “H,” the only capitalized word in the poem, save for the title. The whole of the poem is framed under the emphasized accusation that makes the first line and title of the poem in uppercase, but when the thing becomes named, it becomes important as part of the historic and linguistic record. Earlier this semester, I learned in a history of ancient Greece course that our modern definition of history extends only in application to the written word versus a possibly illusory existence in an interstitial space. Though the action of the speaker is singular, it is crucially informed by legacy and lineage.
A concreteness emerges as this naming of History comes not from the speaker alone, but with her “mother’s itch.” I take this to mean an insistence: not the nagging for chore completion or a bad teenage attitude, but an indication that it is impossible for action to occur in a vacuum. In making this reference, Clifton’s work adopts a familial quality. There is something spurring the speaker on, something the speaker is able to understand best through a mother figure—considering her origins and birth much like we consider “history.”
The poem tells us that there is a universal need to lean on each other—”she” (the speaker of the poem, History, and humanity) is not yet strong enough to travel on her own, and it begs the question of if, will, and when? I think this poem is a refutation of the accusation stated in the first line. The poem ends with a warning—”beware”—and a simple future tense construction in “she will.” The auxiliary verb indicates that an action is going to happen at a later time, in this case, this capital figure History will travel, though its place is indeterminate.
I am left wondering, who is the warning for? Is it for the accusers? Or is it a signal and a call to action—allowing us as humans to be part of the accused. And the ending of the poem, where will she go? When will she be strong enough?
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