Kora In Hell Improvisations 17 - Analysis

The moon as a cliché the poem can’t stop using

The three improvisations keep returning to the moon while also mistrusting it. The speaker begins with a coaxing, almost childlike address: Little round moon, wait awhile, as if the moon were a companion who might outpace him. But he immediately undercuts the lyric tradition with the blunt aside, It has always been the fashion to talk about the moon. The central claim the poem makes, across its separate scenes, is that the moon is less a romantic object than a habit of mind: a ready-made beauty people reach for when they want to soften what is actually rough, bodily, and time-worn.

From sky-sparks to ashes: youth as a trick of light

In the first section, the tone is tender and bargaining. The speaker offers a song, notes the sky as Wine clear, and imagines next winter’s fire where they will shake up twists of sparks. Yet the promise is not simply warmth; it’s a strange mirror: you shall see yourself in the ashes, young, as you were. That image turns nostalgia into something abrasive. Ashes are what remains after burning; to see youth there suggests youth is recoverable only as residue, a face briefly readable in what has been destroyed. The moon’s prettiness is pulled down toward combustion, aftermath, and the desire to make time reverse itself.

Weaving backward: undoing age, undoing damage

The second improvisation explodes into an incantation of repair. It opens with a confession of mischoice—the very thing he should have chosen—then keeps repeating a stubborn refrain: But all’s right now. What follows tries to force “rightness” into being through the command Weave away, addressed to dead fingers. The poem stages time like cloth that can be unmade: pangs of agony and pangs of loneliness are beaten backward into a love kiss, and then even the kiss is rewound into looks and into the heart’s dark. The tension here is fierce: the speaker insists on reversal, yet admits time still moves—time’s pushed ahead—as if the will to undo is always fighting the clock’s indifferent shove.

Joyful dance, bitter mouth: the world won’t stay purified

Williams won’t let the weaving remain purely private. The scene flashes to Mayaguez where the darkies are dancing—a racialized, dated phrase that lands with discomfort, because it turns people into background “color” for the speaker’s emotional weather. Even within that brightness there’s an exception: all but one with the sore heel, and the sugar cane not yet high enough to hide in. The poem keeps inserting what won’t be smoothed over: pain, labor, and a specific body that can’t “romp.” Then comes the old woman’s mouth, eating, eating, eating venomous words with thirty years mould. The speaker wants those words eaten back to honeymoon’s end, but the repetition makes bitterness feel inexhaustible. “Weaving” becomes both hope and compulsion: a frantic labor to erase what still has teeth.

The dim room and the poet’s intrusion: desire as fatigue

In the third section the moon returns, now in a glassy twilight, and the tone cools into a drained, almost reportorial intimacy. A gas jet is turned low because It is costly—a detail that makes poverty (or stinginess) part of the erotic atmosphere. Under that low light, time is not redeemed; it passes with clumsy caresses. The instructions—Feel your way, Drop your clothes, creep in—reduce sex to habit and navigation in the dark. Even the partner’s body has become indifferent: Flesh becomes so accustomed she will not even waken. The appended prose note turns this into a meta-scene: seeing the light in an upper window, the poet enters the room by the power he has and brews a sleep potion. That “power” is imagination, but it’s also a kind of violation: the poet feeds on a private exhaustion and converts it into his own narcotic.

A sharp question the poem leaves hanging

If the moon is the “fashionable” thing to talk about, why does the poem keep circling back to it? One answer the poem seems to dare us to consider is that moon-talk is a cover: it lets the speaker approach aging, racialized spectacle, resentment, and sex without fully owning their ugliness. The moon’s pale distance becomes permission—while the real work of the poem happens down among ashes, dead fingers, and a room where not a move is made for hours.