Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Fruit Cellar" unfolds as a quiet meditation on memory, secrecy, and the weight of inherited history. The poem situates the speaker in the basement of her childhood home, where her father’s tools, preserved food, and wartime relics create a world distinct from the living spaces above. The fruit cellar is a liminal space—part pantry, part workshop, part archive—where objects hold stories, and the past lingers in a way that feels both intimate and mysterious.

The opening lines introduce the father’s tools: "hammers hanging from nails by their heads and saws of diminishing sizes mounted on the wall like the heads of small animals." This image immediately evokes a sense of stillness, of objects preserved rather than used. The father’s presence is implied, but his absence is more striking. His tools remain untouched, like relics of a time when work was done, but no longer. The simile comparing the saws to the heads of small animals suggests both reverence and an eerie lifelessness—objects waiting for hands that no longer reach for them.

The poem shifts to the food supplies—"rows and rows of ketchups and mustards and mayonnaise," emphasizing the abundance and order of these stored goods. The repetition of "family-sized" highlights not just practicality but a form of preparedness, a sense of security rooted in accumulation. The reference to "the cans of fruit cocktail my father had loved best in the war" introduces a personal detail that anchors this storehouse in memory. The father’s past—his wartime experience—lingers in these simple objects, making them more than just provisions.

Darkness pervades the fruit cellar: "Dark in the corners, and darker inside the wooden bins half filled with onions and potatoes." This description suggests both physical obscurity and a deeper symbolic shadow. The younger children fear this space, requiring reassurance from above, as if they are "in coal mines when the rescue is narrow and long." This metaphor underscores the cellar’s depth and separation from the world above, evoking a sense of peril, of being forgotten.

Yet, for the speaker, the fruit cellar is a refuge. "I loved it there, late afternoons, no need to be accounted for." The cellar provides solitude, a retreat from the demands of family life. It is here that she engages with her father’s past, not through stories he has told but through artifacts she discovers. The trunk becomes a portal to an earlier time, filled with letters from women who once knew her father. These letters—"earnest, sexless letters that they might have written in groups, as women roll bandages, all chatting together"—suggest a communal effort, a distant war-era practice that now feels removed from the father she knows. The mention of "Mrs. McDermott, and Mrs. Dollinger," who have since become familiar family friends, creates a sense of time folding in on itself—the past living within the present.

The speaker’s mother appears only briefly, in "one or two letters," from a time "years from knowing she would marry him." This small mention places her parents in a past before their shared life, emphasizing how contingent and unknowable the future must have seemed then.

The poem’s most haunting moment arrives with the father’s supposed war trophy: "the sword my father said he’d stolen from a dead Japanese soldier, but even then I knew he hadn’t." This childhood intuition—knowing without being told that the story was false—adds a layer of complexity to the father’s presence. The sword, "curved a little and still shiny," represents a history both real and fabricated, a tangible object wrapped in myth. The speaker does not challenge the lie but instead holds it "like a secret, unrecoverable history." The act of lightly touching the blade suggests reverence, curiosity, and perhaps even a quiet understanding of her father’s need for this fiction.

The closing lines reinforce the speaker’s role as a keeper of history. She "returns" the objects, closing the trunk as if preserving something sacred, before carrying back upstairs what she originally came for. The return to the ordinary after this ritual of discovery underscores the divide between past and present, between what is known and what remains hidden.

"Fruit Cellar" is a poem about inherited memory, about how history is stored in objects and how children learn to read between the lines of the stories they are told. The speaker navigates a space both practical and symbolic, encountering her father’s past not through his words but through the things he has left behind. The poem’s quiet power lies in its restraint—Howe does not overstate the significance of these discoveries, allowing the reader to feel the weight of what is unspoken. It is a poem of preservation, of touching the past without fully grasping it, and of carrying its mysteries forward into the light.

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