Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jack Hirschman’s "In Memoriam Ernest Hemingway" is an elegy that does not so much eulogize Hemingway directly as it does absorb his death into the rhythm of a journey across the American landscape. Hirschman’s poem resists overt sentimentality, instead evoking a sense of Hemingway’s passing through setting, movement, and omission. The speaker, traveling westward, learns of the writer’s death only upon arrival, emphasizing a kind of temporal and spatial distance—a delayed reckoning with loss.

The poem begins with a striking image: "Lightning-runs down the midnight Dakota sky." The electric, jagged movement of the lightning against the night sky immediately sets a tone of foreboding, hinting at sudden violence, a disruption in the natural order. Hemingway’s suicide looms over the poem, even though it is not mentioned directly until the end. The storm-like imagery reflects the magnitude of his departure—both personal and literary.

The opening scene of sleeping "in back of the wagon, feet stuck out of mosquito netting" conjures a sense of raw, unembellished existence, echoing the rugged outdoorsmanship that Hemingway often depicted in his own work. The heat, the landscape, and the minimalistic description reflect a world Hemingway himself might have inhabited—a land of wilderness and endurance.

As the journey continues, the poem moves through Wyoming in the morning, its "indian-red with ax-nose mountains of Shoshone." Hirschman’s descriptions are elemental, almost geological, as though history itself is etched into the land—mountains fighting each other, rivers carving through clay and silt. These images of struggle and erosion could be read as metaphors for Hemingway’s own battle with time, identity, and decline. The land is shaped by conflict and force, just as Hemingway’s prose was shaped by the harsh realities of war, death, and survival.

The speaker and their companion move further west, "taking back roads, filling the back of the wagon with sprigs and flowers." There is a simplicity, an almost pastoral peace to this act, a contrast to the weight of Hemingway’s death. Their avoidance of modern distractions—"Never turned the radio on. / Never read a headline."—creates a suspended space, a journey outside of time, untouched by news and the noise of civilization. In this quiet, Hemingway’s death is unknown, unacknowledged, and the world of the poem moves forward in its own rhythm.

Then comes the arrival in California, where reality reasserts itself: "The newspaper said, Papa, you were three days dead." The starkness of this revelation is amplified by its delay—the entire journey has unfolded without awareness of Hemingway’s passing, and the knowledge comes suddenly, as if time has caught up with them. The choice to refer to Hemingway as Papa—the affectionate, almost mythic moniker he was known by—infuses the line with a sense of personal loss, as if his death is not just a literary event but something familial, something that reaches deeply into the consciousness of those who admired him.

The final lines return to an external view, a shift from private grief to the impersonal sprawl of urbanity: "The cities and towns piled up again. / The sun got blinding. She put on dark glasses. / I drove slowly through the streets to the end." There is a subtle exhaustion in this conclusion—the return of cities and towns suggests the inevitable weight of the world reasserting itself. The image of the sun blinding and the woman putting on dark glasses implies both concealment and a need to shield oneself from something too bright, too raw. The last line, "I drove slowly through the streets to the end," is both literal and metaphorical—an acceptance of Hemingway’s death, of the journey’s conclusion, of an era closing.

Hirschman’s "In Memoriam Ernest Hemingway" is an elegy without direct lament, a poem that mourns through motion, landscape, and understatement. Rather than eulogizing Hemingway with grand statements about his influence or tragedy, Hirschman instead maps a journey that mirrors the passage of time itself. The speaker remains in motion, observing the natural world with a Hemingwayesque restraint, avoiding direct confrontation with death until it is unavoidable. In doing so, the poem honors Hemingway’s legacy not through grand pronouncements, but through the quiet weight of recognition—through the simple, profound fact of continuing on.

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