Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Visit" is a meditation on mortality, vulnerability, and the way illness brushes against the presence of the dead. In the poem, a medical discovery—a small tumor in the speaker’s brain—is set against the backdrop of personal loss, creating a moment of existential reckoning. The poem’s restrained yet deeply evocative language allows it to balance between relief and foreboding, between the medical and the metaphysical.

The opening lines establish an atmosphere of clinical detachment: "Some fumbling, turning it this way and that: OK, here it is, the doctor said." The doctor’s words are casual, almost offhanded, as he pinpoints the anomaly. This nonchalance contrasts with the gravity of the discovery itself: "the little tumor of nerves or blood that ought not to be there." The phrase "ought not to be there" suggests a quiet violation, an unwelcome presence, something foreign nestled within the speaker’s own body. The tumor is diminutive—"little," repeated twice—but its implications are not.

Howe’s metaphor transforms the tumor into something strangely animate: "my brain’s upper right window, a little face peeking out, a child who won’t go to bed." The image is at once whimsical and unsettling. The "upper right window" suggests a high, distant part of the mind, a place of vision or awareness, yet the child-like figure resists sleep, refuses to be dismissed. This suggests a kind of subconscious awareness—perhaps of mortality, of looming illness—that lingers even in the face of medical assurances.

The doctor’s next words, "Benign is what he said, as God is said to be," introduce an ironic juxtaposition. The term "benign" is meant to be reassuring, but its pairing with divinity raises unspoken doubts. Just as one might question the benevolence of God in the presence of suffering, the speaker seems unable to accept this word at face value. The mention of God also deepens the existential weight of the moment—this is not just about health, but about the fragility of existence itself.

The next lines introduce a shift—suddenly, the speaker is transported into a space of memory or spectral presence: "but for a moment I still stood,—I could almost feel it with my foot, in the place where they had stood: John and Jane and Billy." The names—John, Jane, Billy—appear without explanation, but they carry the weight of loss. Given the recurring presence of these figures in Howe’s work, they likely refer to her brother John, her friend Jane, and Billy, another lost loved one. The phrase "I could almost feel it with my foot" suggests that she is standing in a place of the dead, as if illness has briefly granted her access to their presence. It is a moment of recognition—of standing at the threshold between life and death.

Then, just as suddenly, the speaker is back in the present: "Then I was in the corridor again, it was Spring Street in February and raining." The abrupt return to physical space—the corridor, Spring Street, February’s rain—emphasizes the thinness of the boundary between the past and the present, between presence and absence. The setting is mundane, yet the speaker is carrying something invisible but profound.

The final image is striking in its simplicity: "and the negatives slipped into a plain brown envelope so I could take them home with me." The negatives refer to the medical scans, but their association with photography—ghostly images capturing what the eye cannot see—reinforces the themes of presence and absence. The phrase "so I could take them home with me" carries an eerie intimacy; what she takes home is not just a medical result but a reminder of mortality, of the tenuousness of the body’s structures.

At its core, "Visit" is about a brush with mortality that is both minor and immense. The tumor is "benign," but the encounter with it opens a portal to the past, to the presence of the dead, to the inevitability of death itself. The poem lingers in this space of recognition and quiet reckoning, ultimately returning to the physical world, but altered—carrying, like the brown envelope, the weight of what has been glimpsed.

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