Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Faulkner" is a meditation on literature, grief, and the ways in which books become entangled with life’s most painful moments. The poem takes place during the final days of the speaker’s brother John, juxtaposing his slow decline with the presence of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel about death, family, and the burdens of the living. Through fragmented recollection, Howe reveals how literature both connects and fails to connect with reality, how memory blends with fiction, and how grief can render narrative structure meaningless.

The poem begins with a sense of obligation: "During the last two weeks of John’s life, Joe was reading As I Lay Dying for his English class. He had to give an oral report, and John kept asking me to read it. You’re an English teacher, he said, you know what they want." Here, literature is framed as an assignment, something required rather than chosen. There is a quiet irony in this—while Joe must analyze the book for school, John, who is actually dying, is interested in what it has to say. The request—"you know what they want"—suggests that John seeks something more than academic interpretation, perhaps an insight into his own experience. Yet, the book remains unread.

The novel drifts through the house, moving "from the kitchen to the bedside table to the pillows of the living room couch." This detail subtly captures the way objects—especially books—move in a home filled with illness and waiting. There is no urgency in reading it; instead, it lingers, a reminder of both intellectual engagement and emotional avoidance.

When the speaker finally asks Joe to summarize the book—"late one night when we were making peanut butter sandwiches"—her failure to grasp its narrative underscores how grief can disrupt understanding. She cannot follow "the good brothers from the bad brothers, who was the mother’s favorite, really?" The reference to As I Lay Dying—a novel that follows a family?s chaotic journey to bury their mother—carries a heavy resonance, but its details blur, lost in the weight of personal experience. The pounding of nails into a coffin—an image of preparation for death—appears as an intrusive, unprocessed motif.

Only after John dies does the speaker finally pick up the book: "The afternoon John died, I picked it up, waiting for the food from the aunts and the cousins. I tried to read it that night before I fell asleep and stopped. I don’t know what finally happened." The act of waiting—now for food instead of death—mirrors the liminality of grief. The inability to finish the book reflects the futility of seeking closure through narrative. Fiction, which once promised structure and meaning, falters in the face of actual loss.

The poem closes with a slip in literary memory: "Caddy smelled of trees, I kept thinking during those days and nights of the wake and the funeral. But that was another book, wasn’t it? That was the idiot brother talking." The line recalls Benjy Compson from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, who associates his sister Caddy with the scent of trees. This confusion—mixing one Faulkner novel with another—suggests how grief disorients thought, making even literature unreliable. In a moment of mourning, the mind reaches for something familiar, yet memory collapses distinctions, blending stories and voices.

"Faulkner" is a meditation on the limits of literature in the face of real grief. Though books often provide solace or structure, in the immediacy of loss, they can become unmoored from meaning. The novel’s presence in the house, its unfinished reading, and the blurring of one Faulkner text with another all point to the way grief disrupts narrative comprehension. The poem ultimately suggests that while literature mirrors life, it cannot always clarify it—sometimes, all that remains is the echo of a sentence, an image from another book, a memory that does not fully belong to the moment but remains, nonetheless.

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