Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Dugan’s poem "851" weaves together a moment of mundane urban incident with deep existential reflection, encapsulating the sudden intrusion of the natural into the human-made world and its broader metaphoric implications about mortality and life’s fleeting nature. The poem commences with a simple yet startling event—a pigeon colliding with the narrator—prompting a cascade of thought that draws connections between the randomness of accidents and the inevitability of death.

The poem begins abruptly: "A flying pigeon hit me on a fall day because an old clothes buyer's junk cart had surprised it in the gutter: license 85I." This opening situates the reader immediately in the midst of an action, a mundane yet unusual occurrence turned significant through its unexpectedness. The details are specific—the startled pigeon, the junk cart, the gutter, even the cart’s license number—lending a visceral reality to the scene. This specificity not only grounds the narrative in the tangible world but also mirrors the detailed attention we might pay to events when we are jolted out of routine by surprise.

Following the collision, Dugan describes the contents of the junk cart, which include "summer slacks and skirts" that appeared "not empty and not full of their legs, and a baseball cap remained in head-shape." These descriptions of clothes devoid of their human wearers evoke a sense of absence and presence, subtly introducing the theme of death. The clothes maintain the shapes of their absent owners, suggesting a lingering human essence, a ghostliness that mirrors the fleeting, ghost-like touch of the pigeon. This imagery elegantly bridges the immediate, physical impact with the conceptual, leading into the poem’s broader meditation on mortality.

Dugan then expands this theme, personifying Death as "a complete collector of antiques who finds, takes, and bales each individual of every species all the time for sale to god." This metaphor transforms Death from a mere biological endpoint into an active, almost entrepreneurial figure who collects lives like antiques, preserving each individual’s uniqueness even in their end. This depiction adds a layer of inevitability and natural order to the concept of death, suggesting a transactional nature to existence where lives are eventually 'sold' to the divine, further abstracting the human experience into a cosmic marketplace.

The closing line, "and I, too, now have been brushed by wings," circles back to the personal encounter with the pigeon, using it as a metaphor for the narrator’s own brush with mortality. The touch of the pigeon’s wings becomes a symbol for the touch of death—a light, momentary brush that serves as a reminder of life’s fragility and the ever-present nature of death in the backdrop of our daily lives.

"851" by Alan Dugan is a masterful short poem that moves swiftly from a literal event to a profound contemplation of life and death. Through vivid imagery and symbolic layering, Dugan captures a moment of clarity provoked by the unexpected, reminding us of the transient, precious nature of existence.

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