Potato Blossom Songs And Jigs - Analysis

A mind that can’t sit still in its own happiness

The poem begins in pure bodily lift: RUM tiddy um, my knees are loose-like, feet that want to sling their selves. But that giddiness immediately turns into a question the speaker can’t stop asking: why this gab, why the urge to holler all over the place. The central claim the poem keeps circling is that joy—especially the humble, domestic kind (hens laying, new potatoes and gravy)—doesn’t arrive as a calm feeling. It arrives as a runaway chain of associations, a music that makes the speaker talk too much, remember too much, and reach for meanings that keep slipping.

Courting with “handfuls of nothing”

Even the love-offering is split between abundance and emptiness. The speaker recalls holding empty hands and declaring all is yours—not gifts, but handfuls of nothing. Then he asks for white blossoms and brings a concertina under the apple trees, playing old titles like The Spanish Cavalier and In the Gloaming. Romance here isn’t sleek; it’s homemade and slightly awkward, like a serenade that knows it’s a serenade. That’s why the poem’s recurring phrase—Excuse ... me...—matters: desire keeps interrupting itself, apologizing for taking up space.

Home-like orchard, then rot: the poem’s hinge into ruin

The landscape first feels settled and neighborly: The orchard here is near and home-like, oats that run a mile, green and marching potato vines. Even the night is a gentle double-exposure: lightning bugs criss-crossing with a zigzag of fire while potato bugs sleep under yellow-striped wings. Then the poem swings hard into debris—old foundations, a barn done-for, roaches shaken into light, and a pickax that digs a long tooth. The shift suggests the pastoral scene is built on leftovers: broken structures, labor, waste that Fire can not eat yet. Romance can stutter at the stars, but the ground under it is littered and unfinished.

“The story has no connections”: collage as confession

Midway, the speaker says what the poem is doing: The story lags; no connections; just banjo plinka planka plunks. That isn’t only a stylistic shrug—it’s a statement about consciousness. The poem moves from the roan horse rolling in red clover to Burlington and Ashtabula to Hamlet and Ophelia, because that’s how the speaker’s mind works when it’s overfull: farm fact, town memory, high literature, then a sudden wish to go bugs with Ophelia’s class. The tension is sharp: he longs for coherent meaning, but he’s also suspicious of neatness. Life, like music, comes as riffs.

Watermelon, pictures, and the uglier reflex the poem won’t edit out

The poem’s most uncomfortable turn is where it exposes cultural reflexes rather than pretty scenery. The speaker asks, Does a famous poet eat watermelon?, then notices The Japanese placing watermelon slices into pictures—seeds as oval polka dots. Immediately after, he admits that he “always” thinks of a racial slur (here redacted in the text) and dancing when he sees watermelon. This is not the same kind of free-association as lightning bugs: it reveals how the mind’s no connections can still be structured by prejudice, by inherited stereotypes that arrive uninvited yet feel automatic. The poem doesn’t resolve or excuse that; it lets the admission sit amid dockside peaches, steamboat whistle hong-honging, and the everyday appetite of farmhands with fried catfish. The pastoral is not innocent—it includes what the speaker has been taught to see.

The “same as why”: explanations that sound like folk wisdom

When the poem tries to explain itself, it doesn’t offer philosophy; it offers a chain of equivalents: it’s the same as boys buying peanuts twice, the same as a fat man's foot race, the same as newsboys shooting craps sensing a scientific principle, the same as fleeing a geography lesson when crawfishes and frogs and pussywillows seem to know something about geography. The poem argues—without quite saying it—that meaning is bodily and seasonal before it is logical. You “understand” spring by running through it, not by naming capitals on a map.

Returning to blossoms: a repeated offer, still stuttering

The ending returns to the opening courtship almost word-for-word: I ask you for white blossoms; I bring a concertina; a fire zigzag over the vines; potato blossoms as white spots in mist. But now the offering includes not just flowers and songs; it includes memories and people, and even the strange, intimate detail of a cavalryman’s yellow handkerchief pressed over the ventricles of blood. Love, in this poem, isn’t a clean narrative. It’s an armful of sights—some tender, some rotten, some troubling—carried to another person anyway, with romance still saying, Excuse ... me....