Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Robert Creeley’s “On Phrase from Ginsberg's Kaddish” takes a line from Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”—“All girls grown old”—and spins it into a stark meditation on decay, disillusionment, and the inescapable passage of time. This short, fragmentary piece compresses a sweeping view of aging and loss into just a few lines, capturing a sense of fatalism and bitter irony. Drawing inspiration from Ginsberg, Creeley’s poem explores themes of aging and the transient nature of life, but it does so with a uniquely Creeley-esque conciseness, providing a bleak, unsentimental perspective on life’s inevitable declines.

The poem opens with the phrase “All girls grown old,” an image that invokes the passage of time in its most visible, human form. This line encapsulates the shift from youthful vibrancy to the weariness of age, capturing the quiet tragedy of dreams and vitality faded over time. The choice of “girls” instead of “women” has an unsettling effect, highlighting the contrast between youth’s ephemeral qualities and the reality of aging. The phrase evokes an image of time sweeping through generations, rendering once-vibrant young lives into a subdued, weary state. Here, Creeley appears to capture the melancholic sense that youthful potential has been worn down by the march of time, as people and the things they’ve built are subjected to entropy and loss.

Following this, Creeley lists “broken, worn out men, dead houses gone, boats sunk jobs lost,” a catalog of human decline and the material wreckage that accompanies it. These objects of memory—houses, boats, jobs—represent markers of human endeavor and identity, each one bearing significance within the context of a person’s life. By using terms like “broken,” “worn out,” “gone,” and “sunk,” Creeley reinforces the pervasive theme of deterioration. The imagery feels barren and desolate, conveying a sense of accumulated loss and abandonment that extends beyond individuals to encompass the environments they inhabit and the lives they build. Each word adds to the bleak landscape Creeley paints, one in which everything, from human relationships to material accomplishments, falls into ruin.

“Retired to old-folks’ home” introduces a specific, personal dimension to this theme of aging. The phrase is blunt, devoid of sentimental language or euphemism, mirroring Creeley’s characteristic directness. This line reflects a societal reality: the isolation and often-neglected status of the elderly in institutional settings. It underscores the disposability that society often attributes to people in their later years, suggesting a kind of forced retreat from the active world into places where, for many, life becomes less about living and more about waiting. The line serves as a commentary on how society relegates its elderly members, treating them not as individuals but as worn-out entities set aside from the main flow of life.

The closing line, “Eat, drink, be merry, you fink,” shifts the tone from somber observation to biting irony. This line echoes the Epicurean adage “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” yet the addition of “you fink” transforms it into something scornful and mocking. A “fink” is someone perceived as untrustworthy or weak, and by using this term, Creeley injects a sense of disillusionment with life’s hedonistic pursuits. It’s as though the speaker is acknowledging the futility of pleasure-seeking as a response to life’s inevitable decay, suggesting that the attempts to avoid or defy mortality are foolish, even contemptible. This phrase also calls out the superficiality of living for immediate gratification, implying that such pursuits are empty in the face of life’s deeper, more profound losses.

The poem’s structure is as spare as its language, with no punctuation or line breaks beyond the ellipsis following “All girls grown old.” This lack of structural markers contributes to the poem’s blunt, unrelenting tone, presenting each image or statement as an unfiltered, unyielding truth. Creeley’s terse style, which leaves no room for elaboration or sentimentality, reflects the nature of aging and decline itself—an unstoppable force that offers no respite, no embellishment. The structure forces the reader to confront each image and phrase as it is, without the comfort of interpretation or explanation.

Through “On Phrase from Ginsberg's Kaddish,” Creeley presents a condensed, unsparing reflection on mortality. By invoking Ginsberg’s line, he grounds his poem in a shared awareness of life’s impermanence, expanding it to include both the human and material aspects of existence. Creeley’s tone—at once resigned and scornful—suggests a dual awareness of the inevitability of decline and a frustration with how people respond to it, whether through hedonism, denial, or disregard. In this way, Creeley’s poem becomes a kind of dark mirror, reflecting not only the decay of life but the futility of our attempts to evade it.

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