Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Scree" is a harrowing meditation on illness, mortality, and the struggle between resistance and surrender. The poem’s title—scree, the loose, unstable debris that accumulates on a mountainside—sets the central metaphor of the poem: a steep, perilous descent where each foothold crumbles, leaving nothing stable to hold on to. Shapiro uses this imagery to capture both the physical deterioration of the dying person and the emotional exhaustion of the speaker, who watches and, in his own way, suffers alongside them. The poem’s form—staggered, clipped lines that break into cascading phrases—mimics the instability of the experience, the way life, once orderly, disintegrates into an uncontrollable slide.

The poem begins with a stark visual: "Long scree of pill bottles / spilling over the tipped brim / of the wicker basket, fifty or more, / a hundred." The image of the overturned basket, medicine tumbling out in excess, immediately suggests disorder, an overwhelming accumulation of attempts to stave off the inevitable. The number of bottles—unspecified but vast—emphasizes the sheer scale of intervention, of medical necessity, and yet, implicitly, of futility. These are not just pills but markers of time, the physical remnants of a body’s slow battle against decline.

Each bottle bears the dying person’s name: "your name on every one and under / your name the brusque rune of instructions— / which ones to take, how many, and often, / on what days." The word rune—a term that suggests both mystery and command—casts these instructions as cryptic symbols of control, of medical authority, dictating the rhythms of survival. Yet, despite the meticulous labeling, the treatment regime becomes unmanageable: "impossible / toward the end to keep them all straight, / not even / with your charts, your calendars." The person, once efficient and organized, finds even this last structure slipping away. The loss of control, so devastating to someone accustomed to planning, marks the deeper tragedy: even the most precise preparations cannot withstand the inevitable breakdown of the body.

The poem shifts into its central metaphor—climbing and falling. "For there was / still a future in it, though the future reached / only from one bottle to / the next, from pill to pill." The illusion of forward motion remains, but the increments are shrinking. The phrase "each one / another toehold giving way / beneath you on the steep slope / you never stopped struggling against" captures both the will to survive and the sheer impossibility of it. The climb is no longer about reaching a peak but about simply not falling. The enjambment reinforces the instability—each line break mirrors a slipping foothold, an erosion of ground. The word "unable not / to climb" signals not just determination but compulsion, the human instinct to fight, even when the battle is unwinnable.

Then, a devastating pivot: "and then, when climbing / was impossible, not to try slowing / the quickening descent." The transition from ascent to descent marks a shift from resistance to inevitability, from struggle to damage control. The will to live transforms into a will not to die too quickly. The body, "thinned to the machine / of holding on," is no longer a vessel for living but for enduring, for preventing the final slip.

The speaker, bearing witness, is equally trapped—exhausted "by the vigil, with all your medicine / spread before me, / looked for something, anything / at all to help me sleep." This moment introduces the speaker’s own desperation, his need for relief—not from caregiving itself but from the unbearable awareness of the other’s suffering. His exhaustion parallels the dying person’s, though in an inverted form: where they fight to stay awake, he fights to escape, if only temporarily. His search for sleep is an admission of helplessness, of the limits of endurance in the face of death.

The following lines are among the poem’s most haunting: "aware of you, your gaunt hand / clutching the guardrail, your eyes / blind, flitting, scanning, it seemed, / the air above them / for their own sight." The image of hands clutching a rail suggests the last desperate grip on life, but the eyes, now blind, search for something no longer within reach. The movement of the eyes—flitting, scanning—implies an active search, as if the person is still trying to orient themselves, to reclaim what has already begun slipping away.

Then, a final heartbreaking sound: "and the whimper / far back in the throat, the barely / audible continuous / half-cry half- / wheeze." The broken syntax here mimics the breath itself, halting and fragmented. The inability to distinguish between "half-cry half-wheeze" reflects both the speaker’s uncertainty—are they in pain? Are they trying to speak?—and the way suffering, at this stage, becomes indistinguishable from the act of merely existing.

The poem’s last movement deepens the speaker’s conflict: "I wanted / to sleep, / I wanted if just for that one night / to meet you there on that steep slope." The wish is not just for rest, but for a kind of shared experience, a way to accompany the dying person into their struggle. The imagery becomes more explicit: "the two of us together, facing / opposite / directions." The speaker is "looking down, desiring / what you, still looking up, resisted, / because you were." This final contrast is the poem’s most devastating realization. The speaker, exhausted, wants the relief of descent—wants to give in to the fall. The dying person, still in the process of resisting, still clings to the impossible, looking upward even as the ground slips away. The poem ends not with resolution, but with the profound dissonance between these two stances—between the living, who long for an end, and the dying, who long for more time.

"Scree" is a poem of excruciating honesty, capturing the unbearable limbo of watching someone fight a battle that cannot be won. Shapiro’s use of geological metaphor makes the experience tactile, turning illness into a physical landscape that both the dying and the living must navigate. The fragmentation of syntax and line mirrors the instability of the moment, reinforcing the sense that everything—control, identity, time—is slipping away. What makes the poem so powerful is its refusal to offer solace; it does not pretend that death is beautiful or that suffering can be redeemed. Instead, it leaves us in the unbearable space between resistance and surrender, where the only certainty is that the ground beneath us will not hold.

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