Butcher Shop by Charles Simic
"Butcher Shop" by Charles Simic is a contemplative poem that explores themes of solitude and human connection through the imagery of a closed butcher shop. The work consists of four stanzas, each laden with vivid descriptions that evoke a sense of stark reality—a bloody apron, sharp knives, and a wooden block marked by remnants of blood. These objects not only depict the physicality of the butcher shop but are also imbued with metaphorical significance, prompting reflections on communication and shared human experience.
The poem suggests that despite the solitary existence of individuals, poetry serves as a means to bridge the gap between them. Simic employs accessible language and a minimalist style, allowing readers to engage with the text without being overwhelmed by complexity. The use of repetition and structured verses enhances the poem’s themes, while the generality of the speaker invites broader interpretation. Ultimately, "Butcher Shop" reflects on the interplay between everyday life and deeper existential insights, inviting readers to consider how ordinary objects can evoke profound thoughts about connection and existence.
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Subject Terms
Butcher Shop by Charles Simic
First published: 1971, in Dismantling the Silence
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
Charles Simic’s “Butcher Shop” is a poem of four four-line stanzas that shows how the poet and subsequently all humans are caught in a solitary existence. However, through a poet’s perspective, people can reach across the distance of solitude toward communication.
The poet (someone who may or may not be the autobiographical Simic) stops before a closed butcher shop where a single light shines in the dark. Accoutrements of the butcher shop—a bloody apron, glistening knives, and a wooden butcher’s block—can all be seen inside the store. The light and the other objects serve as images that metaphorically summon further images. The light is “like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.” The apron’s bloody smears appear to make a map of continents, rivers, and oceans of blood. The polished knives shine like the altars “in a dark church,” where supplicants bring victims of physical and mental infirmities to be healed. The wooden block, “where bones are broken,” has been cleaned, but fruitlessly, because it still shows the remnants of the “river” of blood “dried to its bed.” In this final image, the poet recognizes that this source nourishes him. That feeding is not physical, however; the poet claims that it is from this dried river that “deep in the night [he] hear[s] a voice.”
As in much of Simic’s work, the poem operates on a minimalist level. Not much seems to happen within the scene itself. Instead, the action takes place in the poet’s act of making poetry—in turning the simple though gruesome effects of the butcher’s shop into something surreal. This transformation allows the poet and the reader to speculate on the worldly phenomena that allow humans to reach across the distance of space, time, and language to speak to each other.
Forms and Devices
Simic’s vocabulary in this poem—a typical example of his early work—is absolutely approachable. For instance, of the sixty-seven different words used in the poem, “continents” and “imbecile” are the only words longer than two syllables. Similarly, Simic uses a four-line stanza made up of free-verse lines with approximately four beats per line. Such a verse pattern may seem arbitrarily chosen, especially when it is realized that Simic violates this standard several times. For instance, two lines are four syllables or less (“Where I am fed” and “To be healed”). If intentionally chosen, this line may be employed by Simic simply because he finds it comfortable. Yet its facility also aids the reader in simply approaching the poem. The lines are neither overly long nor too short to draw attention to themselves. Overall, Simic seems to be striving for a kind of transparency in his language, where the things named will become what they signify when read.
Other aspects of the poem are manipulated to stress the objects at hand. Each stanza is its own sentence, except the first, which is divided into two sentences. Likewise, each object described—the light, apron, knives, and wooden block—receives a full sentence. When repetition surfaces as perhaps the only overt poetical device, it appears halfway through the poem and again at the end, serving to emphasize the bloody patterns on the apron (“great continents of blood,/ The great rivers and oceans of blood” and “Where I am fed,/ Where deep in the night I hear a voice”).
The point of view in the poem is generalized and anonymous. Both the particulars of time and place are removed by the use of the opening word “sometimes” and the setting of the unnamed city or village street. The “I” in the poem could be anyone, and its anonymity draws the reader into a participation in the poet’s own meditation. The three sentences that begin with “there is” or “there are” emphasize the factuality and permanence of common experience. Once each of the things named here is shown to actually exist, the poet moves into the less tangible connections brought about by the images’ metaphoric comparisons.
Thus, much of Simic’s style is characterized by omission rather than commission. Simic has pared down his words and meter, grounding the poem in day-to-day experience. By emphasizing the things at hand, he shows that the metaphysical considerations within this poem are indeed close to all readers and can even be accessed through everyday physical objects.