Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Bedtime Story, 1979" is a meditation on disillusionment in love, tracing the shift from passion and abundance to estrangement and depletion. The poem operates within the framework of a fable—both in its title and in its extended metaphor of love as a replenishing source, like the enchanted food in children?s stories. However, this myth is slowly dismantled, revealing a love that has become transactional, finite, and ultimately abandoned like a child?s book at bedtime.

The opening lines establish a paradox: “We who agree on nothing are agreed on this / too vigilant and thorough / disenchantedness.” The irony here is striking. The couple, whose relationship has been defined by disagreement, now finds unity in their shared sense of disillusionment. The word vigilant suggests an active, almost obsessive awareness of their emotional state, while thorough reinforces the idea that nothing has been left unexamined. Disenchantment is not something that has simply happened to them—it has been scrutinized, measured, and accepted as a shared reality.

The next lines expand on this idea, framing estrangement as “common ground, / fixed vantage / of a shared estrangement.” This is an inversion of what one might expect from intimacy; instead of deepening connection, their togetherness has become a place from which they observe their own distance. The phrase “the truth of who we / really are together” suggests an almost cruel clarity—what once seemed solid and joyful has been stripped down to something bare and unromantic.

The speaker characterizes their intimacy as “more tense border crossing than a pleasure,” transforming love into something political, territorial, and filled with implicit hostility. Love, rather than being freely given, has become a calculated exchange: “pleasure less a grace accepted, / grace bestowed, / than a precise, sly adding up / of all we?re owed.” The repetition of grace—first as something received, then as something given—suggests that love once felt effortless, but is now reduced to a system of debts and repayments. The phrase "sly adding up" conveys quiet resentment, as if every act of affection is now measured, weighed, and recorded.

The central metaphor of the poem emerges in the next section, comparing love to “the charmed food / in a child?s story, food / replenishing itself / as it’s consumed.” This reference to fairytales evokes a kind of idealized, magical love, one that was once believed to be infinite and self-sustaining. The enjambment between lines mimics the process it describes—love flowing effortlessly from one moment to the next, desire feeding upon itself and continually renewing. The speaker recalls a time when love was instinctive, when “desire filled / as soon as felt, / as soon as filled renewed.” This cyclical, inexhaustible desire—where longing itself was the satisfaction—stands in contrast to the present state of the relationship.

The final shift occurs when the speaker acknowledges that this form of love no longer exists: “that love is now more like the story when, at last, / the child who resisted sleep for pleasure is sleeping fast.” The enchanted food of fairytales has run out, and love is now compared to a bedtime ritual—the end of a day, the closing of a story. The phrase “the child who resisted sleep for pleasure” subtly recalls the couple’s early passion, the unwillingness to stop experiencing one another. But now, exhaustion has set in, and the story is over.

The last few lines complete this metaphor with devastating finality: “the quaint book put back on the shelf / where it is kept, / the shade pulled shut, the light extinguished, the room left.” Love is no longer a lived experience but something stored away, a relic of what once was. The progression of these final actions—book shelved, window shaded, light turned off, room left—mirrors the gradual closing off of intimacy. Each step moves the couple further away from their past selves, culminating in departure. The book, a symbol of their love, remains in the room, but it is no longer being read.

"Bedtime Story, 1979" is a poignant reflection on love’s impermanence, tracing the transformation of passion into estrangement. By drawing on fairytales, Shapiro contrasts the early illusions of inexhaustible love with the eventual reality of emotional depletion. The poem’s strength lies in its quiet resignation—there is no dramatic betrayal or explosive ending, just the slow, inevitable closing of a once-beloved book, left behind as life moves forward.

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