Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gail Mazur’s "Keep Going" is a harrowing and intimate exploration of grief, despair, and the struggle to persevere in the face of overwhelming emotional weight. Through a blend of personal anecdote, observational detail, and extended metaphor, the poem captures the fragile equilibrium required to navigate life’s persistent slights, traumas, and losses. At its core, "Keep Going" is a meditation on survival—not triumphant or heroic, but dogged and necessary, even when meaning feels distant.

The poem begins with the accumulation of “small slights,” seemingly trivial moments that sting and linger, compounding the speaker’s sense of invisibility and disconnection. A misspelled name, a friend’s departure without goodbye, and the casual disregard of an editor at a literary gathering serve as examples of the “comedy of literary manners.” These moments are minor in the grand scheme, yet they resonate deeply, exposing the speaker’s vulnerability and the human need for recognition and connection. The speaker acknowledges the shame of being wounded by such “petty distresses,” but this honesty about their emotional impact invites empathy and highlights the universal nature of feeling diminished in social spaces.

However, Mazur quickly shifts the focus from these minor slights to the larger, more profound sources of despair pressing upon the speaker. These include the grave illness of a friend, a loved one’s inescapable depression, the condemnation of an abandoned family cottage, and, most devastatingly, the death of “K,” an innocent boy struck down by a drunken driver. Each of these tragedies weighs on the speaker’s consciousness, expanding the poem’s emotional scope from the personal to the existential. The specificity of these incidents—E’s desperate test results, L’s trapped life, K’s surprise at the moment of death—grounds the poem in vivid and heartbreaking detail, making the losses feel immediate and real.

The phrase “take action” recurs as a refrain, ironically juxtaposed against the speaker’s sense of helplessness. Whether in reference to boarding up the condemned cottage or responding to shouted insults from passing drivers, this call to act feels hollow, underscoring the speaker’s inability to resolve the deeper, more intractable issues. The effort to “keep going” becomes an act of endurance rather than purpose, a way of moving forward even when the destination feels meaningless.

The poem’s central journey, a drive along the Mid-Cape Highway to Provincetown, becomes a metaphor for this struggle to endure. The act of driving, with its automatic physical movements—“your brain still crackles normally, well-organized signals steering the right foot”—contrasts with the emotional turmoil within. The speaker’s thoughts drift between the demands of the present and the burdens of memory, a mental and emotional oscillation that mirrors the act of navigating the road. The Cape’s landscape, with its “Sahara of dunes” and “brilliant icy bay,” offers a potential for solace, but it also reflects the stark beauty and indifference of the natural world, a place where grief might “shrink in the scouring briny air.”

Mazur deepens the poem’s emotional resonance through the parallel to a climber on Everest, who, deprived of oxygen and warmth, stares at the body of a teammate with “perplexity.” This image of the climber, too numb and exhausted to feel grief, becomes a powerful metaphor for the speaker’s own emotional state. The climber’s inability to process his loss mirrors the speaker’s struggle to reconcile the weight of the tragedies surrounding her. The neutral, photographic lens through which the climber views the body reflects a kind of emotional dissociation, a survival mechanism when the body and mind are stretched beyond their limits.

The poem concludes with the act of turning off the road, a moment of decision and arrival. While the journey to Provincetown may not resolve the speaker’s despair, the act of continuing to move forward—despite the accumulation of pain—is itself a gesture of resilience. The closing lines leave the reader in a space of ambiguity: the speaker has arrived, but the emotional weight remains. The act of pulling in is not triumphant but necessary, an acknowledgment that survival often means enduring the unbearable and finding moments of rest, however fleeting.

Mazur’s language throughout "Keep Going" is precise and evocative, balancing the specificity of personal experience with the universality of grief and endurance. The interplay of trivial and monumental, personal and existential, creates a richly layered narrative that captures the complexity of navigating life’s challenges. The poem’s pacing mirrors the speaker’s journey, moving from moments of sharp detail to broader, more abstract reflections, creating a rhythm that feels both relentless and deeply human.

Ultimately, "Keep Going" is a meditation on the fragility and resilience of the human spirit. It acknowledges the weight of despair and the impossibility of escaping life’s slights and traumas, yet it also affirms the act of continuing, however haltingly, in the face of these challenges. Mazur’s poem resonates as a testament to survival—not as a grand triumph, but as a quiet, determined refusal to give up.

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