Broken Face Gargoyles - Analysis

A love-poem that begins with what can’t be given

The poem’s central claim is blunt and oddly tender: the speaker wants to offer beauty and comfort, but can only offer damaged, watchful stone. The opening line, All I can give you, lands like an apology. What follows—broken-face gargoyles—is not a romantic bouquet but a harsh, chipped ornament from a building’s edge, something made to face weather and ward off harm. From the start, then, the speaker’s affection is filtered through a world that feels public, industrial, and bruised. He isn’t saying he won’t give; he’s saying the time, and maybe his own life, won’t yet let him give what he most wants to.

“Too early” for grief and celebration at once

The poem’s first big tension is in its funeral image: It is too early to sing and dance at funerals. The speaker can imagine the right kind of person for the task—an undertaker who is also somehow a performer, humming a lullaby while doing a mystic buck-and-wing. That combination is startling: death work paired with a lullaby (sleep, childhood, soothing) and a fast dance (life, rhythm, feet). But the poem insists it’s too early for such a reconciliation. The speaker can only whisper this vision, as if it’s not yet permitted in daylight. The line now you see it / now you don’t makes the hope flicker like a magic trick: the idea of a death that can be met with music exists, but not stably, not yet.

The gifts of garden and orchard that the speaker withholds

After the gargoyles and funerals, the speaker suddenly describes offerings that are vivid, domestic, and sensuous: Fish to swim in a garden pool, flashing silver; a basket of wine-saps that fills the room with flame-dark color and the tang of valley orchards. These are not abstract symbols; they’re things you can see and smell. He even repeats the phrase such a beautiful—a pail of fish, a peck of apples—like he’s trying to convince himself the world still contains straightforward goodness. But the sentence ends with refusal: I cannot bring you now. The reason isn’t lack of desire; it’s timing and readiness: It is too early, and I am not footloose yet. That last phrase suggests he is bound—by work, by poverty, by responsibility, by grief, by the heaviness that produces gargoyles instead of fruit.

The turn: nighttime construction as a promise of care

The poem pivots when the speaker stops listing what he can’t do and begins insisting on what he will do: I shall come. He imagines arriving in the night with a hammer and saw, not with flowers or polished words. That choice matters: his love expresses itself as making. He comes near your window, the intimate boundary where the beloved looks out when your eyes open in the morning. At that threshold he will build bird-houses and bird-baths, practical objects for small lives. The birds are described with affectionate specificity—wrens and hummers, yellow wing tips, a blur and buzz soft all summer—so the poem’s earlier stone and funeral coldness is answered by motion, warmth, and seasonal return.

Homes with “always open doors”: a startling idea of love

The most revealing detail in the building fantasy is the speaker’s insistence that these bird homes have always open doors, so all and each can run away whenever they want. That is a strange, bracing version of care: shelter offered without capture. It deepens the poem’s emotional logic. The speaker may be unable to give sweetness now, but when he can, he wants to give a world where the beloved—and the beloved’s creatures—are safe and also free. The word fool in little fool homes sounds like self-mockery: he knows his crafted kindness might look naïve against the earlier gargoyles and the undertaker’s raw face. Still, he commits to it. Love, here, isn’t possession; it’s a place you can leave.

The undertaker with a “dance in his feet”: why the poem can’t relax

Even after the promise of birds and summer, the poem returns to the undertaker: the speaker is still looking for him, now described as raw and wind-bitten, with a dance in his feet. The search is ongoing, which keeps the poem from becoming a simple hope story. The undertaker stands for the world’s hardest fact—death—and for the speaker’s need to find a way of living that can face it without going numb. That’s why footloose matters so much: it isn’t just about having time off. It’s a spiritual condition, a body able to move again. Until the speaker can imagine death-work and dancing in the same person, he can’t fully deliver the apples and fish, or even trust his own birdhouses.

A date “a thousand years from now”: comedy stretched over despair

The poem’s most daring move is its promise: six o'clock in the evening a thousand years from now. It’s funny in its precision and impossible scale, but the humor is doing serious work. By stretching time absurdly, the speaker admits how far away he feels from readiness—how enormous the distance is between broken gargoyles and orchard abundance. Yet he still calls it a date and tells the beloved to put it down, like an appointment. The contradiction is the point: he is both delaying and committing. He can’t give what he wants today, but he refuses to surrender the relationship to the present’s poverty or grief.

Gargoyles, but also a fountain watching for “new people”

When the poem returns to gargoyles, it doesn’t merely repeat the first line; it escalates the strangeness: a double gorilla head with two fish mouths and four eagle eyes spouting water on a street wall. This hybrid creature is grotesque and also useful: it’s a fountain, it gives water; it looks two ways down the street. The final image isn’t private romance but a public corner watching for new people, young strangers, coming, coming. The speaker’s limited gift—broken stone on a building—turns out to be a kind of vigilance, a readiness for the future. Even his uglier offerings are oriented toward arrival, not ending.

The ending’s quiet insistence: early, not finished

The poem closes with two short statements: It is early. and I shall yet be footloose. The tone here is steadier than the whispering at the start. Nothing has been solved—the undertaker is still only imagined, the apples and fish still withheld—but the speaker’s will has clarified. In this poem, brokenness isn’t the final condition; it’s the current inventory. The speaker can only give gargoyles now, but he believes in a later self who can build open-doored homes and make room for buzzing life. The insistence doesn’t deny grief; it simply refuses to let grief be the only architect.