Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Tony Hoagland’s "Delay" is a meditation on avoidance, obsession, and the paradoxical human impulse to pursue self-destruction rather than embrace the ordinary. Through the metaphor of polar expeditions—men who sought fame and meaning in extreme conditions—the speaker reflects on his own tendency to delay intimacy and engagement with life. The poem examines how some people, rather than accept the vulnerability of love or the quiet demands of daily existence, choose paths of suffering and obliteration, seeking a kind of purity in destruction.

The poem begins with a stark admission: "I should walk up the stairs right now and make slow love to the woman I live with, / but I sit here drinking ginger ale instead." This opening establishes the central tension—between action and inaction, connection and distance, presence and escape. The act of making slow love suggests intimacy, warmth, and a deliberate surrender to another person. But instead of engaging in this moment of connection, the speaker chooses solitude, a fizzy, non-alcoholic distraction, and a book about "polar expeditions". The juxtaposition of these choices—love versus isolation, warmth versus ice—sets the stage for the deeper exploration of why we sometimes turn away from what sustains us.

The speaker describes the explorers in the book as "men who ran away from what they should have done to carve a name out for themselves in a hunk of planetary ice." The phrase "ran away from what they should have done" suggests that these explorers, rather than being purely noble adventurers, were driven by avoidance. Their journey to the ends of the earth is framed as an escape rather than a pursuit, an extreme form of distraction from ordinary life. The "hunk of planetary ice" becomes a symbol of something cold, remote, and indifferent—an inhospitable landscape onto which they project their desires for greatness, as if suffering in an alien environment could give their lives meaning.

The next lines depict the explorers in the prime of their journeys: "In the yellowed, hundred-year-old photographs, they still look arrogant and brash / in their brand new bearskin coats and beards." The phrase "yellowed, hundred-year-old photographs" reminds us that these men, once ambitious and alive, are now merely historical artifacts. Yet in these images, they appear confident, untouched by the reality that awaits them. The speaker likens them to "Nordic gods, posing on a ridge above a caravan of Eskimos and sleds." This description emphasizes their self-perception—powerful, mythic, superior—while also subtly critiquing the colonial gaze, as the indigenous people remain in the background, reduced to a mere detail of the landscape.

But the speaker’s interest is not in the early triumphs of these explorers, but in what comes next: "I wonder how they looked months later, when the emptiness they wanted such a close inspection of had eaten out their cheeks, eaten up the part of them made out of words, and left the bony, silent men themselves, walking over fields of sea-green, thousand-year-old ice and wind." This passage marks a shift from admiration to horror. The "emptiness" they sought—to conquer, to understand, to define themselves against—becomes a devouring force. Their "cheeks" (symbols of vitality and flesh) are "eaten out," and the part of them "made out of words" disappears, leaving behind only "bony, silent men." The explorers, who once sought to carve meaning into ice, are instead stripped of language and identity, reduced to skeletal figures wandering through a vast, indifferent landscape.

The poem continues with other images of suffering: "the Welshman kneeling, as if to pray, at the carcass of a seal; Peary weeping at the stump of his left hand." These figures, once bold and confident, are now brought to their knees, mutilated and diminished. The juxtaposition of prayer and predation—kneeling before a seal’s carcass—suggests both desperation and reverence, as if survival itself has become a grim form of devotion.

Then comes the poem’s central revelation: "There are other plot-lines and motifs. But the story stays the same: / some of us would rather die than change." This line expands the poem’s scope beyond the historical explorers, linking their fates to a broader human tendency—the refusal to adapt, the preference for destruction over transformation. The explorers? suffering is no longer just about physical endurance; it is about an existential resistance to the ordinary, to the compromises of daily life.

The next line delivers a devastating insight: "We love what will destroy us as a shortcut through this world which would bend and break us slowly into average flesh and blood." The word "love" here is crucial—it suggests that the drive toward self-destruction is not merely compulsion but a kind of perverse devotion. To "love what will destroy us" is to embrace obliteration as a means of escape from mediocrity, from the slow erosion of identity that comes with time and compromise. The phrase "shortcut through this world" reinforces this idea: choosing self-destruction is a way to bypass the mundane struggles of life, to avoid being ground down into "average flesh and blood."

After this existential crescendo, the speaker returns to his present moment: "I close the book and listen to the noises of an ordinary night." The contrast between the extreme suffering in the book and the quiet domesticity of his surroundings is stark. The "chair that scrapes," the "cricket, like a small appliance singing," the "ponderously still" air—these are the sounds of life continuing, steady and uneventful.

Then comes another realization: "I can tell that it is not too late." This line suggests that, unlike the doomed explorers, the speaker still has a choice. The intimacy he has been avoiding, the connection he has postponed, remains within reach. But this moment of possibility is quickly followed by an overwhelming fear: "And then I think this ordinariness will crush me in its fist. And then I wish it would." Here, the speaker acknowledges the deep ambivalence at the heart of the poem. He knows that an ordinary life—love, domesticity, presence—can sustain him, yet he also fears its weight, its ability to strip him of whatever restless energy fuels him. The final twist—the wish that it would crush him—suggests both surrender and defiance, a longing for obliteration not through ice and exile, but through the sheer gravity of the everyday.

"Delay" is a powerful exploration of self-imposed isolation, the allure of self-destruction, and the fear of ordinariness. By drawing parallels between himself and the doomed explorers, the speaker confronts his own resistance to intimacy and the ways in which people sabotage their own happiness. Hoagland suggests that avoidance—whether through physical escape, emotional detachment, or obsessive distraction—offers a seductive but ultimately empty alternative to real engagement. In the end, the poem leaves the speaker suspended between two choices: to remain lost in the frozen landscape of avoidance, or to walk up the stairs and face the quiet, unremarkable, and profoundly human alternative.

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