"Ashes" by Philip Levine

First published: 1979, in Ashes:Poems New and Old

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“Ashes” is a free-verse, single-stanza poem that is forty-one lines long. The title points to what a life comes to upon death, and it immediately establishes a mood of fatalism. Ashes are the result of fire, and fire in this poem is a metaphor for life’s toil and labor. The poem is written in the first person, and the poet addresses the reader as early as the fourteenth line, telling the reader that “You can howl your name,” but the wind will turn it to dust. The direct address links the poet to his reader.

“Ashes” begins at dusk with the poet musing, the classic pose for lyric poetry. Philip Levine sees smoke rising from a field of cotton, from which the workers have already returned several hours earlier. The image of the smoke is the point of departure in the poem—and will become the point of closure as well—as is the bus that passes by the poet and carries the blue-collar laborers home.

While the poet watches the bus pass, he wonders about the workers’ fate, the fate of the poor who make their living in the only back-breaking jobs they can get. He wonders about the children who die every day, about the women who curse the very hours of their lives, and about the men who “bow/ to earn our scraps.” By saying “our,” Levine links himself to the men, suggesting that he, too, in writing the poem, is a laborer, a recorder of their experience, and thus, vicariously at least, experiences their suffering. Yet he only wonders about these people, and in that pose he exposes the differences between the poet and those who inspire him. The answer he provides about their life, which provides the poem’s title, is cryptic only in the sense that it is metaphoric: “with fire there is smoke, and after, ashes.” That, Levine suggests, is the fate of all people.

Next the poem imagines the darkness coming down for the night, but it is a night representative of all nights. The people go to sleep tired, and when they sleep they dream “of sleep/ without end.” That state is fleeting, however, as morning comes in the next line like a blood stain on the sky; the workers are up dressing in clothes that are still warm, though damp, from the day before.

Meanwhile, as the workers head back to the fields, the poet is sleeping. This is a more dramatic difference between them, causing Levine to ask of the reader, “Do you want the earth to be heaven?” The answer given is a call to pray for “all you’ll/ never be.” Here the poem returns to the imagery of its beginning. In a list of options of what one may never be—“a drop of sea water” or a “small hurtling flame”—is the poem’s final image of a “fine flake of dust that moves/ at evening like smoke at great height/ above the earth and sees it all.” The image of smoke here represents the vision of the poet as well as the inspiration for poetic vision.

Forms and Devices

Levine has always been attracted to images of fire and smoke, and this poem typifies that interest. His concern, ultimately, is a consideration of living and dying, with which poetry finally must deal. In this sense, the poem’s imagery is imbued with an elegiac tone as well as a defiant one.

Levine connects these tones by linking violent and tranquil images—that is to say, he finds an image’s internal sense of paradox. For example, fields of cotton are often thought of as a quiet, almost pastoral image. Cotton-picking is hard, back-breaking work, but here the work is made harder because the fields are burning, an image that signifies the life of the laborer. Second, the earth is often thought of as Mother Earth, but it is anything but motherly in this poem. The poet is affected by this contrast. He questions why the earth would let children die and women curse and why it will eat lives the way people “eat/ an apple, meat, skin, core, seeds.” He questions why people must tear a living “from the silent earth.” The traditional image of the earth as benign and generous has been transformed into an image of affliction and distress.

In addition, Levine finds a paradox in the light. Traditionally, first light is a romantic image, going back to the Greek poet Homer’s epithet of “rosy-fingered dawn.” Dawn is a beginning, a new start. Yet in “Ashes,” the first light “bloodies the sky,” and beneath it the cotton-pickers are “bruised by the first hours” of that new sun. These paradoxes have a dramatic effect as they build throughout the poem. Building that kind of energy is a characteristic of Levine’s poetry. He gives his images an urgency they might not otherwise have by endowing them with an emotional life: The bus creaks like a tired body; the earth is silent while the people suffer; answers hurt as much as questions; the sun bleeds the way people bleed.

Another device that is effective in this poem is the poet’s direct address to the reader. By implication, Levine is suggesting that his readers are like the laborers and like him. All suffer and see suffering. One can “howl” one’s name, call attention to oneself in a great burst of sound, but the wind will “blow it into dust.” He tells readers that a person could “pledge” a “single life,” but the earth “will eat it all.”

By addressing readers, he pulls them deeper into his experience. One feels what the poet feels. This is the device for the poem’s final movement, the prayer. The poet advises: “go down on your knees/ as though a king stood before you,/ and pray to become all you’ll/ never be.” One often thinks of hard work as the proper path to take to improve one’s lot. Typically, however, Levine suggests that prayer will do as well, because—as the cotton-pickers demonstrate—hard work only begets more hard work.