Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lawrence Raab’s "Lost Things" is a meditation on memory, permanence, and the quiet inevitability of letting go. The poem reflects on the objects of childhood—stamp albums, baseball cards, toy guns—and their slow passage into neglect and disuse. Through its restrained tone and simple, declarative sentences, the poem explores how we relate to the past, not through preservation, but through the acceptance of its impermanence.

The opening lines establish the setting in spaces associated with storage and forgetting: "In the attic or cellar, back in some drawer, way back on the top shelf of somebody?s closet." The repetition of "back" and "way back" creates a sense of distance, both physical and temporal. These are not just lost things; they are things deliberately put away, left behind in places where they might never be retrieved. The specificity of the items—"the stamp albums and the baseball cards, both cap pistols in their leather holsters"—grounds the poem in a particular kind of American childhood, evoking nostalgia but also signaling a loss of relevance.

The speaker then contrasts the idea of being "lost" with the reality of these objects’ existence: "In our house there was room enough—nothing was actually lost, / even if we didn?t know where to look." This distinction is crucial. The objects are not gone, only misplaced or forgotten, much like certain memories. The house, with "room enough," represents a time when everything had a place, even if that place was unknown. But this security is temporary, as the next lines suggest the inevitable decay of these cherished possessions: "So those guns rusted, and the pages of books / turned brown or gathered mold." Time does not allow for true preservation—objects, like memories, deteriorate, regardless of intention.

The poem acknowledges this reality with a quiet but profound statement: "No one had taken proper care, but of course that wasn?t the point. / Permanence was never the point." This is the poem’s central realization. The speaker does not mourn the loss of these items because their significance was never in their longevity, but in the time and place they represented. The real concern, then, is not loss, but "a desire not to feel regret." This shift transforms the poem from a simple reflection on forgotten objects into a deeper meditation on how we deal with the past. The goal is not to hold onto everything but to avoid being weighed down by what is left behind.

The next section moves forward in time, to a moment of final reckoning: "When the time came, / both parents gone, and the house / up for sale, every closet open to inspection." The transition is quiet but profound—the world of childhood, once filled with stamp collections and adventure novels, is now subject to adult realities: death, selling a home, the forced act of sorting through the past. The phrase "every closet open to inspection" suggests not just the physical clearing of a house but the emotional process of confronting everything that remains.

Faced with the choice of what to keep, the speaker reveals an ambivalence: "I took what I thought I wanted / even if not to decide / was what I wanted." The phrasing here captures the weight of indecision—wanting to preserve something but also wanting to leave things untouched. The speaker ultimately chooses not to intervene in the natural process of decay: "to leave things / in their places, let the pictures crack / and the mice chew at the spines." This decision is neither sentimental nor careless—it acknowledges that these objects, once so important, are no longer central to the speaker’s life. Their value lies not in their preservation, but in their past existence.

The mention of books—"the Hardy Boys and / Tom Swift and His Submarine, Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship, / Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire"—grounds the speaker’s childhood in a specific literary era, evoking the excitement of adventure and discovery that once filled these pages. But the decision "not selling them or throwing them away, not saving them either" reflects an understanding that objects do not hold the past in place. They are neither sacred nor worthless; they simply are.

The final lines return to the idea of memory: "The way we think anything can be remembered, / if memory is like opening the right drawer / or taking a box down from a high shelf / for no particular reason." Here, the poem suggests that memory is not something we control, not a careful cataloging of objects and events, but something more arbitrary—something we stumble upon unexpectedly, like finding an old box in an attic. This realization makes memory feel both unreliable and beautiful, a process of rediscovery rather than storage.

"Lost Things" is ultimately a meditation on how we relate to the past—not by clinging to it, but by allowing it to exist in its own time. The poem acknowledges the human impulse to preserve, but also the necessity of letting things go. The speaker’s acceptance of decay is not an act of indifference, but a recognition that memory, like the objects we leave behind, is not something we can control. It emerges when it will, surprising us with its presence, like an old book pulled down from a shelf, its spine still intact despite the passing years.

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