Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lawrence Raab’s "What We Don?t Know About Each Other" is a contemplative poem about memory, missed connections, and the shifting nature of identity over time. Through a deeply introspective voice, the speaker reflects on an old relationship, the paths not taken, and the way life moves forward even as the past lingers in the mind. The poem’s quiet, measured tone captures the wistfulness of wondering about someone who may no longer be wondering about you, and how our memories often consist of imagined versions of what could have been.

The poem begins with a seemingly casual observation: "In the next room my youngest daughter is practicing the piano." This ordinary moment—a child practicing a scale—becomes the catalyst for deeper reflection. The speaker notes, "I don’t know why that halting scale has made me think of writing to you, after so many years." The phrasing suggests that memory often arrives unexpectedly, triggered by small, unrelated details. The "halting scale" could symbolize uncertainty, incompleteness, or even the act of revisiting something from the past in a tentative, hesitant way.

The speaker then shifts to an external description of the season: "Isn’t it always the weather one begins with?" This rhetorical question acknowledges the convention of small talk, but also suggests that weather, as a marker of time, often frames deeper emotional experiences. The details that follow—"the bronze of the oaks, pale yellows of the lesser trees"—create a sensory atmosphere of autumn, a season of transition, mirroring the poem’s themes of change and reflection. The warmth that "turned into a week, then another, until we felt blessed and disconcerted" introduces the idea that even good fortune—like unexpectedly beautiful weather—can feel unsettling, much like memories that linger longer than expected.

The speaker recounts an ordinary morning with their children, "walking them out to the bus stop," but the emphasis is on the feeling: "It was one of those mornings when you feel the season change, and you think tomorrow you’ll have it again even more keenly." This fleeting moment—when the present is heightened by an awareness of passing time—leads to broader contemplation: "I remembered others." The act of recollection spirals into thoughts about how, in hindsight, "I expect always to uncover some personal design in everything." This suggests that memory has a way of imposing meaning on past events, even if that meaning is arbitrary or retrospective.

Then, the speaker acknowledges the possibility that the addressee—the "you" of the poem—may no longer think of them at all: "For all I know you may have given up thinking about me. / For all you know I may have died." This stark possibility underlines the distance that has grown between them, reinforcing the idea that, at a certain point, we stop knowing anything real about the people we were once close to. The hypothetical death scenarios—"a sudden, tragic illness, or perhaps / the time my car spun out of control on the ice."—are not just dramatic what-ifs but also metaphors for the way lives diverge unpredictably.

The car accident anecdote that follows is told with an understated irony: "What they say is true—everything slows down to a long arc, and though you do the right or the wrong thing with the wheel... the car goes on as if you?d been abandoned, or released." The moment of helplessness in the car mirrors the broader helplessness the speaker feels about the past: no matter what actions are taken, events unfold as they will. The "odd disappointment" the speaker feels when merely crashing into a snowbank instead of experiencing a more profound revelation suggests an awareness that life rarely provides dramatic, transformative moments.

Reflecting on that near-miss, the speaker notes: "That whole scene was so sharp and certain, so new, I thought I should feel as if I’d been given a second life." Yet, instead of embracing a newfound appreciation for life, the speaker’s thoughts return to what was left unsaid between them: "Then would I decide to write to you, hoping to explain how often I’d wished this or that day had gone differently, and you or I had spoken as we never did?" The use of "this or that day" reinforces the idea that the regrets are not tied to a single moment but to a pattern of missed opportunities.

The final stanza brings the poem back to the daughter’s piano practice: "Now she’s moved on to a song, ?Waltz? or ?The Three Boatmen.? You’d laugh to think it was a song at all, / but inside those stiff, hesitant repetitions I can hear the melody she’s after." This echoes the earlier "halting scale," reinforcing the theme of incompleteness. The speaker recognizes that the song is not fully formed, just as their memories and imagined conversations with the addressee remain unresolved.

The closing lines shift into a meditation on identity and time: "What we know or don’t know about each other—it doesn’t matter, except that I’ve moved beyond these careful inventions, beyond the glittery trash and souvenirs of memory." Here, the speaker suggests that while memory can be sentimental and embellished, it is ultimately insubstantial—"glittery trash and souvenirs." The shift in tone suggests resignation, or perhaps even liberation from the past.

The final image is one of mistaken identity: "And that young woman you saw this morning hurrying out of the library, fastening her coat, looked like me only for a moment." This moment encapsulates the central theme of the poem: the way the past flickers into the present, how we mistake echoes of familiarity for real connection. The speaker then completely dissolves the boundaries of self and voice: "And yet the life you’ve taken up to make this letter could not be my life, just as this voice was never mine, nor even yours." This closing thought calls into question the very nature of memory, communication, and identity. Is the speaker writing a real letter, or imagining one? Is the "you" a specific person, or simply a stand-in for all the roads not taken?

"What We Don’t Know About Each Other" is ultimately a meditation on distance—both emotional and temporal. It captures the way memories fade, how they become stories we tell ourselves, shifting and unreliable. The poem does not resolve this uncertainty but instead embraces it, recognizing that our pasts, our relationships, and even our identities remain fluid, shaped as much by forgetting as by remembering.

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