Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Slums" is a grim yet lyrical exploration of urban poverty, where the poet confronts the reader with a landscape of decay, crime, and suffering while meditating on the inscrutable ways of divine providence. The poem's epigraph—"God writes straight with crooked lines," a Portuguese proverb—suggests that what appears chaotic or tragic on the surface may, in some mysterious way, serve a higher, unknowable purpose. However, Nims does not offer easy redemption or forced optimism. Instead, he presents a vivid tableau of a world where human and animal lives dissolve into one another, where time drags with oppressive inevitability, and where violence and survival intermingle in a brutal, necessary rhythm.

The opening lines, The slow day burns across the rubble dial. / The shadows twist, slow as a hanging thing, set a tone of eerie stasis and suffering. The sun, typically a source of vitality, here burns—a word that connotes not just heat but destruction—across a rubble dial, implying both a broken sundial and a city reduced to ruins. Time itself is distorted and oppressive, as shadows do not merely lengthen but twist, slow as a hanging thing, evoking an image of execution, of bodies left to swing lifelessly. This line immediately plunges the reader into a world where existence is a prolonged punishment, where even natural phenomena bear the imprint of suffering.

The people who populate this environment are equally marked by despair. In faded skirts the faded children troop. / And women curse and bill collectors ring. The repetition of faded underscores the erosion of life’s brightness and possibility, as if even childhood, typically associated with vitality, has been worn thin. Meanwhile, the daily burdens of poverty—debts and relentless financial demands—reduce adult life to a cycle of frustration and desperation.

Nims then crafts an unsettling equivalence between men and animals: On curbs the men and dogs together rot. / Those are the men. They talk. The dogs do not. This couplet is striking in its brutal simplicity. The placement of rot at the end of the first line forces the reader to connect both subjects—men and dogs—as if they are in the same state of decay, discarded and stagnant. The only distinction between them is language; men still talk, while dogs remain silent. Yet, the irony is clear: their speech is futile, their words carrying no power to change their fates. Language, often considered a defining trait of humanity, is reduced here to an impotent distinction.

The next lines introduce a mechanical, lifeless rhythm to the day: Morning is sober in that rocky land. / Noon is a whistle on the heated brick. The phrase rocky land evokes a biblical desolation, an arid, unforgiving place where life struggles to take root. The mention of a whistle at noon—likely from a factory or some industrial site—suggests that time is marked not by natural rhythms but by the rigid structures of labor and machinery, reinforcing the dehumanizing environment.

Even leisure is meager: Baseball is sparse among the glass and sand. The image of children playing amidst broken glass and sand captures both the persistence of life in bleak conditions and the stark contrast between innocence and danger. The street, littered with hazards, becomes a setting where even a simple game is precarious.

The poem then turns toward evening, where the transition into night is marked not by peace but by a continuation of suffering: Twilight begins—the ruthless meters click. / Along the streets adultery and gin / Together watch the immortal stars begin. The phrase ruthless meters click suggests economic oppression—perhaps parking meters, taxicab meters, or utility meters—continuing their relentless toll. The pairing of adultery and gin suggests the twin forces of escape and vice that define life in the slums, as people seek momentary relief from hardship in illicit pleasures. Yet, the mention of immortal stars above this scene creates a jarring juxtaposition, hinting at an indifferent universe where celestial beauty exists in stark contrast to human misery.

Nims then zooms in on the microscopic world of the slums, where even insects reflect the surrounding decay: The millipede his roundhouse in the rot / Forsakes and like a rubber choo-choo crawls; / The bedbug in a teeny jeep patrols / The shot terrain of urea-colored walls. These lines infuse a grotesque humor into the scene, anthropomorphizing vermin as tiny machines navigating a war-torn landscape. The phrase urea-colored walls bluntly highlights the filth and degradation, reducing homes to spaces marked by bodily waste.

The next stanza directly invokes God, linking the poem’s brutal imagery with its epigraph: This violent page by plane and robin read / Spells god in crooked letters, hard as slate. Here, nature—symbolized by the plane (a bird or an airplane) and the robin—observes the suffering below, as if interpreting the slum’s story. Yet, what emerges is a difficult, almost indecipherable vision of divinity—crooked letters, hard as slate. If God is present in this world, He is not easily understood, and His writing is not gentle or merciful but etched in unyielding stone.

In a moment of bitter irony, Nims acknowledges religious authority figures—Is (saving your presence, nuns, who over my head / Will bust the bottles of your holy hate)—as those who might take offense at his unvarnished depiction of slum life. The phrase holy hate is provocative, suggesting that religious figures might be more inclined to condemn those who expose suffering than to address its root causes.

The poem closes with a reflection on the nature of divine creation and the strange forms it takes: Study the strange incognitos of god: / A milkweed set afire, a naked thief, / Penguin or pike, or rowdy avatar / Here in the husk and falling vaults of grief. These lines suggest that God reveals Himself in unexpected, often chaotic forms. The milkweed set afire could symbolize fleeting beauty amidst destruction; the naked thief evokes vulnerability and transgression; the penguin or pike introduce the absurdity of life’s diversity; and the rowdy avatar suggests an unpredictable divine presence. The poem ends by identifying God as the weird and fertile cubist of the slums, an artist who constructs meaning through brokenness, who sees creativity in destruction.

Ultimately, "Slums" is an unsparing vision of urban poverty, where decay, vice, and suffering are inextricably linked to divine mystery. Nims presents the slum as a brutal yet strangely fertile space, a world where God’s presence—if it exists—is cryptic and unsettling. The poem does not offer comfort but instead challenges the reader to confront the paradox of a world where suffering persists under the indifferent gaze of the stars. The slums become a living text, one where God’s crooked handwriting offers no easy answers, only the raw and unfiltered reality of human struggle.

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