Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Fanny Howe’s "A Hymn" is a meditative and deeply layered poem that explores the intersections of literature, faith, memory, and existential uncertainty. Structurally, it is fragmented and wandering, mirroring the process of thought itself, where scripture meets fiction, where the self dissolves into historical, philosophical, and literary contemplation. The poem takes inspiration from Dostoevsky’s paradoxical embrace of humiliation and beauty, setting the stage for an investigation of the ways in which suffering, faith, and narrative intertwine.

The poem begins with a journey into text—"I traveled to the page where scripture meets fiction. / The paper slept but the night in me woke up."—suggesting an awakening of thought, a movement from passive reading to an active reckoning with meaning. This contrast between stillness and animation, between text and reader, sets the tone for a work in which words and their interpretations shift unpredictably. The speaker finds the "black letters now alive", no longer confined to their fixed meanings, but moving within an unsettling "material crawl". The instability of language—whether it seeks to "seduce or speak truth”—becomes a central concern, as the speaker struggles to decipher whether words reveal or obscure, whether they liberate or ensnare.

Religious imagery is woven throughout, with birds acting as both divine messengers and predatory forces—"While birds swept over the water / like pot-bellied angels… Then down to scavenge the surf / and eat the innocent." The birds, moving between heaven and earth, suggest both spiritual ascent and the harsh realities of survival. This duality reflects the poem’s engagement with faith—not as pure transcendence, but as something entangled with violence and mortality. The presence of Kerouac’s words—"I love God and the ferry too”—introduces a Beat sensibility, a blending of spiritual yearning and earthly experience, reinforcing the idea that faith and material existence are not separate but intertwined.

As the poem progresses, the speaker questions whether imagination—the space of literature and belief—can withstand time and suffering: "I wonder, will our imagination / remain a temple burning with candles / against all odds?" The imagery of candles burning within the body ("Behind a nipple and a bone") suggests that storytelling, like faith, is both fragile and persistent. The poem does not provide an answer but instead moves toward personal memory, reflecting on how literature influences identity, how characters in books become companions, and how narrative structures shape our understanding of reality.

The presence of Dostoevskian characters, particularly Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, reinforces the theme of compassion amid despair: "I like to sit with him in the grass. / Then we see the same thing at the same time, / and are one mind." Alyosha, a figure of spiritual kindness, represents the possibility of shared understanding, of "a single gesture / of kindness." Yet this moment of connection is fleeting, as the poem acknowledges the strangeness of reading about lives that can never be touched—"It seemed evil to read about people / we would never meet." This reflects a metafictional awareness of literature’s paradox: it immerses us in lives that remain, ultimately, inaccessible.

The poem also critiques history, especially its violent excesses—"It was a terrible century: / consisting of blasted / oil refineries and stuck ducks, / fish with their lips sealed by plastic / and tar in the hair of cooks." This list of industrial and environmental devastation, along with the presence of institutions moaning and hospital waste reddening dumpsters, suggests that the past century has been defined by ruin. The line—"Yawning on obsolescence / the computer wonders / who punched in such poor grammar."—is particularly striking, personifying technology as both observer and participant in human decline.

The passage on light—"Some long-ago light is pulsating in a trout’s heart / on a laboratory dish."—introduces a scientific and almost mystical perspective, suggesting that energy, like memory, is never truly extinguished. This echoes the idea of light as both a physical force and a metaphor for knowledge, transformation, and continuity.

The final sections of the poem blend personal and historical allusions, moving from questions about lineage and inheritance to literary and cinematic references. The invocation of Nijinsky and Nastasya from The Idiot introduces figures of artistic intensity and doomed passion, both of whom embody a kind of self-destruction born of feeling too much. The imagery of Nastasya tangled in a thorn bush, seeing into her own body and screaming in horror, suggests a moment of existential confrontation—an encounter with the self that is both revelation and terror.

In the closing lines, the poem moves into the realm of film, specifically The Third Man, with its iconic Ferris wheel scene and the amoral figure of Harry Lime. The speaker finds forgiveness possible only within the cinematic world—"It is here where I can forgive someone for his crime." This suggests that fiction, whether in books or films, provides a space where moral reckoning can occur in ways reality does not allow. The final image—"Like fish in a secular city / flipping through sewers for a flash of Christ."—beautifully captures the poem’s ongoing tension between the sacred and the profane, the search for meaning in a world where faith is both present and elusive.

"A Hymn" is a deeply introspective and intellectually rich poem that refuses linearity, instead embracing the fluidity of thought, memory, and language. It is a hymn not in the sense of a structured praise song, but as a meditation on literature’s role in shaping belief, on the ways history and personal experience intertwine, and on the eternal human search for meaning in a fractured world. Through its intertextual references, shifting perspectives, and lyrical intensity, the poem constructs a space where Dostoevsky, Kerouac, Alyosha, and Nastasya all coexist, where imagination and reality blur, and where the act of reading itself becomes both an existential and spiritual endeavor.

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