Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Making Things Right" is a satirical, dreamlike exploration of regret, self-worth, and the fantasy of divine intervention correcting the perceived injustices of the past. Through humor and absurdity, the poem taps into the universal longing to rewrite personal history—to erase failures, correct misunderstandings, and reclaim lost opportunities. The speaker, presented with an omnipotent figure offering retroactive justice, initially embraces the revelations but ultimately finds himself lost in the illusions of wish fulfillment. The poem deftly critiques the human tendency to blame fate for life?s disappointments while simultaneously exposing the fragile nature of self-esteem.

The poem opens with an immediate, striking image: “He’s there when I get home: white beard, Charles Atlas muscles—just like in the Sistine Chapel.” This description establishes the visitor as a traditional, Michelangelo-style depiction of God, but the added detail of "Charles Atlas muscles" injects an element of absurdity. The juxtaposition of religious grandeur with the exaggerated masculinity of a 20th-century bodybuilder hints at the poem’s playful tone while also suggesting a figure who embodies both divine authority and an over-the-top physical perfection. When the speaker meets this deity, he remarks, “God, you haven’t aged a day . . .”—a casual, almost irreverent greeting that further sets the stage for a surreal, conversational encounter.

God wastes no time in getting to the heart of his visit: rectifying past wrongs. His first revelation concerns an event from the speaker’s youth: “You know that test you bombed in tenth grade? The one that kept you out of Honors Math?” This introduction immediately taps into a familiar human anxiety—academic failure and its long-term consequences. The speaker learns that the test was misgraded and that he deserved an A. This revelation feeds into the speaker’s underlying insecurity: the idea that he was never actually incompetent but simply a victim of error.

The pattern continues as God unearths another perceived injustice: “Remember not making the track team?” The speaker nods, only to learn that his exclusion was a clerical mistake—the coach had meant to cut Chad Webb, not him. This moment highlights the arbitrary nature of fate in the speaker’s mind. His failures, it turns out, were not reflections of his ability but of simple misfortune.

The grievances escalate as the speaker questions his rejection from Yale: “Why didn’t I get in?” God’s response—“Politics.”—is followed by an explanation that his spot was taken by “the dean’s grandson”. The brevity of God?s response underscores the bitter reality of nepotism and unfair advantage, reinforcing the idea that life’s greatest disappointments are often out of our control. The speaker, who previously saw himself as “an utter bleb” (a term denoting insignificance or failure), now realizes that his struggles were never his fault. This reassessment of his past, however, is based on an entirely fantastical premise.

The moment shifts from professional and academic regrets to the most personal of all: romantic rejection. “Remember Jo Ann?” God asks, introducing a memory that has clearly haunted the speaker. Jo Ann, the girl he had longed for in his youth, had dismissed him cruelly: “’Fraid not, Zit-Master.” This nickname encapsulates the speaker’s teenage humiliation, reducing him to a caricature of adolescent insecurity. But in this revisionist dream world, Jo Ann suddenly appears before him, transformed. “I was wild for you,” she whispers, wiggling down her slinky dress.”

This moment of ultimate validation—where the once unattainable girl reveals her hidden desire—echoes a classic revenge fantasy. Jo Ann’s confession—“I was scared of sex. You were so sexy. All the girls were wild for you.”—turns the speaker’s old insecurities inside out. In this revised version of the past, he was not rejected because he was undesirable but because he was too desirable. This reversal, though clearly a fantasy, offers him an intoxicating sense of retroactive vindication.

The final lines bring the poem’s irony to its peak. The speaker, overwhelmed with relief, “wakes up sobbing happily.” The phrase “Thank God” is repeated, but now with an entirely different connotation. While the initial use of “Thank God” might be read as an acknowledgment of divine intervention, its presence at the end of the poem reinforces the illusion: this was just a dream. The use of "sobbing happily" complicates the humor—though the scenario is exaggerated and absurd, the speaker’s relief is genuine. This suggests that even though he subconsciously recognizes the fantasy, the emotional weight of past disappointments remains potent.

"Making Things Right" ultimately satirizes the human tendency to rewrite history in ways that absolve personal failures. By placing the speaker in a dream world where God himself arrives to correct every injustice, Webb highlights the absurdity of imagining life’s setbacks as clerical errors rather than inherent challenges. At the same time, the poem acknowledges a fundamental truth: people crave validation, whether academic, professional, or romantic. The humor and irony in the poem do not entirely dismiss the speaker’s desires—they merely expose the futility of dwelling on what could have been. In the end, the poem leaves the reader with an unsettling realization: even when handed a perfect past, happiness remains elusive, because it is not the past itself that needs rewriting, but the way we come to terms with it.

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