Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Old Joke" is a poem that juxtaposes divine perfection with human frailty, contrasting the effortless beauty of Apollo’s music with the humiliations of aging and bodily decay. Through this contrast, the poem explores the limits of art, the indifference of the gods, and the way humor, however brief, can reclaim dignity in the face of suffering. The poem’s title suggests something well-worn, something that has been repeated throughout history—perhaps the cosmic irony of human existence itself.

The opening lines invoke Apollo in the grand, elevated tone of a classical hymn: "Radiant child of Leto, farworking Lord Apollo, / with lyre in hand and golden plectrum, you sang to the gods / on Mount Olympus almost as soon as you were born." The diction here—radiant, farworking, golden, Mount Olympus—is elevated and stately, situating the reader in a mythic space. Apollo’s precociousness, his ability to enchant the gods with music from birth, establishes him as a figure of effortless perfection. The next lines reinforce this: "You sang, and the Muses sang in answer, and together / your voices so delighted all your deathless elders / that their perfect happiness was made more perfect still." The repetition of perfect emphasizes the gods’ insulation from suffering. Their pleasure is self-perpetuating, untouched by pain or need.

Then comes the poem’s first shift. The speaker questions what it was about Apollo’s song that so overwhelmed the gods: "Was it the freshest, / most wonderful stops of breath, the flawless intervals / and scales whose harmonies were mimicking in sound / the beauty of the gods themselves?" This moment sets up an expectation that beauty alone is what captivated them. But the alternative question complicates this assumption: "or what you joined / to that, what you were singing of, our balked desires, / the miseries we suffer at your indifferent hands, / devastation and bereavement, old age and death?" The juxtaposition here is striking—Apollo’s music is not merely a reflection of divine perfection, but also an aestheticization of human suffering. This suggests that what makes art so moving is not just its technical brilliance but its engagement with pain. The irony, of course, is that Apollo himself remains untouched by these miseries. He transforms human suffering into something beautiful, but he does not experience it.

The second major shift occurs when the poem moves from myth to the immediate, intimate reality of the speaker’s aging parents. The first image is starkly physical: "Here is my father, half blind, and palsied, at the toilet, / he’s shouting at his penis, Piss, you! Piss! Piss!" The contrast could not be more extreme. From Apollo’s celestial, untouchable beauty, we are brought into a bathroom where an old man struggles with the indignities of a failing body. The humor in the moment is undeniable, but it is a humor laced with pathos. The father’s frustration, his desperate command, is met with indifference—just as mortal prayers to the gods go unanswered. The comparison is made explicit: "but the penis (like the heavenly host to mortal prayers) / is deaf and dumb." The divine aloofness of Apollo is mirrored in the body’s betrayal; both remain unmoved by human need.

The mother enters next, "with her bad knee, / on the eve of surgery, hobbling by the bathroom, / pausing, saying, who are you talking to in there?" The image of her hobbling reinforces the physical toll of aging, but her question introduces another layer of humor—she does not know whom her husband is addressing. His reply, "no one you would know, sweetheart," is a perfect punchline, transforming the moment of bodily failure into something comedic. This brief exchange, absurd as it is, carries an intimacy that Apollo’s music lacks. The joke between husband and wife is not just deflection; it is a form of resilience.

The final section directly addresses Apollo again, turning into an accusation: "Supernal one, in your untested mastery, / your easy excellence, with nothing to overcome, / and needing nothing but the most calamitous / and abject stories to prove how powerful you are, / how truly free." The language here is pointed—Apollo’s greatness is untested, his mastery easy. He does not struggle, does not suffer, yet he takes human suffering as his raw material. The phrase "needing nothing but the most calamitous / and abject stories" critiques the way the gods, and perhaps even art itself, draw power from suffering while remaining detached from it.

The poem closes with the parents reclaiming a moment of godlike joy—not in divine music, but in laughter. "Watch them as they laugh so briefly, / godlike, better than gods, if only for a moment." The father and mother, in their failing bodies, achieve something Apollo cannot: they take their misfortune and make it bearable through humor. This moment, fleeting as it is, surpasses the gods? sterile perfection. The last image returns to the father: "if only because now she’s hobbling back to bed / where she won’t sleep, if only because he pees at last, / missing the bowl, and has to get down on his knees / to wipe it up." The comedy is undercut by the lingering reality of their frailty. The final line—"You don’t know anything about us."—is a direct rebuke to Apollo. He may turn human suffering into music, but he does not understand what it means to live with a failing body, with the daily humiliations and small, necessary victories.

"Old Joke" is a meditation on art’s limitations, on the gap between aestheticized suffering and real, lived experience. By contrasting Apollo’s effortless artistry with the messy, undignified realities of aging, Shapiro challenges the notion that beauty alone is enough. The poem suggests that what makes humans better than gods is not perfection, but the ability to laugh in the face of what cannot be changed. In the end, it is not Apollo’s song that redeems suffering, but the father’s joke, the mother’s laughter, the brief moments where pain is turned into something absurd, something human.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...