Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Epithalamium" is a haunting, shape-shifting meditation on transformation, grief, and the fluid boundaries between perception and meaning. Traditionally, an epithalamium is a wedding poem, a celebration of union and love. Hicok’s use of the term, however, is deeply ironic—while the poem does culminate in a moment of matrimonial affirmation (“Do you take? I do.”), it is preceded by a series of dissolving images that suggest a union not only of people but of elements, griefs, and revelations. The poem resists stability, enacting the flux of identity, perception, and existence, where nothing remains as it first appears.

The opening lines introduce this shifting, unstable world: "A bee in the field. The house on the mountain / reveals itself to have been there through summer." The poem begins with a simple observation of nature, but already there is a suggestion of concealed presence—the house "reveals itself," implying it had been hidden, or perhaps overlooked. The field, the house, the bee—each seems ordinary at first, but the very act of recognition is unsettled.

Then, suddenly, "It's not a bee but a horse eating frosted grass / in the yawn light." This transformation—bee into horse—is abrupt, disrupting the reader’s expectations and establishing the poem’s central mechanism: things do not remain what they seem. The phrase "yawn light" evokes the liminal space of early morning, where the world is still stretching into being, where perception is uncertain. Frosted grass suggests both beauty and hardship, a landscape that is neither fully alive nor fully asleep.

The next lines deepen the sense of instability: "Secrets, the anguish of smoke / above the chimney as it shreds what it's learned / of fire." Smoke is given sentience, “shredding” knowledge, as if fire imparts lessons that must be unlearned in its dying. This is a powerful image of impermanence: smoke both reveals and conceals, carrying the residue of fire while dissipating into nothing. The phrase "anguish of smoke" implies that transformation is painful, that moving from one state to another—whether fire into smoke, bee into horse, or something deeper—is fraught with loss.

Then, another transformation: "The horse has moved, it's not a horse / but a woman doing the stations of the cross / with a dead baby in her arms." This is the most startling and tragic shift yet. The pastoral landscape collapses into religious and existential agony. The Stations of the Cross, depicting Christ’s journey to crucifixion, carry themes of suffering, endurance, and redemption. But here, instead of Christ, we have a woman carrying a dead child—her suffering raw, immediate, maternal. This shift forces the reader to reconsider everything prior—was the field sacred ground? Was the house not just a house, but a place of mourning?

Hicok repeats and varies the previous image of fire and smoke: "The anguish of the house / as it reveals smoke to the mountain." Now, it is the house itself that suffers, no longer just a passive structure but something that "reveals," as if it has secrets of its own. The image of "a woman / eating cold grass in Your name, shredding herself / like fire" intensifies the religious undertone. The woman, mirroring the earlier horse, consumes something lifeless, possibly in an act of penitence or self-sacrifice. The phrase "in Your name" introduces a divine presence, an ambiguous invocation that hovers over the poem, questioning whether this suffering is witnessed, sanctioned, or simply endured.

Then, in another transformation: "The woman has stopped, it's not a woman / but smoke on its knees keeping secrets in what it reveals." This erasure of form, the woman dissolving into smoke, suggests the ultimate instability of identity—what appears to be flesh and suffering is in motion, shifting into something intangible. The paradox—"keeping secrets in what it reveals"—captures the heart of the poem’s structure: revelation and concealment occur simultaneously. Smoke shows us the presence of fire while obscuring its details, just as grief makes loss visible while remaining inexpressible.

The next line expands this instability to a cosmic scale: "The everything has moved, it's not everything / but a shredding of the anguish of names." Here, language itself becomes unstable. What was "everything" is reduced to fragments of naming, as if words themselves are breaking apart. Names are central to identity, to relationships, to memory—and yet, in anguish, they unravel. This suggests a breakdown of meaning, a crisis in how we understand and categorize the world.

The final lines, however, offer a moment of resolution, if not clarity: "The marriage / of light: particle to wave. Do you take? I do." The phrase "marriage of light" references the dual nature of light in physics—it exists as both particle and wave, seemingly contradictory states that coexist. This scientific principle is framed as a union, a paradox reconciled. In this context, marriage extends beyond the human—it becomes a cosmic principle, the merging of opposing states, the acceptance of instability.

The concluding “Do you take? I do.” brings the poem full circle, finally engaging with the traditional function of an epithalamium. However, given all that precedes it, this marriage is not merely between two people, but between contradictions—presence and absence, anguish and revelation, body and dissolution, fire and smoke. The acceptance implied by “I do” is not just a vow of love but an agreement to exist within this shifting, unstable reality.

Hicok’s "Epithalamium" is an extraordinary poem of transformation and grief, where nothing is fixed and every certainty dissolves into its opposite. The poem resists simple interpretation, instead enacting its own logic of movement, where the loss of a child, the suffering of a mother, the presence of smoke, and the physics of light all become part of the same continuous reformation. This is not a conventional wedding poem, but it is a poem about union—the union of suffering with the divine, of language with silence, of the self with whatever it is that remains after loss.

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