Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "Five" is a meditation on transformation, distance, and quiet surrender, capturing the subtle shifts in identity and emotion that occur within relationships. The poem is structured as a movement through time and self-perception, beginning with a sense of separation and ending in an image of stillness and inevitability. Sparse yet resonant, the language evokes both personal history and a kind of dissolution into the present.

The opening lines establish contrast: "You move from a repose / I am far behind, and vain." The beloved exists in a state of ease, while the speaker lags behind, vain—perhaps in the sense of being self-absorbed, or in the sense of futility. There is an immediate dissonance between the two figures: one moving fluidly, naturally, while the other is caught in a state of belatedness, of striving but not arriving.

The next lines—"The simple way you take things in that are, after all, trembling."—suggest admiration for the beloved’s ability to perceive and accept things as they are, without hesitation or resistance. The phrase "that are, after all, trembling" complicates the simplicity—it acknowledges fragility, the way all things exist in a state of precariousness. The beloved absorbs the world’s tremors with grace, while the speaker lingers, uncertain.

The poem then shifts into a series of reflections on identity: "Two years ago I was a Lublin juggler, / a Dublin Jew last year was I." These lines suggest fluidity, a shifting self. Lublin juggler conjures an image of itinerant performance, movement, an act of balance and skill—perhaps a reference to the wandering Jewish entertainers of Eastern Europe. Dublin Jew could be an allusion to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the figure of Leopold Bloom, the quintessential modern exile, navigating identity and displacement. The speaker’s past selves are transitory, unstable, defined by movement and reinvention.

Then comes a moment of stillness: "Since you have put your finger on me / I have no desire, no more water in / the pail, no more moon in the water, only this snow falling, this / slow filling up of room." The act of putting a finger on suggests both tenderness and containment—the beloved’s touch seems to arrest the speaker’s motion, bringing an end to striving, to longing. The imagery shifts to absence: no more water in the pail, no more reflected moon. These images suggest a loss of reflection, of illusion, of something once carried but now emptied. The final image—"only this snow falling, this / slow filling up of room."—conveys quiet inevitability. Snow falls continuously, insidiously, not in a dramatic flurry but in a gradual accumulation. The room fills—not with presence, but with the hush of something impersonal, indifferent.

The poem moves from the energy of past selves to the stillness of now, from wandering to waiting. The shift is not necessarily one of peace—there is a sense of resignation, of inevitability, of something closing in. But there is also an intimacy in that stillness, a suggestion that in being touched, in being seen, the speaker has surrendered to something larger, something beyond the performance of identity. Hirschman’s use of understated language, his gentle merging of personal history with elemental imagery, makes "Five" a meditation not just on love but on the way love alters selfhood, leading not to culmination, but to quiet transformation.

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