Ice by Ai

First published: 1978; collected in Killing Floor, 1979

Type of poem: Narrative/dramatic monologue

The Poem

The free-verse poem “Ice” is a monologue that dramatically narrates the speaker’s experiences as a cast-off teenager, her killing of her child and her man, and the warm memory she has for this man as she comes to reconcile her adolescent confusion. The poem consists of four stanzas, the first three having thirteen lines each and the last, twelve. The title word proceeds into the first line, with the thought that will compare the conditions on a river as a harsh winter ends with the chilly and irresolute emotions she felt toward her new family.

The speaker is a young woman. Throughout the poem she addresses her lover, beside whose grave she stands. She had strangled their first child, which the reader discovers only after being confronted with the oddly juxtaposed images of the sunrise surrounding her man and the baby’s skull in the box. Despite having violently attacked and killed him, she finds that her affection for him strengthens. In this monologue, Ai creates an effect similar to that achieved by Robert Browning in “My Last Duchess,” except that Ai dramatically relates the specific details of the speaker’s actions.

The opening stanza establishes the fact that, as an adolescent Choctaw, she is far from home, living in Minnesota. The Choctaws were called one of the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the southeastern United States; however, taking up European ways did not exempt them from being forcibly removed from their original homelands in northern Alabama and Mississippi and relocated to the Indian Territory, which later became the state of Oklahoma, in the 1830’s. The speaker resents her father for considering her already “a burden” at twelve, and her feelings of resentment at his giving her away during her menses are powerful.

At fourteen, the speaker, literally a child-woman, is ill-disposed to the roles of mate and mother (nowhere in the poem is marriage explicitly stated or implied). She describes her man’s warmth and disposition as he enters their abode, hugged by the sun, in stanza 2. The rocking horse he made for her is subtly placed in that stanza; it introduces details such as “the ebony box/ with the baby’s skull inside,” the husband combing his hair with a casual gesture, and the dramatic action in stanza 3 that may shock the reader. She dismounts from the rocking horse, which is essentially a toy, to attack, maim, and slay him.

Reopening her eyes in the last stanza, she recalls how “I wanted you then and now/ and I never let you know.” Together—he in death, and she vibrant and filled with mixed emotions about their past—they will “slide forward” into an eventual and eternal realm of the spirit.

Forms and Devices

When using first-person points of view, poets often adopt a persona or mask in order to create a character that seems mentally and physically active and real. Creating this persona does not mean that the poet intends to veil autobiographical details. The figurative devices in “Ice” may be drawn from oral history, readings, historical documents, and the like. Ai may feel close to the images she creates, and her Native American, Asian American, and mixed black and white ancestry makes her imagery, details, and emotions more profound.

Images of remembrance, retribution, distrust of males, and killing abound in “Ice.” The ice on the river breaks into “obelisks,” which as tapered monolithic structures bear a phallic significance. Ice metaphorically reflects the speaker’s attitude toward her man, her distrust of him, just as its breakage results from the onset of warm conditions.

Juxtaposed to the poem’s bittersweet memory and dramatic violence are images of soft materials such as “that shawl of cotton wool,” the “white smock,” the piece of velvet, and “the pony-skin rug,” all of which convey nonthreatening surroundings. Ai balances this set of images, however, by introducing early in the poem the material central to the speaker’s rage—“the roll of green gingham” she had to use to absorb the blood of her menstrual flow, a flow that confirms that she is ready for childbearing. This bloody roll of gingham embodies her child-woman’s humiliation over being disposed of for being a burden to her father. In the second stanza, the horse she rides has a “black mane cut from my own hair,” a mane she strokes, but which, because it is her hair, fills her with mixed emotions. The clashing of these images corresponds to the speaker’s inner turmoil over what are also natural and utilitarian events and practices. Ai’s perceptions of serenity balanced by physical acts of rage characterize other poems in her books Cruelty (1974) and The Killing Floor (1979).

Ai gives “Ice” a cyclical narrative structure. A poet achieves a cyclical structure by connecting historical events with present emotions in a fashion that is neither chronological nor linear. Reminiscence, flashback, and an organic sense of the relationship of events across or despite temporal realities distinguishes such a poetic structure. T. S. Eliot’s lengthy sequence, The Waste Land (1922), is one example of this kind of circular construction. The cyclical character of “Ice” may derive from Ai’s heritage, in that this nonlinear form is common is storytelling narratives among indigenous peoples, and is particularly important to Native American and certain Indonesian groups. The expressionist does not attempt a deliberate shaping of the form to meet a cultural demand. The form results from the people’s nonlinear and nonchronological perception and understanding of time.

Early in “Ice,” the speaker by the graveside holds back her head and remembers, then closes her eyes, taking the reader to the second stanza’s memory of being a mate and the mother of a dead child. Closing this stanza, the speaker blocks out the cries of the new infant, cries that provoke finally her rage against her man. The “row of bear teeth” image seems less clear regarding her intentions than the closing of her eyes and the covering of her ears, both of which are avoidance gestures. Thus one may infer that these bear teeth are part of a rug or a pelt similar to the pony skin. As the speaker manipulates these teeth, she parallels the masticating imagery of the previous lines, and completes the image of attempting to crush the gingham roll, her man nailing shut the black box, and the strangulation imagery in the third stanza as a whole. When she opens her eyes in stanza 4, she completes a cycle of memory and physical position. In the two closing lines, she affirms her feelings of growing warmth toward him “without bitterness,” emotions she grasps more keenly and can better articulate. “Everlasting,” the poem’s final word, reaffirms the seasonal breaking up of river ice, and her perpetual reminiscence.

The number of stanzas and lines is probably not arbitrary. The four stanzas reflect the seasons and the cardinal directions. That stanzas one through three have thirteen lines each seems to suggest not ill luck but the thirteen moons in a year as understood by the Choctaw girl. Each menstrual period is called a “moon.” The twelve lines of the last stanza suggest that she has jettisoned the hurt and humiliation she recalled earlier in the poem.