TW: Depiction of infant mortality
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In “On Your Twenty-first Birthday“, Joan Austin Geier formulates a formalist poem that is heartbreaking in its content. While examining this piece, I enjoyed the formalism even through a topic that is so tragic. As I have often stated though, as freethinking and progressive as I may be in many areas, I very much like my poems to look and sound like poems, with a structure and meter that echoes a more traditional era. In that regard, Geier delivered like a champ, even though the subject of this poem gutted me.
First, I want to take a look at the form of this poem. There are 10 stanzas with 7 lines each, followed by a 5 line stanza and ending with a 4 line stanza of rhyming couplets. The lines do not match up with sentence structure, nor does every stanza contain a complete thought, but almost every line is written in iambic pentameter. That meter lends a rhythmic feel to this piece that is reminiscent of more traditional forms of poetry. In addition, there is a discernable rhyme scheme that is evident, ABABBCC. This rhyme scheme, along with the 7 line stanza and iambic pentameter is known as the “rhyme royal”, a format used by Geoffrey Chaucer.
Geier doesn’t just use a common format for this poem. She also infuses the poem with poetic devices from the beginning, with a metaphor in the first line describing her son as a “sweet bitter shadow”. Metaphor isn’t the only poetic device used. Geier also employs apostrophe as she converses with her dead son. Though part of poem is Geier lamenting his loss, she also engages in an almost direct conversation with him through lines like “I will not have you crippling / my breath”. In addition to the other poetic devices already mentioned, one of the most obvious is enjambment. Out of almost 80 lines of poetry, less than 20 of these lines are end stopped, making enjambment one of the most prevalent devices used in this poem.
Moving away from the technical aspects of the poem, I do want to engage with the topic. The idea of engaging the memory into conversation with a long dead child is crushing, but Geier does an admirable job of painting a picture of loss balanced with life. She strikes this balance as she makes comparisons between the son that she lost and his siblings, the ones that lived. References like “sibling / roots and vines”, “smiling father, brothers, sister” and “tall as your brothers” show that for this mother, though there is deep grief in this loss, that grief is balanced with the need to mother the children that are alive. She states “We / joke and pass the platters.” This is a signal that she recognizes that life does continue, even during moments of overwhelming sadness. In fact, at the end of the first stanza, a proclamation is made that there will be no succumbing to despair with a “vacant stare fingering pain”. Instead, the speaker insists that she will get up and cook “an ordinary meal” on this day that should be spent on something celebratory, like perhaps a “special pasta”.
There are a few moments when the poem dances into graphic, even macabre, territory. Images like “diseased lungs” and a “cord-strangled, prenatal suicide” depict a premature birth and its sad outcome. The narrator describes flailing and crying “Save my baby” in a way that might make a woman that has experienced childbirth cringe in sorrow. The imagery of the “small, white box” stopped my heart with sadness, much as the “bottled curio, displayed in formaldehyde / in some lab” made me cringe at the grotesque and almost glib way the death is treated.
This was a difficult poem to read because of the subject matter. However, in most other respects, I actually enjoyed the poem. I like the familiarity that this type of poem gives through its style. I appreciate a rhyme scheme, even when liberties are taken. I like to be able to look at a poem and find comfort in the patterns and predictabilities, as they make even the troubling subjects more palatable for me. Overall, I prefer the structure in this poem more than I relish the freedom of free verse. For me, the comfort of traditional poetic structure made even the tragic remembrance of the loss of a child something that could be faced. If only it were so easy to pad tragedy with familiarity to ease the pain in real life. Then again, maybe it actually is, in exactly the way that Geier shows. Wrapping up the difficult in tradition doesn’t erase the tragedy, but it does feel a little easier to manage.
I love the idea of “wrapping up the difficult in tradition”–it’s such an interesting way to frame that ways in which traume emerges in formalist poetry. I’m always struck by how many of these poems seems not only formal, but to meditate on what it means to be formal. In this case, the ritual of a dinner mirrors the ritual tradition of verse form, and she continually plays the ordinary against the extraordinary as we wonder how anything–dinner, life, a poem–can contain such despair. I also note the images of containment here–especially the grotesque image of the jar. It seems like a commentary on a poem’s ability to preserve a sadness like this, subtly asking whether the act of writing the poem itself echoes that more grotesque act of preservation.
This was such a beautiful elegy for her lost child. I agree that the traditional form of the poem gave comfort, even as the poem descended into the macabre. It does a good job of setting itself in time with the nurse not allowing the mother to see her baby, my grandmother went through the same thing in the 60s.