Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s “Cure for the Common Cold” is an ecstatic fever dream of transformation, desire, and defiance against winter’s oppressive sterility. The poem takes the common experience of illness and elevates it into a surreal, almost mythological event, where fever becomes not just a symptom but a passage into a heightened state of being. Hicok’s language is lush, tactile, and feverishly imaginative, layering images that blur the boundaries between body and environment, sickness and rebirth, hallucination and revelation. The poem resists simple categorization—it is at once humorous, erotic, and philosophical, treating the body as a site of both suffering and transcendence.

From the outset, Hicok personifies fever as an illicit lover, stating, “I was having an affair with fever.” This phrasing immediately reframes sickness not as an affliction but as an intimate and even seductive force. The setting is winter, described with a mix of whimsy and bleakness: trees become “old men in unbuttoned long johns,” and the wind “locked its face in the river’s ice.” These images emphasize winter’s slow, creeping paralysis, yet rather than aligning himself with the season, the speaker actively rebels against it. Under layers of blankets, he “invented July,” summoning warmth and growth from within himself, as if the fever is an act of creation rather than destruction.

The poem continues to unfold in a series of increasingly surreal transformations. The speaker’s underarms sprout daylilies, and his head becomes a field where grasshoppers wield “lyrical scythes.” In this fevered state, his body is not his own but a landscape of wild, uncontrollable growth. The motif of water surfaces as well: each eye holds a lake, and within each lake, a man in a rowboat reads Moby-Dick to trout “to make them brave.” This moment, both comical and poetic, suggests that literature itself has the power to fortify even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant creatures. Fever-induced visions allow the speaker to see not just beyond winter but beyond the ordinary, revealing an imaginative world where the boundaries between human and nature, real and unreal, dissolve.

As the fever breaks, so does the speaker’s spell of hallucination. The transition is marked by an abrupt shift: “When the fever broke and I opened the gaze of the curtains, I thought I’d parachuted into another mind.” The metaphor of parachuting suggests a kind of forced descent, a re-entry into reality that is disorienting rather than relieving. The references to Andy Hardy’s swimsuit and grape hyacinth create an odd, almost nonsensical juxtaposition, reinforcing the strangeness of returning to an ordinary state of consciousness. The speaker’s playful, summer-soaked fever dreams are replaced by the cold demands of winter: “instead of a beer in my hand I needed a shovel.” His body, which moments before was a lush, blossoming terrain, must now be covered in “January’s albino camouflage.” This return to winter is a loss, and the speaker does not embrace it; rather, he longs to go back into the fever’s embrace, to continue inhabiting the world of warmth and transformation.

The poem then shifts into a passionate defense of the fever’s liberating force. “I was happier sweating because it proves the body’s made of rain.” This line encapsulates a key idea: that heat, perspiration, and even illness affirm life, whereas cold and winter represent stagnation and deprivation. The speaker’s fevered hallucination is preferable to mundane health because it allows him to exist in a heightened state, where he can “run like a naked Swede through cow-shaped hills” and “burn away the snow with my thighs.” The physicality of these images is striking; the speaker wants to leave his mark on the world, to prove his existence not through rational thought but through the sheer intensity of bodily sensation.

The poem takes a darker turn when it characterizes winter as violence: “Winter is always rape, a curse against our hunger, because we starve for seven pomegranate seeds.” The reference to Persephone (Proserpina in the Latin tradition) underscores the poem’s mythic undertones. In the myth, Persephone is abducted by Hades and forced to spend part of the year in the underworld, her return to the surface bringing spring’s renewal. The hunger for “seven pomegranate seeds” aligns with the speaker’s own longing for a return to warmth, growth, and sensuality. But the lesson taken from Persephone’s story is not one of passive endurance; instead, the speaker urges a more active approach: “be the best at picking blossoms… be the best at harboring a thaw in your body.” The imperative tone suggests that one must cultivate the ability to resist winter, to create warmth from within, just as the fever allowed him to “invent July.”

The final image is one of defiance and creation. The speaker envisions peeling his own skin and throwing it “into the mouth of the sky like a monarch you made from scratch.” The reference to a monarch butterfly suggests metamorphosis, a self-willed transformation. The fever, once seen as an affliction, becomes a catalyst for reinvention, a force that allows the speaker to transcend the limitations of his body and environment. The gesture of throwing his skin into the sky implies both sacrifice and liberation, a final act of defiance against winter’s oppressive stillness.

Hicok’s language in “Cure for the Common Cold” is vivid, playful, and associative, driven by a rapid succession of metaphors and unexpected imagery. The poem resists conventional structure, moving fluidly between fevered hallucination, nostalgic longing, and mythic invocation. The lack of punctuation in some sections creates a breathless, almost delirious effect, reinforcing the sense that the poem itself is a fever dream, refusing to settle into a fixed form. This instability mirrors the speaker’s shifting state—caught between health and sickness, winter and summer, reality and fantasy.

At its core, the poem is about the refusal to accept dormancy, the need to fight against stagnation, whether it comes in the form of seasonal cold, societal restraint, or the body’s limitations. Fever, with its heat and hallucinations, offers an alternative existence, one in which the speaker is not only more alive but more himself. The poem ultimately suggests that to be fully engaged with life, one must embrace transformation, passion, and even suffering, turning affliction into creation, cold into fire.

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