Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Parting: 1940" is a meditation on the universal experience of departure, imbued with a sense of historical continuity and existential uncertainty. The poem, set against the backdrop of 1940—a year marked by the spreading devastation of World War II—extends beyond its immediate historical moment to encompass the larger, timeless human experience of separation. The tone is elegiac, evoking the emotional weight of parting not just in the poet’s own time but across centuries, binding the personal and the collective, the intimate and the historical.

From its opening lines, the poem captures the anguish of separation, emphasizing the unknowability of return: Not knowing in what season this again / Not knowing when again the arms outyearning. The repetition of not knowing immediately establishes a theme of uncertainty, the lingering fear that a farewell may be final. The phrase arms outyearning conveys both the physical act of embrace and the emotional desire for connection that extends beyond the immediate moment. Nims emphasizes how the parting moment itself—marked by the flung smile in eyes not knowing when—becomes suspended in time, its significance deepened by the absence of clear resolution.

The second stanza further complicates this uncertainty by undercutting the very idea of assured return: Not sure beyond all doubt of full return / Not sure of time now nor the film’s reversal. The mention of film’s reversal invokes an impossible longing—the wish to rewind time, to undo the departure. The following line, This all done opposite, the waif regathered, suggests a reversal that cannot happen: the separation, like a lost child (waif), cannot simply be undone. This disruption of temporal certainty reinforces the fragility of human connections, highlighting the limits of control in the face of history’s forces.

The poem then moves beyond the individual farewell, placing the parting within a larger framework of displacement and wandering: Like our lost parents in the blinded song / We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow / Through suburbs take our solitary way. Here, Nims evokes a biblical or mythological resonance, where loss and exile are fundamental aspects of the human condition. Lost parents in the blinded song could reference the expulsion from Eden or the generational cycles of migration and exile. The image of walking with bag in hand suggests both the refugee and the traveler, reinforcing the sense of historical recurrence.

Even as war looms in 1940, the poem does not attribute the significance of parting solely to the conflict: Not that all clouds are garrisoned and stung / Not that horizons loom with coppered legions / Not that the year is dark with weird condition. These lines negate explicit causality—the pain of separation is not only due to war. Though the world in 1940 is in turmoil, the emotions Nims describes are not confined to this specific moment. The repetition of Not that distances the poem from immediate political history, suggesting instead that all departures throughout history have carried the same weight, regardless of external conditions.

This idea culminates in the final two stanzas, which emphasize the universality of farewell: All who parted in all days looked back / Saw the white face, the waving. And saw the sea / Not knowing in what season this again. The image of looking back at a white face—perhaps pale with sorrow, perhaps distant in the fading light—suggests the pain of those left behind. The mention of the sea introduces a symbolic element: water as the boundary between presence and absence, the threshold between connection and separation. Seas divide continents as war divides people, but they also connect distant lands, just as partings presuppose the possibility of return. Yet, the repetition of not knowing in what season this again reiterates the poem’s central theme—parting is defined by uncertainty.

The closing lines extend the farewell beyond the poet’s own time: For well they knew, the parters in all evenings / Druid and Roman and the rocked Phoenician: / The blood flows one imposed way, and no other. Here, Nims situates the act of parting in the deep past, invoking Druid and Roman and the rocked Phoenician as representatives of ancient civilizations that, too, experienced the pain of separation. The final line—The blood flows one imposed way, and no other—is a striking conclusion. It suggests an inescapable fate, a preordained movement of history and human experience. The phrase one imposed way emphasizes inevitability, reinforcing the idea that separation and loss are not choices but conditions of existence.

Throughout the poem, Nims blends classical and modern elements, personal loss and historical displacement, to create a meditation on the inexorable nature of parting. The sparse yet evocative language allows for a multiplicity of interpretations—whether read as a response to the upheavals of 1940, an elegy for the displaced, or a broader philosophical reflection on the nature of separation. In doing so, "Parting: 1940" becomes a poem of both its time and all time, capturing the poignancy of departure as an experience shared across generations and civilizations.

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