Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "How Some of It Happened" is an intimate and harrowing meditation on mortality, suffering, and the inescapability of fate, woven through the lens of her brother’s life and death. It is a poem that begins with childhood fear and ends in the blunt reality of dying, tracing the ways in which apprehension and inevitability intertwine. The poem’s style is narrative, almost conversational, yet its pacing and imagery evoke an emotional weight that makes the experience palpable.

The poem opens with a memory of her brother’s fear of blindness, an obsession so deep that it manifests in small, ritualistic acts—"he would turn the dinner knives away from, looking at him"—as if the mere presence of sharp objects directed at him could make his fear real. His unease extends to "those knobs that lock the car door from the inside," a detail that hints at both paranoia and an attempt to control his environment. The image of "sharp and shining crystals" from the dismantled chandelier in the upstairs hall is particularly striking; it suggests an unconscious premonition of the medical procedures that will later define his suffering, the broken pieces foreshadowing the slow fragmentation of his body.

From this childhood fear, the poem moves into the stark, clinical reality of his adult illness. The medical treatment he undergoes—"they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through his cheek and up and into his eye from underneath and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out once a week for many weeks"—is described with excruciating detail. The syntax mimics the experience: long, unbroken clauses give the impression of endurance, of time stretching unbearably, just as her brother must endure the intrusion of the needle. The phrase "he learned to, lean into it, to settle down he said" conveys both resignation and a forced adaptation to pain, an attempt to manage what cannot be avoided. But despite this endurance, "still the eye went dead, ulcerated, breaking up green in his head, as the other eye, still blue and wide open, looked and looked at the clock." The contrast between the ruined eye and the one that remains open, watching, measuring time, reinforces the relentless approach of death.

Time becomes an increasingly significant motif in the poem. Her brother’s promises—"he shook my hand on a train going home one Christmas and gave me five years," then "five years later he promised five years more"—are acts of defiance against the inevitability of death. These moments suggest a belief that making a promise, defining a timeframe, might somehow ward off the feared event. Yet these reassurances collapse under the weight of reality. The line "so much for the brave pride of premonition, the worry that won’t let it happen" reflects the paradox of anxiety: the belief that by worrying about something deeply enough, one can prevent it from occurring.

The poem’s climax comes when her brother articulates the bitter irony of his life’s trajectory: "You know, he said, I always knew I would die young. And then I got sober and I thought, OK, I’m not. I’m going to see thirty and live to be an old man. And now it turns out that I am going to die. Isn’t that funny?" This passage is devastating in its simplicity and matter-of-factness. The humor is dark, ironic, and resigned. It underscores how death arrives regardless of expectation—whether feared or denied, anticipated or ignored, it comes just the same. The phrase "the unendurably specific, the exact thing" captures this certainty with brutal precision.

The poem ends with a moment of tenderness and quiet devastation: "Here, sit closer to the bed so I can see you." This final line collapses all the earlier fears, pain, and irony into a singular request—a need for connection, for vision, for presence. The brother, who once turned knives away from himself in childhood superstition, now struggles simply to see, and his last wish is for his sister to sit close enough that he can still hold onto this world a little longer.

"How Some of It Happened" is an extraordinary poem in its ability to convey both the deeply personal and the universally inevitable. It is about the ways we try to bargain with fate, the rituals we create to stave off fear, and the way death disregards all of it. Through its precise yet unembellished language, the poem offers no false comfort, only the raw truth of loss—and in that truth, a kind of heartbreaking beauty.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...