Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lynda Hull’s "Fairy Tales: Steel Engravings" is a richly textured meditation on childhood imagination, cultural memory, and the intersection of history and myth. The poem follows a young girl who immerses herself in books, their gilt-edged pages a portal to a world of transformation and escape. Hull structures the poem as a series of layered images, moving seamlessly between the girl’s domestic surroundings, the cityscape beyond, and the narratives she reads, blurring the lines between past and present, reality and fantasy.

The opening lines establish a setting suffused with the glow of industry and the romance of dusk: "Dusk after dusk, through the smoke of industry and autumn buffed across the sky, the shy girl loses herself in books her grandmother once read as a child." The repetition of “dusk” suggests a habitual retreat into literature, a ritual of escape from the encroaching pressures of the world outside. The grandmother’s presence and the inheritance of these books suggest a continuity of longing, a shared desire for stories that offer solace and transformation. The "blue and violet spines" shimmer in her hands, evoking both the material beauty of the books and the spectral, half-lit world they contain.

The narratives she consumes—"stories of runaway children transformed to sea urchins caught by underwater journeys"—set up one of the poem’s central themes: the idea of metamorphosis and displacement. The girl’s imagination fuses with the urban landscape around her: "At some point in her mind, the Thames and Hudson braid their waters." In this blending of literary and personal geographies, Hull suggests how deeply literature shapes the ways we perceive our surroundings. The rivers, with their "steely, engraved whorls," recall the engravings in old storybooks, where static images imply movement, just as the city’s "traffic flows like the river flows across the pages."

The presence of Catholic schoolgirls outside provides a contrast to the solitary, bookish girl. Their physicality—"so purely physical, unbound in blue gym suits, cool air stippling their skin"—stands in opposition to her more interior world. They, too, are framed in a way that makes them seem almost mythical, "carrying their soul like a white, clear room." Their movement, laughter, and presence are rendered ephemeral, as if they, too, might vanish into a story. The "Nuns? faces from sidelines float, bodiless, the girl believes, on columns of air," an image that evokes both religious iconography and the disembodied figures of fairy tales.

The poem’s sensory richness deepens with the grandmother’s presence in the kitchen, "humming through a clatter of enamelware and radio news from Cuba, then the Aqueduct race results." Here, Hull seamlessly interweaves domestic life with political history. The "Bay of Pigs" reference places the poem in the Cold War era, juxtaposing the external world’s turbulence with the girl’s private, interior escape. The "spell of Caribbean jockeys? names steaming through the alarm of garlic and rosemary" turns the grandmother’s cooking into a kind of incantation, binding the personal and political into a singular moment.

This sense of enchantment extends to the women the girl sees through the parlor windows, "turning in heavy silks through brittle rings of gossip." The description recalls the elegance of another era, figures reminiscent of fairy-tale queens or society women lost in time. Their children, "descending ladders of white mist," mirror the fates of lost children in the books the girl reads—runaways who slip into myth, never to return. "It’s too late to call them home from the river’s quick current," Hull writes, reinforcing the poem’s preoccupation with inevitable departure, the current of time pulling forward those who cannot be retrieved.

The final stanza brings the girl’s reading experience to a climax. The "promises of transport" enchant her, and she "traces the caps of engraved sea-leaves that frame those faces like sunflowers turning to follow the moon’s silver imperative." The image of sunflowers following the moon—a reversal of their usual heliotropic nature—underscores the nocturnal, dreamlike quality of her longing. She finds herself already immersed in a narrative larger than herself, shaped by the rhythmic pull of tides, stories, and the ebb and flow of history.

Yet, just as she is lost in this reverie, the reality of the world outside intrudes once more: "She hears Bay of Pigs then Odds 10 to 1, and the cries fading, now turning sharper across the street as if by sheer volume, each girl might stay her departure." The juxtaposition of geopolitical tension and everyday loss suggests that departures happen on all levels—political, personal, mythical. The Catholic girls’ cries, as if attempting to halt the inevitable, serve as a poignant reminder that childhood is always slipping away, and that stories, while they may promise transformation, cannot always stave off the forces of history and time.

"Fairy Tales: Steel Engravings" captures the intoxicating blend of nostalgia, imagination, and loss that defines childhood reading. Hull’s masterful layering of images and associations allows the poem to move fluidly between different realms—the historical, the mythical, the deeply personal—mirroring the way a young mind absorbs and reshapes the world. At its heart, the poem is an ode to the power of books, the way they entwine with lived experience, and the way they offer both solace and an aching reminder of what cannot be held onto.

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