Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "By Day" is a tightly woven meditation on night, memory, literature, and the inescapability of fictions—both personal and literary. The poem unfolds as a layered reflection on how narratives, whether in books or lives, deteriorate, intertwine, and persist even in their neglect. Hirschman blends references to literature with images of loss and transience, creating a poetic space where past and present, real and imagined, merge seamlessly.

The opening line—"The night persists."—immediately sets a tone of endurance and stagnation. Rather than giving way to the morning, night lingers, suggesting insomnia, an unresolved tension, or an emotional weight that cannot be easily dispelled. This feeling of persistence extends into the next lines, where "fictions held between us / curl and grow frayed in their neglected bindings." Here, Hirschman likens the deterioration of stories to the physical decay of books. The phrase "fictions held between us" suggests not only literal books but also shared illusions, histories, or narratives that once defined a relationship. The "neglected bindings" reinforce the idea that these fictions—whether romantic, intellectual, or existential—have been left to decay, their once-cohesive structure unraveling.

Yet, even as these narratives fray, the fingers of the poem’s speaker move past them—"on another corpus." This shift introduces a second body, both metaphorical and literal. The term "corpus" refers to both a body and a collection of literary works, creating an overlap between the tactile and the textual. This ambiguous phrasing suggests that while one set of fictions disintegrates, the speaker’s attention moves to another text, another body, another history.

Hirschman then introduces a stark image: "A young American suicide, the intricate windings / Of a derelict through boyflowering Alexandrine Streets." This passage evokes an individual lost in a labyrinth of poetic and urban experience. The phrase "boyflowering" carries multiple layers—suggesting youthful beauty, potential cut short, and possibly an allusion to queerness or innocence tinged with tragedy. The "Alexandrine Streets" reference is particularly dense, evoking the French Alexandrine poetic form, the ancient city of Alexandria, and perhaps the literary allusions present in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. There is a sense of wandering here, both in physical space and in the literary imagination.

The next lines—"ryder and nightwood and the ghostly loves / Of a woman not yet risen from her sleep, Justine"—further deepen the poem’s engagement with literature. "Ryder" refers to Djuna Barnes’ novel Ryder, while "Nightwood" is one of her most famous works, a deeply poetic novel about love and loss. "Justine" recalls both Durrell’s Justine, a novel about passion and betrayal, and the infamous Marquis de Sade’s Justine, a tale of suffering and moral corruption. By invoking these literary figures, Hirschman blurs the line between fiction and reality, embedding his own poetic meditation within the echoes of past works. The "ghostly loves" reinforce the notion that love, memory, and narrative all exist in a spectral state—both present and absent, felt yet intangible.

The final line—"The palpable pithed strings the mind is soundless of."—is enigmatic yet powerful. The phrase "palpable pithed strings" suggests something both tangible (palpable) and emptied out (pithed, referring to the removal of an animal’s spinal cord, a process used in dissection). This contradiction—something both felt and hollowed out—captures the poem’s essence: the tension between what lingers and what has already decayed. The phrase "the mind is soundless of" suggests an absence of awareness, a loss of connection to these resonant threads. The fictions, the lovers, the literary echoes—though once deeply felt—now exist outside of perception, just beyond the reach of the conscious mind.

"By Day" is an elegy of dissolution, where stories—whether personal, historical, or literary—fade but never fully disappear. Hirschman presents love, literature, and memory as intertwined forces, subject to erosion but persisting in traces. The night remains, the fictions fray, the figures of the past drift through the streets of thought, and the mind, though distanced, remains haunted by what it can no longer fully grasp.

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