Love and Happy Endings
I was talking to someone a while back about love and relationships and whoever it was said that there WERE no happy endings, that at the ends of fairy tales (the Disney, not German ones), they go off to live "happily ever after" and it doesn't talk about laundry and squabbles and paying bills, and that, at the ends of movies, it's the same thing.
I said that there IS a happy ending, but it's not the one we get from Hollywood. This poem is, in my mind, the happy ending. It's what I wish for, what I wish for to those who also would like it. It's a happy ending that takes place at the END, that accepts the good and bad that have gone before, and that is content.
After the Dinner Party
by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
You two sit at the table late, each, now and then,
Twirling a near-empty wine glass to watch the last red
Liquid climb up the crystalline spin to the last moment when
Centrifugality fails: with nothing now said.
What is left to say when the last logs sag and wink?
The dark outside is streaked with the casual snowflake
Of winter's demise, all guests long gone home, and you think
Of others who never again can come to partake
Of food, wine, laughter, and philosophy--
Though tonight one guest has quoted a killing phrase we owe
To a lost one whose grin, in eternal atrophy,
Now in dark celebrates some last unworded jest none can know.
Now a chair scrapes, sudden, on tiles, and one of you
Moves soundless, as in hypnotic certainty,
The length of table. Stands there a moment or two,
Then sits, reaches out a hand, open and empty.
How long it seems till a hand finds that hand there laid,
While ash, still glowing, crumbles, and silence is such
That the crumbling of ash is audible. Now naught's left unsaid
Of the old heart-concerns, the last, tonight, which
Had been of the absent children, whose bright gaze
Over-arches the future's horizon, in the mist of your prayers.
The last log is black, while ash beneath displays
No last glow. You snuff candles. Soon the old stairs
Will creak with your grave and synchronized tread as each mounts
To a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then
That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts.
Even so, one hands gropes out for another, again.
My explication of the poem is at my homework site for school.
I said that there IS a happy ending, but it's not the one we get from Hollywood. This poem is, in my mind, the happy ending. It's what I wish for, what I wish for to those who also would like it. It's a happy ending that takes place at the END, that accepts the good and bad that have gone before, and that is content.
After the Dinner Party
by Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
You two sit at the table late, each, now and then,
Twirling a near-empty wine glass to watch the last red
Liquid climb up the crystalline spin to the last moment when
Centrifugality fails: with nothing now said.
What is left to say when the last logs sag and wink?
The dark outside is streaked with the casual snowflake
Of winter's demise, all guests long gone home, and you think
Of others who never again can come to partake
Of food, wine, laughter, and philosophy--
Though tonight one guest has quoted a killing phrase we owe
To a lost one whose grin, in eternal atrophy,
Now in dark celebrates some last unworded jest none can know.
Now a chair scrapes, sudden, on tiles, and one of you
Moves soundless, as in hypnotic certainty,
The length of table. Stands there a moment or two,
Then sits, reaches out a hand, open and empty.
How long it seems till a hand finds that hand there laid,
While ash, still glowing, crumbles, and silence is such
That the crumbling of ash is audible. Now naught's left unsaid
Of the old heart-concerns, the last, tonight, which
Had been of the absent children, whose bright gaze
Over-arches the future's horizon, in the mist of your prayers.
The last log is black, while ash beneath displays
No last glow. You snuff candles. Soon the old stairs
Will creak with your grave and synchronized tread as each mounts
To a briefness of light, then true weight of darkness, and then
That heart-dimness in which neither joy nor sorrow counts.
Even so, one hands gropes out for another, again.
My explication of the poem is at my homework site for school.