Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Covenant" is a deeply layered portrait of a family bound by habit, grievance, and an unspoken awareness of impending loss. The poem moves fluidly through present time and the near future, capturing the nuances of familial tension, unacknowledged grief, and the ways in which people maintain order, even in the face of the inevitable. Shapiro’s meticulous attention to gesture, voice, and domestic detail builds a world where everything is ordinary and yet, in its accumulation, tragic. The poem’s title suggests an unspoken agreement—perhaps the silent contract that family members enter into, one of shared histories, grudges, and obligations that continue even after death.

The scene unfolds around a meal that has just ended, the table still cluttered with “the smear of egg yolk / and the torn rolls disfiguring the china.” The eldest sister, tense and focused, waits impatiently to clear the dishes. Her meticulousness, her refusal to leave the mess untouched, signals a need for control, as if by cleaning up, she can restore order to something beyond the table. Her actions are not simply about tidiness but about maintaining a structure, a role that she has likely played for years. The brother, in contrast, is relaxed, lighting his pipe, making an offhanded, crude joke to the middle sister—an old routine that suggests familiarity but also a deflection from anything too serious.

In the background, nearly unnoticed, the youngest sister, Irene, sits disengaged, a cigarette dangling from her fingers, “her legs cross that the ashtray in her lap / spills ash over the sunflowers of her housedress.” The sunflowers on the fabric are a quiet, ironic contrast to her apathy, their brightness dulled by the creeping presence of ash. The line that follows—“Her death is just three months away.”—drops suddenly, stark and unembellished. This foreknowledge changes everything that precedes it, infusing each moment with an inescapable tension. The sister?s disinterest, the brother’s jokes, the eldest sister’s obsessive cleaning—all take on a different weight in light of what is coming. The poem does not dwell on sentimentality; instead, it moves forward with the same observational precision, allowing the reader to see what the family, in their own way, is avoiding.

The passage that follows captures the texture of everyday conversation, filled with anecdotes, jokes, and small grievances: a cousin’s illness, a daughter who won’t diet, a friend’s vanity in the face of sickness. Their voices repeat familiar refrains—“Listen, what are ya gonna do?”—as if these expressions have the power to ward off deeper reflection. The habit of talking about bad news, of rehearsing misfortune, becomes a way of keeping true catastrophe at bay. The poem suggests that as long as they can keep telling stories about others, they do not have to acknowledge what is happening within their own family.

The storytelling takes a darker turn with the tale of “the Schmo”—a man who, having thrown away his medication in a moment of happiness, collapses into despair, losing his wife and his sense of self. The anecdote is delivered with a mix of pity and humor, but beneath it lies an unspoken fear: that stability is always fragile, that any sense of well-being is precarious. In telling this story, the family distances themselves from their own inevitable losses, as if making someone else’s suffering the focus can protect them from their own.

The poem moves forward in time, leaping past Irene’s death to the recriminations that will follow. The eldest sister will blame the others for moving away, for not being there to witness the slow unraveling, for leaving her to bear the burden alone. The passage captures the way grief often manifests not as sorrow but as resentment, as a justification for long-held grievances: “And selfish. She was selfish, that one. After / all those years of living with that bum, / her husband, may his cheap soul rest in peace, / didn’t she deserve a little pleasure?” The bitterness here is complex—there is anger, but also a reluctant admission that Irene, even in her neglect of herself, deserved more than she got. The eldest sister’s final memory—running in with nothing but a dishtowel to beat down the flames, while Irene simply sat there—is both literal and symbolic. She has always been the one to clean up, to take responsibility, while others let the disorder accumulate.

The final lines return to the present moment, stretching it into a suspended space where time has not yet caught up with them. The heat from the sun slowly increases, unnoticed, just as the inevitability of loss has not yet been fully registered. The moment is stretched so thin that even the smallest gesture—the cigarette rising to Irene’s lips—feels prolonged, as if delaying what comes next. “Nothing bad, right now, can happen here / except as news.” This line is both a reassurance and an illusion. The family can still believe that loss is something that happens elsewhere, something that can be contained in conversation, rather than something already present at the table with them.

The eldest sister, ever the one to maintain order, dreams of cleaning, of scrubbing away the remnants of the meal, “if it gets them clean.” But the real disorder, the real accumulation of time and loss, cannot be washed away. The poem ends with this futile, ritualistic attempt at control, the hot water scalding her hands as she holds each dish under the jet. This final image is both tactile and deeply metaphorical—pain is inevitable, but the effort to keep things clean, to maintain some illusion of order, continues.

"Covenant" is a study in how families live with knowledge they refuse to fully acknowledge. The poem captures the weight of obligation, the ways in which roles are performed and grievances sustained, and how the habits of conversation serve as both a comfort and a form of denial. Shapiro’s language is restrained yet deeply evocative, allowing each detail to speak for itself. The unspoken grief beneath the surface is what makes the poem so powerful—love is present, but it is expressed through habit, through tension, through the stories they tell each other to keep the worst of reality at bay.

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