Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

David Wagoner’s “Floating Lady” delves into the artifice of illusion and its metaphorical resonance, juxtaposing the spectacle of stage magic with deeper existential themes. The poem scrutinizes the magician’s performance, focusing on the iconic "floating lady" act, while simultaneously inviting readers to explore ideas of perception, manipulation, and impermanence.

The poem opens with a series of acts familiar in stage magic: the sawing in half, decapitation, and the piercing of the body with swords. These dramatic feats, traditionally resolved with the illusionist?s restoration of his assistant to wholeness, serve as a prelude to the floating act. Wagoner’s matter-of-fact recounting—“The Professor sawed her in half and put her back / Together; chopped off her head, restored it”—reflects an audience desensitized to the fantastical through repetition. By cataloging these seemingly miraculous events with minimal fanfare, the poem underscores the paradoxical tension between awe and apathy in human experience.

The shift to the levitation act marks a transition in tone and focus. The Professor’s assistant, draped in a sheet evocative of death—“as white as any lady in a morgue”—rises effortlessly into the air. Her ascension is described with a serene, ethereal quality, emphasized by “hovers there to music, floating on nothing.” In this moment, the poem captures the audience’s suspension of disbelief, a collective yearning to transcend the ordinary and embrace the impossible. Yet, this act is steeped in ambiguity: the white sheet both conceals and defines her, creating a paradoxical tension between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.

The narrative perspective shifts to the audience, specifically to those in the balcony, who project themselves onto the floating figure. This imaginative leap—“we put ourselves in her position”—blurs the line between observer and observed. The desire to “weigh her down / To a world of unsliced bodies and mattresses” introduces a yearning for corporeality and permanence, contrasting the weightless unreality of the act. Here, Wagoner highlights the human impulse to anchor the extraordinary to the tangible, to reconcile the magical with the mundane.

The climactic moment occurs when the Professor unveils the absence of his assistant: “And she’s gone.” Her disappearance, unaccompanied by a triumphant return, subverts expectations, leaving the audience to grapple with a sense of loss and incompletion. The Professor, meanwhile, accepts his applause with detached professionalism, clutching the now-empty sheet—a symbol of what was once perceived as miraculous. His demeanor—“like a man saying Q.E.D. to a piece of logic”—suggests an air of intellectual triumph, reducing the emotional weight of the performance to a mere demonstration of skill.

Wagoner’s choice of the phrase “Q.E.D.” (quod erat demonstrandum, meaning “that which was to be demonstrated”) introduces a critical layer of irony. While the Professor’s demonstration of illusion achieves its intended effect, the emotional resonance of the act—the longing, awe, and wonder it evokes—is left unresolved. This dissonance mirrors broader existential concerns: the tension between intellectual mastery and emotional fulfillment, between appearances and truths.

The final image of the Professor standing alone with the sheet encapsulates the poem’s meditation on impermanence. The assistant’s vanishing act becomes a metaphor for the ephemerality of existence, the fleeting nature of beauty, and the inevitability of absence. In this context, the magic act transcends its theatrical origins, becoming a poignant commentary on human aspirations and their inevitable limitations.

“Floating Lady” masterfully balances the spectacle of stage magic with profound philosophical inquiry. Through precise imagery and layered symbolism, Wagoner explores themes of illusion, desire, and transience, inviting readers to reflect on the interplay between what is seen and what is felt, what is present and what is absent. Ultimately, the poem underscores the fragile boundary between reality and imagination, grounding its wonder in the shared human experience of loss and longing.

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