You Know What This Is — and don’t we all know?

This week’s poem of the week is “You Know What This Is,“ a poem referring obliquely to our tendency to fool ourselves and our need to be reminded that, most of the time, we know what is going on around us. We just don’t want to face it.

It’s a poem heavy in personification. Good old personification, the poet’s best friend. In this case, personification is used on abstract qualities: Truth, Hope.

And there’s a long history of this type of literary construction. For a very early example, look in the Old Testament, Proverbs 1, Verse 20: “Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets” (King James version).

Or skip forward a few thousand years to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19, which begins “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,” and ends “Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong. / My love shall in my verse ever live young.”

The difficulty in speaking about abstract concepts — truth, wisdom, time — is that such concepts are too big, too broad a topic. We all know what Time is, right? Or Wisdom? But we also each have our own understanding of time, of wisdom. Personification provides a way to speak more concretely and specifically about an otherwise abstract concept, or a part of it.

You Know What This Is

Every morning Truth
rises out of the steaming streets.
Under the subway
tracks are more tracks, tempting.
The dog has his bone,
shank empty of marrow.
Even hollow, bones
know they’re still good for something.
If you feel the faint
brush, swoop, the track’s certainty,
if you sense sure steps
each day, Hope just ahead,
then you know where Truth
goes, know the touch of her hand.

If you enjoyed You Know What This Is

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

I recognize that those of you reading this may not be poets. If so, just trust me when I say that this title, You Know What This Is, must, in poet’s circles, inevitably echo off the well-known poem by Philip Levine, What Work Is. What Work Is touches on the abstract values of work, art, and love, but does not personify or anthropomorphize them. It’s a powerful poem which begins:

We stand in the rain in a long line

waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

And I encourage you to read the rest of What Work Is at the Poetry Foundation.

Have a great week!