The Retrieval System by Maxine Kumin

First published: 1978, in The Retrieval System

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

Like so much of the poet’s work, Maxine Kumin’s “The Retrieval System” focuses on human-animal interactions. In this case, the poet examines the surprising ways that certain animals remind her of the “lost” people in her life and how these correspondences serve to “retrieve” those individuals.

The first line of the poem sets the pattern. “It begins,” Kumin writes, “with my dog.” The pronoun “it” refers to the system of resemblance that seems to well up from the poet’s subconscious when she is alone. In the first of five stanzas, the poet comments on how her late dog’s brown eyes reminded her of her father, who is also deceased. The eyes of both dog and man shared certain qualities; both were “keen, loving, accepting, sorrowful.”

This linkage leads to another outlined in the second stanza and the first part of the third. Here the poet remarks about how much the “tiny voice” and “terrible breath” of an old goat “who runs free in pasture and stable” remind her of her “former piano teacher// whose bones beat time in [her] dreams.”

This resemblance is, in the third stanza, followed by two more examples of how the poet’s dead family and friends are linked with the “patient domestic beasts” in her life. Kumin writes of how much her “willful/ intelligent ponies” remind her of her “elderly aunts” and how much her cat in “faint chin,” “inscrutable squint,” and cry resembles her sister, who died at the age of three.

The fourth stanza continues this pattern of apparently free association. After a brief reference to her sister’s funeral and a quote from the twenty-third psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd,” a subtle reference to the often symbiotic relationship between man and beast, the stanza occupies itself primarily with one poignant correspondence. The poet focuses on a “yearling colt” whose exuberant energy recalls the “cocksure” quality of a boy that the poet once loved but who died thirty years earlier in World War II.

This temporal reference seems to snap the poet out of her reverie temporarily and to bring readers not only to the poem’s present but also to a forecast of what is to come. A television weatherman, who reminds the poet of an owl who has found a home in her barn, outlines current conditions and predicts snow. The weatherman-owl connection, however, leads to another apparently serendipitous linkage. The owl’s face that is both “heart-shaped” and “donnish, bifocaled, kind” conjures up memories of the poet’s late dentist, who filled in one of the poet’s wisdom teeth, just like the snow threatens to fill the “open graves” of memory.

Forms and Devices

Kumin is noted for her formalist approach to poetry, her use of traditional metrical patterns. In the case of “The Retrieval System,” however, the poet experiments with something akin to free verse. Yet, underneath the apparent freedom of her poetic line lies Kumin’s masterful control. She manipulates stanza length, for example, to underscore her theme. The first three stanzas are six lines each, the fourth is eight, and the fifth is nine. Like the accumulating references to the dead, the basic structure of the poem adds increasing weight to the last two stanzas. In effect, the entire poem offers a verbal equivalent to the final image of the shrouding snow.

Another Kumin strength is her careful use of detail. In the third stanza, for example, the poet makes three references to musical selections associated with her late piano teacher. Each is extraordinarily resonant. “Country Gardens” by twentieth century Australian-born American composer Percy Grainger is a piano duet, a fact that underscores the relationship between poet and teacher. The piece is also a tone poem meant to conjure up country life, an apt parallel to Kumin’s bucolic setting. The second musical selection, “Humoresque,” by nineteenth century German composer Robert Schumann, is a piece that calls attention to the shifting moods of Kumin’s poem. As its title indicates, the piano piece is intended to be lively and funny, just like some of the poet’s correspondences, particularly the piano teacher and elderly aunt examples. Yet, at the same time, the reader cannot help but think of the composer’s tragic death in an asylum following a failed suicide by drowning, a reference that may foreshadow the burial at sea of the boy-lover in stanza 4. Finally, there is the “unplayable” music of eighteenth century German composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whose work was forgotten for a time only to be resurrected long after his death. This Bach reference underscores the theme of retrieval. The use of the adjective “unplayable” may refer to the fast fingering required of many Baroque keyboard pieces, a tempo at odds with the poet’s prevailing mood of reverie.

Throughout this essentially meditative poem, the principal agency of correspondence is synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole. Thus, a dog’s eyes conjure up memories of the poet’s father. The power of these correspondences comes from the concrete language that the poet employs to describe the animal “features” that “uncannily” come to the surface of her mind when she is alone and offer her a means by which she can be linked to people lost to death. The goat, for example, has “flecked, agate eyes” with “minus-sign pupils.”