Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Beth" captures a moment of sisterly intimacy and admiration, a fleeting yet profound episode that encapsulates the mysteries of adolescence, desire, and courage. The poem unfolds in a hushed, nocturnal atmosphere, where the speaker, lying in the dim safety of "The New Addition," receives a quiet confession from her sister, Beth, who is leaving to meet a boy named Rusty. The secrecy of this meeting and the act of telling the speaker—"so that somebody would know in case anything happened"—immediately casts the night in an air of suspense and transformation.

The poem moves through the passage of time with an exquisite stillness, evoking the speaker’s half-wakefulness as she waits. The imagery of the "pool-yard’s moonlight and water" creates a dreamlike suspension, a liminal space between childhood and adulthood, innocence and experience. The waiting itself is significant; it mirrors the threshold the speaker perceives in her sister—Beth is stepping into an adult world, a world of romantic risk, while the speaker remains in the periphery, watching, wondering.

Beth’s return introduces movement and urgency: "still shaking from the snarling dog that had chased her bike down the wide and empty avenue." This sudden intrusion of danger punctuates the night, suggesting that the transition into adulthood is not seamless—it is fraught with real threats, both literal and metaphorical. The image of the dog chasing Beth underscores the vulnerability inherent in her journey, an echo of the fears that accompany desire and independence.

The moment Beth sits beside the speaker is where the poem turns luminous. "Her warm weight pulled the bed off center when she sat to tell me." The phrase "pulled the bed off center" is both physical and symbolic—Beth’s presence, her transformation, shifts the balance in the speaker’s world. The scents of summer, the "crickets lightly shaking their salt," enhance the sensory fullness of the moment, wrapping it in nostalgia. But it is Beth herself, "still terrified and radiant, just come from Rusty’s kisses," who becomes the poem’s focus. The juxtaposition of "terrified and radiant" encapsulates the paradox of young love—its exhilaration entwined with fear, its sweetness laced with risk.

The final lines reveal the speaker’s awe: "I remember thinking: This is Beth." It is a revelation, a crystallization of her sister as both known and unknowable. Beth is not just her sister; she is someone with a private world of longing and bravery, someone who has "learned to love a boy like that, without irony or condescension." This last observation is crucial. The speaker marvels at Beth’s unguarded, earnest approach to love—something she perhaps does not yet understand, something she may even envy. The absence of irony or condescension suggests a purity of emotion, a willingness to be vulnerable that the speaker recognizes as extraordinary.

"Beth" is a poem about witnessing, about standing at the edge of someone else’s experience and feeling its weight. It captures the hush of summer nights, the quiet pacts between sisters, and the way one person’s bravery can leave an indelible mark on another. Through subtle details and restrained lyricism, Howe paints a scene that is at once intensely personal and universally resonant—a moment of awakening, not just for Beth, but for the speaker, who sees her sister, perhaps for the first time, as fully her own.

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