A Woman by Robert Pinsky

First published: 1984, in History of My Heart

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

Robert Pinsky’s short lyric poem “A Woman” begins “Thirty years ago” when the speaker in the poem is a child. The scene is set, probably in the New Jersey town of Long Branch on the Atlantic coast, where Pinsky grew up. That oceanside community, with many gulls, pigeons, and chickens, succeeds in “forming a sharp memory” for the child, who walks along beside the “old, fearful” grandmother figure in the poem. Their walk together is a ramble through history, featuring characteristics of both the grandmother’s older world (“Panic of the chickens” awaiting slaughter) and the child’s modern world (“a milkshake”). “A Woman” also contains the accumulated suspicions and terrors of that older world in which the grandmother figure lived her childhood: “Everything that the woman says is a warning,// Or a superstition.”

The child feels the conflict of his clear-eyed observations and her ominous interpretations. He sees the natural world with its “measured rhythm” of wave motion and seasonal change, “booths and arcades/ Still shuttered in March.” For the grandmother this ordinary boardwalk landscape symbolizes “Tokens of risk or rash judgment—drowning,/ Sexual assault, fatal or crippling diseases.” She knows too much and cannot forget; he knows too little and cannot understand. The attempts that the grandmother makes to impart her own fears do not fall on deaf ears, but this child’s ears are filled with wonder, with the emerging awareness of the world around himself, of its possibilities, and of his place in it.

In the middle of “A Woman” the tone of apprehension is underscored by an image the grandmother recalls from a dream: “a whole family// Sitting in chairs in her own room, corpse-gray/ With throats cut.” Though this is a family of strangers, people she only imagines and does not recognize, her fear is real. The child, feeling her helplessness along with her, turns abruptly outward to the natural world again, to its reassuring list of names for things like rivers and inlets, and to features if not altogether without violence at least not sinister or criminal : “waves crashing over the top” of a seawall.

Finally their walk ends in a common solution to trouble: “the old woman has a prescription filled,/ And buys him a milk-shake.” Yet rather than find that bit of the ordinary reassuring, the child remembers another event and time when the ancient fears held him back from a simple excursion “and he vowing never,/ Never to forgive her, not as long as he lived.” As the protection of the old ways becomes rigidly stubborn, the warnings have become ineffectual. The child’s vow expresses a fundamental recognition of more satisfactory alternatives to fear.

Forms and Devices

“A Woman” contains multiples of Pinsky’s favorite kind of loosely iambic pentameter line, in which a short phrase is followed by a colon that introduces an extended series of descriptive clauses full of observations and of images. In short, Pinsky writes a discursive poem with distinctly narrative features to organize and impel the action forward. “A Woman” opens in the past, “Thirty years ago,” but “gulls keen in the blue,” as indeed they do still. The past and the present exist side by side in the language and in its underlying meaning. “Pigeons mumble on the sidewalk” in precisely the way one might encounter them on a boardwalk in the 1940’s or in the present time. Word choice such as “mumble,” simple enough in its general definition, augments the activity of the pigeons so perfectly that Pinsky might have reinvented the word for his own use.

Observations are essential to Pinsky; “monotonous surf,” “gusting winds,” and “high bluffs” contribute to the colloquial, predictable language in the poem. Yet when his memory is most intense the images become entirely unexpected, such as “a house-cracking exhilaration of water.” Pinsky wants these images to seem both very ordinary and very special—a powerful reminder that daily pleasures can enrich poetry as well as lives.

Pinsky’s short lyrics often have a meditative force that is due partly to tone and partly to the arrangements of sounds and of images. The simple images that sustain the poetic meditation in “A Woman” are typical of Pinsky’s emphasis on the significance of casual events that people encounter in their lives. There is boldness of enjambment, where lines do not respect their boundaries, and caesuras, where boundaries are imposed within the lines, as the three-line phrases that constitute “A Woman” build through the progress of the poem. The poet uses colons and hard stops (periods) in the middle of lines, adjectives dangling between lines, and adverbs poised between stanzas.

If Pinsky meant to reinforce ordinary events and an everyday atmosphere with an informal line structure, he also conveys the quality of memory with its disjointed and disjunctive impressions. Pinsky moves in “A Woman” from the vague expressed fears of the grandmother figure to quite “Vivid” (for both child and reader) images that would strike fear into most hearts. Yet he is also capable of describing a familiar event with great playfulness; thus the child remembers himself on the previous Halloween “In his chaps, boots, guns and sombrero,” dressed (as were so many children in the 1940’s and 1950’s) to imitate cowboys and American Indians seen and envied in films.

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.