The Unseen by Robert Pinsky
"The Unseen" by Robert Pinsky is a poignant poem set in a town in Poland, steeped in historical significance related to the Holocaust. The imagery evokes a somber atmosphere, vividly described through elements such as rain and gray tones that contribute to an overall sense of emptiness. The poem juxtaposes the mundane with the horrific as it depicts a tour through a death camp, listing ordinary objects like toothbrushes and shoes that serve as haunting reminders of the lives lost there. Through these contrasts, Pinsky explores themes of suffering and loss, incorporating allusions to biblical texts, particularly Psalm 22, which enhances the poem's depth by connecting the Jewish experience with Christ’s suffering.
The speaker’s journey through the camp is interwoven with a dreamlike vision of justice, where the desire to confront the oppressors emerges. However, this vision is tempered by a sense of humility and acceptance in the face of profound existential questions. Rather than conveying nihilism, the poem invites readers to grapple with despair while maintaining a glimmer of hope and trust in the unknowable mysteries of existence. Through Pinsky's exploration of these themes, "The Unseen" offers a reflective space for considering the nature of suffering, faith, and the complexities of human experience.
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The Unseen by Robert Pinsky
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1984 (collected in History of My Heart, 1984)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
“The Unseen” is set in a specific town in Poland with a particular historical burden. Immediately, the reader knows the setting: the rain, the stone arcade, and smoky air of one “penetrating color.” This color is gray, setting a particular empty tone to the poem. The people in the poem are on a tour and the speaker in the poem provides the images for the reader, including the audience to tour the death camp.
Pinsky presents a list: toothbrushes, hair, shoes, photographs. These are all human ordinary materials, which adds irony to this tour of a death camp, since a death camp seems unordinary and horrific. The speaker even remarks, “We felt bored,” but then, with the use of enjambment, Pinsky juxtaposes boredom with the next line, “And at the same time like screaming Biblical phrases: I am poured out like water.” It is necessary to grasp this allusion to Psalm 22:14 in order to understand the poem’s underlying theme. Psalm 22 is the prophecy of the Messiah, of Christ, and begins with the words “Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me,” Christ’s final words when dying on the cross. Though Pinsky is Jewish and is walking through a death camp where Jews were tortured and killed, he still includes the suffering of Christ, who was a Jewish man, with the suffering of all the Jews killed in these death camps. This brings the poem a more universal theme of suffering and loss.
All this is suddenly altered with the dream vision of the speaker in the poem, invisible, unseen, walking the camp, and killing the Nazi soldiers and officers. The reader may identify with this desire to do justice unto those who have done evil, but the speaker in the poem comes out of the dream and humbles himself. The speaker confronts the “discredited Lord” as a “servant” gaping obediently, accepting all that has been in the face of a much greater being whose mysteriousness is inexplicable.
The easy interpretation of this poem would be to accept that Pinsky is giving his readers a nihilistic outlook of this world, but the textual evidence reads with more humility and acceptance of a powerful unknowable being. When the speaker states, “but still/ We try to take in what won’t be turned from in despair,” the reader must recognize that the speaker in the poem will not despair and believe in nothing, but rather, like Job, the speaker will trust those mysterious secrets of the day and night to be something greater.
Bibliography
Dietz, Maggie, and Robert Pinsky, eds. An Invitation to Poetry: A New Favorite Poem Project Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.
Downing, Ben, and Daniel Kunitz. “The Art of Poetry: LXXVI.” Paris Review 144 (Fall, 1997): 180-213.
Pinsky, Robert. Democracy Culture and the Voice of Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Pinsky, Robert. The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Pinsky, Robert. Poetry and the World. New York: Ecco Press, 1988.