Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg

First published: 1961 (in Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960)

Type of poem: Elegy

The Poem

“Kaddish” is a long elegy infused with stream of consciousness; it is divided into six parts with long poetic lines and passages of prose. The title comes from the Judaic prayer, recited in daily services, in praise of God and in memory of the dead. The term itself sets the elegiac tone of the poem, announcing principally that the poem is in memory of the poet’s mother, Naomi Ginsberg, who had died three years earlier.

The title also anticipates the poem’s first-person point of view and suggests a confessional tone. To say that the poem is confessional is to suggest that the poet directly addresses the reader (or, in this case, his mother, as a posthumous reader) without the mediation of a persona. More important than the confessional stance, which could imply simply an autobiographical approach, is that Allen Ginsberg is revealing intensely private experiences that have not only shaped his life but also formed the muse of his poetic sensibilities. Thus, he claims early in the poem that “Death is that remedy all singers dream of.” Singer here represents the poet, whose historic duty has been to sing the truth. This concept of the singer brings to mind the beginning of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.), which begins “Arma virumque cano” (I sing of arms and the man). “Kaddish” becomes a song for the dead, begun, as the first six words indicate, in present tense, but with the distance of recollection: “Strange now to think of you.”

The first section of the poem, called “Proem,” acts as a prelude for what follows in the other five sections. It has the aura of a musical overture, highlighting the themes and motifs that will come forth in their full complexities later. The first two lines announce the poem’s modus operandi, as the following words suggest: strange, think, you, eyes, walk, village, winter, night, Kaddish, blues. The poet is in a singularly peculiar state. He believes that it is strange to think of his mother while walking on a sunny day in New York City’s Greenwich Village; he has been up the night before reading the Kaddish aloud and listening to the blues. In these two images, Ginsberg unites the larger backdrops of this elegy: his Jewish heritage and the private suffering, as depicted in blues music, of living painfully and in isolation. Readers familiar with Ginsberg’s poetry will recognize that these two ideas create the foundation of his canon.

What follows is a recollection of his mother’s immigration and early life in America, ending with the invented prayer, written in prose lines, that he sings to the “Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father.” The second section, called “Narrative,” recounts his mother’s bouts with insanity, from the time the poet was twelve until her death in 1956, three years before the poem was written. The story of her paranoia ends at the moment of her final sickness and ultimate death. Infused in these final passages about her life is the poet’s sudden dramatic address to her, where he writes: “O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision.” Here Ginsberg reveals what he only implied in the poem’s first few lines—that his mother’s life, and death, constitute the source of his poetic energy.

The third section, called “Hymmnn,” is a complete and invented prayer, a return to the song motif, recited both to “He who builds Heaven in Darkness” and to the mother-muse Naomi. The fourth section, “Lament,” is a list of regrets. The poet wishes he could have understood his mother’s painful, paranoiac visions better and not have resisted the uncontrollable way that she brought pain on him and his family. The fifth, called “Litany,” reiterates the poem’s major episodes of his mother’s illnesses and relapses into an incantatory prayer which begins “O mother/ what have I left out” and ends with a list of the various “eyes” of her life, from the “eyes of Russia and the “eyes of Czechoslovakia attacked by robots” to the “eyes of lobotomy” and the “eyes of stroke.” The final section, “Fugue,” ends in an utter rending of emotion with the poet unable to articulate anything more than “Lord Lord Lord caw caw caw.”

Forms and Devices

Ginsberg’s two principal formal devices in “Kaddish” bring about the poem’s impression of sadness and remorse. The first is what could best be called stream-of-consciousness writing—that is, the unending and unyielding movement of thoughts and emotions. One can see this stream of consciousness most obviously in the poem’s punctuation, in particular the dash. The use of the dash is relentless; in each use, it announces an associative and subsequent thought or emotional condition. For example, in the second section, “Narrative,” a prose stanza reads: “Once locked herself in with razor or iodine—could hear her cough in tears at sink—Lou broke through glass greenpainted door, we pulled her out to the bedroom.”

Lou is the poet’s father. What is typical of this passage is that the dash separates images into categories that resemble the pattern in which the poet remembers them. By not relying on traditional syntactic constructions or regular sentence patterns, Ginsberg heightens the tension between memory and experience. He intensifies the severity and the unswerving nature of the narrative itself. Because he leaves out the expected punctuation of periods, for example, thoughts never end but keep moving, the way the poet himself keeps moving by walking on the streets of New York City, as announced at the beginning of the poem.

A second device is the poet’s simultaneous juxtaposition and linkage of song and prayer. Both song and prayer are expressions of celebration, be they joyous or sorrowful. If one thinks of song as the more secular and prayer as the more religious, one can see how Ginsberg uses these two forms to mediate the pathos of the poem. Ultimately, as the title of the poem predicts, prayer wins out—as the final sections of the poem give way to an outpouring of emotion and recitation of mourning.

Still, the poet is constantly trying to use the motif of song as a remedy for his grief. Thus, as he says at the beginning of section 2, images “run thru the mind—like the saxophone chorus of houses and years.” By returning to the texture and sound of blues, the poet can resist his sorrow. Yet in a moment of self-blame and self-guilt later in the same section, the poet breaks from the narrative to recite a line in Hebrew from the Kaddish itself: “Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.” Here, the recitation of the Kaddish perhaps eases his suffering; or, if not that, since the song of the poem is not the remedy he had sought, the recitation of the actual Kaddish—rather than the poem as a form of Kaddish—reminds him of his sorrow, and in that he finds a kind of solace.

Suggested Readings

Hyde, Lewis, ed. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

Miles, Barry. Ginsberg: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Portugés, Paul. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978.

Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.