Today’s poem by Joseph Harrison employs one of the oldest poetic forms, the ballad, to take on the tragic subject of an early death by a beloved contemporary.
OH
When Love herself came to me
Framed by the classroom door
Her presence shot straight through me,
My heart dropped to the floor.
Nothing phantasmal slew me.
What eyes and hair and skin
Could do they did to do me,|
Helpless and hopeless, in.
Oh, when her news came to me
—Ovarian, forty-four—
Her absence echoed through me,
Ringing my hollowed core.
Ballads usually rhyme ABXB (with X indicating an unrhymed end word) or ABAB, but those actual rhyme sounds tend to change from quatrain to quatrain. As we saw in Wednesday’s sonnet, where Harrison upped the ante by rhyming fourteen lines with a single rhyme sound, he won’t allow strong feeling to weaken his commitment to difficult form. Here, in a three-stanza poem, only the middle stanza has a unique pair of rhyme sounds; the first and third stanzas sonically agree. Looking again, we see there is only one occasion in the entire poem, the center rhyme of “skin” and “in,” which doesn’t rhyme with “to me” or “door.” What this insistent repetition creates, if I’m not being too fanciful, is a closed system which connotes the inevitability of death. Or here’s another possibility: every line that rhymes with “to me” or “door” indicates what we might call the normal, expected health of the poem; cancer enters with the one freak rhyme of skin/in.
Another sound is essential to the poem’s emotional impact, and the clue comes in the very title, “Oh.” A surprise, or a lament, or both, are coming. The sound recurs at the beginning of stanza three: “Oh, when her news came to me/–Ovarian, forty-four…” Now the capitalized “O” of “ovarian” gains equal weight, as the clue to the poet’s misery. The word “cancer” need not be uttered, and the O in the “Love” of the first line returns to our memory. The two O’s in “forty-four” emphasize not only this new sound but also the other “or” sounds—door, floor, core. At the core of the words “core” and “hollowed” is an O, a hollowed core that is also a sigh.
— Mary Jo Salter
“Oh” is from Shakespeare’s Horse, Waywiser Press (2015)
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Author: The Best American Poetry
