The Poet with His Face in His Hands
The Poet with His Face in His Hands - meaning Summary
Despair Beside Enduring Beauty
The poem addresses a person overwhelmed by regret and directs that grief into solitude in the natural world. Behind a waterfall, private crying can be released without harming others or interrupting life. The ending does not deny despair, but sets it beside the thrush's song and nature's enduring beauty. Oliver suggests that sorrow is real, yet it need not become the whole of one's vision.
Read Complete AnalysesYou want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound. So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t hold it in, at least go by yourself across the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.
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