Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Fanny Howe’s "Starlet" is a meditation on loss, time, and the illusory nature of desire. The poem unfolds through a narrative of emotional devastation, weaving together personal anguish, philosophical questioning, and cinematic imagery. The title, "Starlet," evokes Hollywood, dreams of fame, and the ephemeral nature of beauty, suggesting that the poem itself operates within the realm of illusion and disillusionment.

The opening lines—"That terrible day my heart took a blow that nearly killed it."—set a dramatic and personal tone. The immediacy of "terrible day" and the near-fatal impact on the speaker’s heart establish a sense of profound emotional injury. The imagery that follows—"While silver lilac shivered in the Hollywood Hills, I packed and prepared to fly."—juxtaposes nature’s fragility with the artificial glamour of Hollywood, creating an atmosphere of transience and impending departure. The "silver lilac" shivering suggests both beauty and vulnerability, reinforcing the poem’s theme of loss.

The speaker’s heart—"once red as a valentine"—a symbol of love and vitality, undergoes a transformation: "seemed to contract and blacken like a prune." This striking simile conveys the physical sensation of heartbreak, shrinking and desiccating the heart until it loses its vibrancy. The contrast between the bright, sentimental image of a valentine and the shriveled prune reflects the stark reality of disillusionment.

A pivotal revelation follows—"If you want to know the truth, I missed happiness by inches." The speaker frames happiness as something nearly attained, but ultimately lost. The phrase "A meeting (planned for seven years) never took place." introduces the idea of long-anticipated destiny thwarted by circumstances. The phrase "The person lost me. I could not find him." shifts responsibility onto both parties, suggesting mutual failure, fate, or a cosmic misalignment. The ambiguity of "the person" makes the loss universal, applicable to romantic, platonic, or spiritual relationships.

The next passage—"As a result, my personal pulse dropped the formula for survival."—suggests that this missed connection destabilized the speaker’s very existence. Survival itself is framed as a formula, something logical and structured, now abandoned. The following lines—"I fled the city of colors, emptying, with each mile, my will to go on."—depict an act of self-erasure, as if leaving behind Hollywood (a city of illusion and spectacle) also means shedding personal identity and hope.

The image of the "night freeway" reinforces the sense of aimlessness, while the metaphor of the heart—"like a body in a pine box, calling ?Preacher, keep it short, for God?s sake.?”—equates emotional devastation with death. The heart, now a corpse, pleads for brevity, as if the weight of existence has become unbearable. The dark humor in this plea evokes the resignation of someone who has lost faith in meaning or recovery.

The poem then shifts into a philosophical inquiry about loss and discovery. The numbered reflections—"1. To be lost is to be undiscovered."—redefine loss not as absence, but as a state of waiting to be found. The second proposition—"2. To find is to discover what was already lost and waiting."—implies that what is sought is inherently present, waiting to be uncovered. But the speaker then complicates this premise: "But where is the object of desire in fact?" The question undermines the certainty of discovery, suggesting that the sought-after thing may not exist in any fixed state.

The final, most abstract inquiry—"Is it really out there, waiting? / How can it be there, when it requires time to find it? / And if the time required to get there doesn?t yet exist, how do I know it?s there at all?"—challenges the very structure of time and longing. The speaker questions whether what is sought (love, meaning, fulfillment) is external and predetermined, or whether it only exists through the act of searching. The paradox—that something must exist in the future in order to be found in the present—suggests an inherent futility in desire itself.

"Starlet" thus functions on multiple levels: as a personal lament, a critique of Hollywood’s illusions, and a metaphysical meditation on the nature of longing. The title evokes an image of fleeting fame and unfulfilled promise, mirroring the speaker’s own near-attainment of happiness. The philosophical turn at the end destabilizes the poem’s earlier narrative of personal heartbreak, raising deeper existential questions about whether loss and discovery are real or merely constructs of time and perception.

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