Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Lehman’s "Spontaneous Combustion" unfolds as a surreal, cinematic meditation on passion, destruction, and transcendence. The poem progresses through a series of escalating images that blur the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, reality and fantasy. It begins in the realm of the tangible—money, a mattress, a newspaper—but rapidly transforms into something ethereal, culminating in a vision of lovers immolated yet somehow illuminated in their absence.

The poem’s opening lines are grounded in the concrete: “Under the mattress was a day-old newspaper rolled into a scroll, / And in the scroll was a small fortune in bank notes.” These details suggest a secret stash, perhaps savings or hidden wealth, but its importance is fleeting. The next line abruptly undoes any material security: “They all went up in smoke.” With a quick and violent transition, the domestic setting erupts into fire: “First the sheets caught fire, / Then the mattress, the newspaper, the money.” What begins as an intimate space is overtaken by uncontrollable flames, symbolizing not just physical destruction but a release from the constraints of material concerns.

The transformation intensifies as the bed itself begins to “ascend to the heights / Of a wandering cloud suspended between rival promontories / In the Alps.” This elevation suggests a mystical or mythological movement, an ascent beyond the corporeal world. The shift from a burning bed to an image of "rival promontories" in the Alps elevates the event from the personal to the grand, even the cosmic. The lovers themselves vanish into the cloud, and only then does their true presence emerge: “For the first time, in the splendor of their absence.” This paradox—that they become visible only by disappearing—heightens the poem’s dreamlike quality. They exist as an outline of light against the sky, “just to the north of the archer” (likely a reference to the Sagittarius constellation), suggesting a celestial permanence, an eternal presence rendered in negative space.

The poem then shifts into another surreal vignette, invoking an eerie after-hours department store scene: “It was as if the boy had stayed in the big store / After it closed for the night, had hidden in the men's room / When the lights went out and the clerks went home.” This echoes childhood fantasies of being locked inside a magical place, but here, the fantasy carries a sense of isolation. The mannequins come to life, performing “a masquerade ball,” reinforcing the theme of illusion versus reality.

A mannequin dancer in “slippers and pearls” becomes an object of desire, but her reality is questioned: “He wanted her / And would have her if only ... if only her body weren't just / A function of the mind that designed her dress.” The ellipsis conveys hesitation, an uncertainty about whether the body beneath the dress is real or merely a projection of desire. The phrase “the nave of her nudity” invokes religious imagery, turning the act of undressing into a form of revelation, an entrance into a sacred space.

Yet the poem resists easy conclusions. The lovers are both real and unreal, their presence both undeniable and spectral. They are “equipped with the lips / And hair angels lack”—an assertion of their carnal reality, distinguishing them from the disembodied purity of celestial beings. This physicality, paradoxically, is affirmed at the moment of obliteration: “The proof lay there beside him / In the bed.”

The poem closes with a striking juxtaposition of passion and negation: “A lover of paradox, he turned away / From the big bright cancellations of night / That announced the new day.” The “big bright cancellations” suggest neon signs, dawn’s arrival, or even cosmic forces erasing the night. The lovers, however, reject these external markers of time and reality. Instead, they surrender to sleep “in the levitating bed, in the flames.” This final image fuses the realms of dreams and destruction, positioning the bed as both an altar and a pyre, a space where love, like fire, consumes and transcends.

Structurally, the poem flows in an unbroken, cascading rhythm, with long, unpunctuated sentences that mimic the fluidity of thought and dream. The lack of stanza breaks allows the imagery to blur into one another, reinforcing the surreal transitions. The diction moves effortlessly between the mundane (bank notes, newspapers, mattresses) and the celestial (clouds, constellations, angels), mirroring the tension between the tangible and the ineffable.

"Spontaneous Combustion" is ultimately a meditation on passion as a consuming force—both destructive and illuminating. Fire, here, is not merely physical but transformative, turning materiality into myth, presence into absence, flesh into legend. The lovers are simultaneously annihilated and immortalized, their existence confirmed only in the moment of their disappearance. In this way, Lehman crafts a poem that is both intimate and expansive, weaving personal desire with cosmic inevitability, and leaving behind an afterimage as haunting as a burned-out constellation in the night sky.

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