Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Kiss" captures a moment of profound transformation, where grief and time momentarily stand still, only to be set into motion again through physical intimacy. The poem is direct, yet its brevity and controlled lyricism convey the weight of loss and the redemptive power of human connection.

The opening lines establish the speaker’s deep emotional dislocation, the weight of mourning that has suspended her in time: "The minutes since my brother died / stopped marching ahead like dumb soldiers." This simile likens time to an unthinking, relentless force, moving forward without regard for the speaker’s suffering. The phrase "dumb soldiers" suggests both the inevitability of time and its indifference, as if life itself continues its march regardless of personal loss. The "tilted axis" of the world reflects a reality that has been unbalanced by grief, a world out of sync with the speaker’s emotional state.

The moment of contact—"his mouth on my shoulder and then on my throat"—introduces a shift, both in the speaker’s perception and in the movement of time. The phrasing is gentle and gradual, as if awakening from paralysis. The imagery of a "machine deep inside it recalibrating" reinforces the sense of an internal mechanism adjusting, realigning itself after having been knocked off course. The speaker is not merely experiencing desire; she is being reconnected to the world, pulled back into the stream of life. This physical act is not isolated but rather woven into the larger fabric of existence: "the massive dawn lifting on the other side of the turning world." This expansive image suggests that her personal moment of renewal is mirrored in the natural world’s cyclical movements.

The poem culminates in the kiss itself, an intimate gesture that holds immense symbolic weight. The moment is described not just as physical pleasure but as an almost cosmic event: "the world?s chord played at once: / a large, ordinary music rising / from a hand neither one of us could see." The paradox of "large, ordinary music" captures both the magnitude and the inevitability of this experience—love, desire, and renewal are fundamental to human existence, yet they feel extraordinary when personally encountered. The "hand neither one of us could see" invokes a sense of fate or divinity, suggesting that this moment of connection is not merely accidental but part of something larger, something beyond their comprehension.

"Kiss" is ultimately a poem about restoration. In the wake of profound loss, the body—through touch, through intimacy—becomes the conduit for re-entering life. The poem does not diminish grief, but it suggests that love, even in its simplest form, has the power to return us to ourselves, to realign the axis of our world.

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