Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gail Mazur’s "Horizontal Man" is a haunting and richly textured poem that blurs the boundaries between memory, literature, and lived experience. Inspired by Helen Eustis's 1946 mystery novel The Horizontal Man and filtered through the speaker’s recollections of college, the poem intertwines the fictional with the autobiographical to explore themes of failure, isolation, and the enduring weight of formative experiences. Mazur’s language evokes a gothic, almost surreal atmosphere, as the speaker reflects on her younger self with both detachment and deep emotional resonance.

The poem begins with a quote from Eustis’s novel, setting a dark, ominous tone: “Surely it was too awful to be real.” This phrase, describing the unsettling campus environment, becomes a lens for the speaker’s own memories, which feel equally surreal and disorienting. The novel’s fictional murder—a professor killed with a poker—parallels the speaker’s recollection of her own professor, whose lectures on Shakespeare were steeped in the charisma of a man “wild and gray,” known as much for his affairs as for his teaching. This merging of fiction and memory creates a layered narrative where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur, reflecting the speaker’s internalized anxieties and insecurities.

The speaker’s recollection of Professor F is tinged with both admiration and bitterness. His lectures on Shakespeare, infused with the “alcoholic timbre of his brogue,” captivated his students, even as his personal life served as fodder for gossip. For the speaker, he represents an unattainable ideal, both intellectually and emotionally. Her solitary triumph—an “isolated A” earned by studying Hamlet’s “O that this too too solid flesh would melt”—is overshadowed by her parents’ waning hopes and her own self-perception as “fat, and pining for a boy.” This contrast between academic achievement and personal despair highlights the dissonance of the speaker’s college experience, where outward success masks inner turmoil.

As the poem unfolds, the speaker’s memories become increasingly vivid and raw. The references to The Horizontal Man serve as a framework for revisiting her own struggles with mental health and societal judgment. The “unwomanly physician” and the “psychiatrist from Springfield” evoke a clinical coldness, reflecting the era’s stigmatization of mental illness and the speaker’s sense of alienation. Her confinement to campus for an “indiscretion” adds another layer of shame and vulnerability, as she recalls lying on her “restricted cot” and memorizing soliloquies as if her life depended on it. This image of confinement, both physical and emotional, underscores the speaker’s feelings of entrapment and her desperate attempts to find meaning and identity.

Mazur’s language masterfully conveys the gothic, almost claustrophobic atmosphere of the speaker’s college years. Phrases like “the scrollery iron gate” and “Paradise Pond” evoke a sense of decay and isolation, while the recurring image of the examination hall filled with “victims and perpetrators” captures the speaker’s ongoing sense of inadequacy and dread. The “classic college nightmare” of unread books and unfulfilled expectations becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s broader anxieties about her place in the world and her ability to meet its demands.

The poem’s exploration of literature as both a refuge and a source of pressure is particularly poignant. Shakespeare’s soliloquies, memorized in moments of despair, serve as a lifeline for the speaker, offering a language through which she can articulate her fears and desires. Yet, these same soliloquies underscore her sense of unworthiness, as she sees herself as the “unversed girl I never stop becoming.” This tension between the solace and the demands of literature mirrors the speaker’s broader struggle to reconcile her intellectual aspirations with her emotional realities.

The closing lines of the poem bring the narrative full circle, as the speaker reflects on the death of her former professor and her own sleepless nights spent reading. The novel’s “bloody weapon on the cover” becomes a symbol of the unresolved conflicts and traumas that continue to haunt her. The dream she tries to avoid—of a gothic campus filled with victims and perpetrators—is a reminder of the ways in which the past lingers, shaping her identity and her relationship with the world.

“Horizontal Man” is ultimately a meditation on the interplay between fiction and reality, past and present, and achievement and failure. Mazur captures the complexity of memory, where moments of triumph and despair coexist, and where literature serves as both a mirror and a means of escape. The poem’s rich imagery and introspective tone invite readers to reflect on their own formative experiences, the weight of their personal histories, and the ways in which we carry the unresolved narratives of our lives.

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