Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Shapiro’s "Underground" is a dreamlike meditation on dissolution, the loss of self, and the eerie realization that what seems like a dream is, in fact, an "irrevocable waking." The poem’s language is dense and shifting, capturing the way perception distorts in fog, how identity unravels when clarity is lost. Shapiro constructs a world in which reality is neither stable nor separate from the dream, where even the most tangible things—bodies, light, voices—are gradually erased.

The poem opens in a dream, yet the description of the environment is so vivid that it immediately destabilizes the distinction between dream and waking: "I dreamt it came on toward us, far away in the woods where trees, receding quickly deeper into trees, were a fog themselves." The phrase "it came on toward us" is deliberately ambiguous; we do not yet know what it refers to, only that it approaches. The trees are not merely shrouded in fog—they are fog, "green tufts and grey green colls of branch on branch already drifting in rough skeins." This description transforms the forest into something insubstantial, a place where solidity is deceptive, where reality is already in the process of dissolving.

The fog, instead of merely settling, moves actively, "ravel[ing] nearer now, as if to bear that dense recession up to the woods’ edge, / and then beyond it, thicker, through the yard." The image of "dense recession" is paradoxical—it suggests movement and withdrawal at the same time, as though the forest is both disappearing into itself and expanding outward. The fog?s movement is invasive, breaching the boundary between nature and home, "through the yard," as if consuming everything in its path.

Then comes the crucial shift: "and we knew this was no dream of ours, love, but a sudden and irrevocable waking, underground." The phrase "no dream of ours" suggests not only an external force acting upon them but also an alienation from the usual nature of dreams. What follows is even more unsettling—what seemed like a dream is actually "a sudden and irrevocable waking," but it is underground, a space traditionally associated with death, burial, or the subconscious. This reversal complicates the idea of dreaming and waking; the poem implies that true waking might be a descent rather than an emergence.

Despite their awareness, the speaker and their companion are powerless to resist: "even though we held our hands out to each other in that cool steam, to fend it off, all we could see was how the fingers paled and were gone, and then the hands, arms, faces." The fog does not simply obscure; it erases. The act of reaching for one another is futile—their bodies disappear before their eyes, consumed by an indistinct force that renders them bodiless, lost.

Shapiro reinforces this theme of dissolution by shifting from physical disappearance to perceptual entrapment: "our eyes the farthest border it had to twist through, tangling through and over till our every step was still the same dead center." The fog does not merely surround them—it enters them, twisting through their vision, eliminating even the possibility of orientation. The phrase "every step was still the same dead center" creates a sense of claustrophobic paralysis; no movement changes their position, no action shifts their reality. They are trapped, not just physically but existentially.

The final lines intensify the isolation: "the houselight?s far-off uncertain aura still as far away, and no one calling Come home now, children, nobody calling / back to the dissolving thread our calls were through that pallid air." The image of the distant house light, "uncertain," suggests a lost anchor—a home that remains unreachable, no matter how much they try to return. The absence of voices calling them home emphasizes their isolation, the loss of familiarity, the dissolution of what should be a recognizable world. Even their own voices, attempting to break through the fog, become "the dissolving thread our calls were through that pallid air." Their cries do not travel; they fray and vanish, just as their bodies did earlier in the poem.

"Underground" is a haunting depiction of erasure—of identity, of connection, of perception itself. The poem captures the slow horror of realizing that what seemed dreamlike is inescapably real, that waking does not lead to clarity but to further dissolution. The fog is not just an external force but a metaphor for the loss of self, the way people can vanish from one another’s sight, even while reaching for each other. Shapiro’s fluid, recursive syntax mimics the experience of disorientation, making the poem feel as if it is slipping away even as we read it. In the end, there is no escape—only the awareness that they are lost, unseen, and unheard, suspended in a space where every step leads only deeper into nowhere.

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