Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Belle Waring’s Before Penicillin is a stark, atmospheric poem that captures the limitations of medicine, the weight of inevitability, and the human cost of historical circumstance. Structured in free verse with short, clipped stanzas, the poem’s rhythm mirrors the tension and finality of its subject. The absence of rhyme or metrical regularity reinforces the bleak, documentary-like quality of the narrative, allowing the imagery to unfold with an unembellished, almost reportorial precision.

The poem opens with an understated yet foreboding scene: The doctor steps into the room. / Light is December dusk. The phrase December dusk suggests both literal dimness and metaphorical decline, while the presence of sleet clouds reinforces a cold, unyielding atmosphere. The one-room shack compresses the family’s existence into a single space where illness, desperation, and waiting all converge. The repetition of all the beds are here underscores the claustrophobic setting and the shared burden of witnessing a loved one’s suffering.

Waring employs visceral, precise descriptions to communicate the severity of the girl’s condition. The doctor immediately discerns the diagnosis in her face. Gray-green. / Bone-stiff. The curt, hyphenated phrase Bone-stiff conveys both her rigidity and the stark reality of her condition—she is already beyond saving. Her brachial pulse runs in a thread / so thin it would fray if you blew on it, an image of fragility so delicate that even breath—the essential force of life—could unravel it.

The doctor’s familiarity with the child adds to the emotional gravity. He takes the hand of a child he delivered / thirteen, fourteen years ago. This line bridges the past and present, reminding the reader that he was present at the beginning of her life and is now helpless at its end. His attempt at comfort—It’s all right, Evie—is simple, futile, yet deeply human. The subsequent revelation, that the girl’s entire abdomen is abscessed, makes clear the hopelessness of her situation. The use of burst appendix, rotting for days and now spread conveys the unchecked progression of disease in an era before antibiotics, where infections that are now routinely treated were death sentences.

The father’s resistance to the doctor’s efforts adds another layer of fatalism. No Sir, Doctor, the father says. You take her / over there, she’ll die. The refusal of hospitalization stems not from ignorance but from experience; the father has likely seen others taken away only to never return. The tension between the doctor’s duty and the family’s resignation manifests in the brief quarrel, punctuated by the mother’s quiet Please, once, then is still. Her singular plea suggests a momentary flicker of hope before she accepts the inevitable.

The shift to the doctor’s own predicament expands the poem’s scope beyond the girl’s death, exposing the larger economic and emotional burdens carried by those trying to help. His wife / will be angry again, at him and the house / and the bank in town which has filed / to foreclose. This passage, embedded within the moment of loss, underscores the doctor’s own powerlessness—not only against disease but against financial ruin and domestic strain. The repetition of and mirrors the piling weight of his struggles.

The poem’s conclusion is hauntingly restrained. He washes / his hands on the bristling grass, runs them / under his mare’s black mane, and leans on her neck, an action that suggests both ritual cleansing and a futile attempt to rid himself of guilt. The mare’s fragrant, inculpable neck becomes a source of solace, its innocence standing in contrast to the suffering he has just witnessed. The word inculpable suggests not just innocence, but the absence of blame—something the doctor himself does not have the luxury of.

Waring’s poem masterfully renders historical suffering through precise, understated imagery. The free verse structure allows the story to unfold naturally, without the constraints of rhyme or regular rhythm, reinforcing the stark realism of the moment. The doctor, bound by time and circumstance, is neither savior nor villain—just another figure trapped in a world where medicine has not yet caught up with human need. Before Penicillin is both an elegy for the lost girl and a lament for all those forced to endure helplessness in the face of relentless mortality.

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