Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Attic" is a deeply moving meditation on love, loss, and the silent endurance of trauma. The poem, written in praise of the speaker’s older brother, portrays him as a boy and a man, tracing his journey from a resilient adolescent protecting his sister to a dying man confronting his fate. Howe’s work is often characterized by its stark emotional clarity, and here she weaves a narrative that captures both the quiet moments of care and the inexorable force of mortality.

The attic setting establishes a space of exile and protection, a liminal refuge where the brother, "an exiled prince," finds solace in precision and structure. His devotion to drawing buildings is more than a school assignment—it is an act of control in a world where control is elusive. His meticulousness—"his tools gleam under the desk lamp"—contrasts with the instability below, where the father’s heavy steps loom as a threat. This tension heightens as the father enters the scene: "Not until I?ve slammed the door behind the man stumbling down the stairs again does my brother look up from where he?s working." The brother remains absorbed in his imagined world, distancing himself from the household chaos, yet when the speaker needs him, he still rises, offering an awkward but profound gesture of comfort: "I know it hurts him to rise, to knock on my door and come in." His touch is hesitant, his presence strained, but the act itself is an act of love, an effort to create a world where his sister can one day trust and love a man.

The poem then shifts to an intimate recollection of the brother’s childhood fears—his fixation on blindness, his attempts to block out threatening objects, his dismantling of a chandelier in the night. These details paint him as someone perpetually aware of unseen dangers, attuned to the lurking possibility of harm. This sensitivity makes the medical ordeal he later endures all the more harrowing. The description of the eye injections is brutally physical: "they clamped his one eye open and put the needle in through his cheek and up and into his eye from underneath and left it there for a full minute before they drew it slowly out once a week for many weeks." The cruelty of the procedure, the slow destruction of his eye, and his forced resignation to the pain—"He learned to lean into it, to settle down he said"—all foreshadow the larger inevitability of his death.

Howe masterfully uses dialogue to capture the brother’s acceptance of fate. He had once promised the speaker that he would not die after their father’s death, shaking on it like a business agreement. The poem underscores the cruel irony of fate: "So much for the brave pride of premonition, the worry that won’t let it happen." The brother, who once feared dying young, got sober and began to believe in a future—only to be confronted with the certainty of his own death. His final words are both heartbreaking and intimate: "Here, sit closer to the bed so I can see you." This last request is an echo of his lifelong awareness of sight, of presence, of the need to look and be seen.

"Attic" is a poem of survival and surrender. The brother’s life is marked by careful control, his childhood fears manifesting as adult resilience, but ultimately, even he cannot hold back the inevitable. The speaker, through her elegiac praise, gives him the dignity of recognition—honoring his efforts, his love, and his reluctant farewell.

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