Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims’ "Memory of Places" is a sonnet of recollection, blending geography, history, and emotion to construct a love affair mapped onto the landscapes of the Iberian Peninsula. The poem moves through a series of settings—Lisbon, Galicia, Spain, Estremadura, and Finisterre—where love and loss are intertwined with the physical world. The poem's form, with its tightly controlled rhyme and shifting imagery, mirrors the way memory itself functions: fluid yet structured, intimate yet tied to grand, external forces.

The opening line immediately establishes a setting of power and turbulence: "Where the mad ocean breaks its teeth on stone." The mad ocean personifies the sea as a force of aggression, its waves compared to teeth gnashing against the stone of an unyielding coastline. The phrase evokes both the Atlantic’s fury and the emotional undercurrents of the poem’s narrative. This is not a gentle sea; it is a place of struggle and endurance, perhaps hinting at the tension in the love affair about to unfold.

The second line adds a layer of historical resonance: "And exiled royalty has crept for haven." Lisbon has long been a place of refuge for displaced monarchs, particularly during periods of European upheaval. By invoking exiled royalty, Nims situates the personal love story within a broader, historical displacement, reinforcing a theme of impermanence and loss. Love here is not only passionate but also precarious, as if it, too, is seeking refuge.

Yet, despite the turbulence, the lovers find a moment of solitude: "We came to meet, and met, and were alone." The line suggests inevitability (came to meet, and met), while the final phrase, "and were alone," signals an intimacy that isolates them from the world. This aloneness, however, may not only be a condition of passion but also a foreshadowing of solitude to come.

The exclamation "Love in Lisboa!" bursts with the excitement of memory, but it is immediately complicated by the next phrase: "Call it dove and raven." The dove, a universal symbol of peace and love, is set against the raven, often associated with death and foreboding. This juxtaposition encapsulates the dual nature of their love—tenderness mixed with an underlying darkness.

The poem moves northward to "Galicia next: like robins in the rain, / Chirp-chirping, the wagon wheels would creak us toward / Where crows in the Roman theater in Spain / Spoke in pure Poe their one bituminous word." Here, Nims contrasts the cheerful robins in the rain with the crows in the Roman theater. The robins evoke a lighthearted image, while the crows, associated with Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic sensibilities, introduce a tone of doom. The phrase "one bituminous word" suggests the unrelenting nevermore of Poe’s most famous raven, an omen of inevitable separation. The journey, once filled with chirping and movement, is heading toward something ominous.

"Estremadura and the bitter end." The name Estremadura itself suggests extremity, the farthest reaches. The phrase bitter end plays with dual meanings: geographically, Estremadura is a frontier region, and emotionally, it suggests a final, painful conclusion. Yet, Nims immediately contradicts this expectation: "But not the end; the end was Finisterre." Finisterre, the westernmost point of Spain, literally means the end of the earth. In medieval times, it was believed to be the edge of the known world. By shifting the end to Finisterre, Nims heightens the dramatic finality of this journey while also suggesting that endings are more complex than they appear—there is always another threshold.

The final couplet takes us to the sea once more: "From decks at midnight, in the surf off there / Who’d strew your smouldering letters in the bay?" The decks at midnight suggest the speaker on a ship, gazing out at the dark waves. The smouldering letters imply not only passionate words but also their destruction—perhaps letters that were burned before being cast into the water. The phrase "Who’d strew" raises an ambiguous question: was it the speaker, the beloved, or someone else who disposed of these traces of love?

The last line, "What whitecaps frothed as if to boil away?" ends the poem on an image of dissolution. The ocean, earlier described as mad, now becomes a cauldron, its waves frothing like something being boiled away. This transformation suggests the erasure of passion, the inevitable washing away of what once seemed indelible. The memory of love remains, but the ocean—the great eraser—threatens to consume it.

"Memory of Places" is a poem about love intertwined with geography, where each location serves as a marker in the relationship’s evolution. The formality of the sonnet, with its controlled rhyme and measured pace, contrasts with the turbulence of the emotions it contains. The progression from Lisbon’s passionate union to Finisterre’s finality mirrors a love affair’s arc—from exhilaration to loss. The interplay of birds (doves and ravens, robins and crows), historical allusions, and the persistent presence of the sea reinforce the poem’s meditation on impermanence. Love, like land and water, shifts, erodes, and dissolves, leaving behind only the memory of places where it once existed.

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