Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Charles Harper Webb’s "Waiting" is a meditation on the human experience of anticipation, exploring the tension, impatience, and underlying existential anxiety that accompany the act of waiting. Through a series of cascading images, the poem captures moments both trivial and profound, illustrating how waiting permeates every stage of life, from childhood impatience to the anxious dread of mortality. The poem’s relentless momentum, built through its listing structure and repetition, mirrors the restless human tendency to yearn for the future while neglecting the present.

The poem opens with familiar frustrations: “We sigh and fidget, waiting for the class to end.” The description of classroom impatience immediately evokes childhood or adolescence, a period often defined by an eagerness to escape boredom. The transition to the next image—“We nod like therapists, and say ‘Uh-huh,’ waiting for the nagging to wind down, the battering tongue to punch itself out”—shifts from youthful impatience to adult endurance, capturing the way people tolerate conversation they do not wish to engage in. Webb’s choice of verbs—battering and punch itself out—implies that speech can be something to endure, something that physically wears us down.

As the poem progresses, Webb moves seamlessly between the physical and psychological dimensions of waiting. “We curl in bed waiting for our guts to calm, the chills and headaches to subside.” Here, waiting takes on a bodily discomfort, reinforcing the idea that patience is often a forced state rather than a chosen one. The speaker acknowledges how waiting can drive people toward distraction and indulgence: “We can’t stand the tension, we decide, and smoke and drink and screw.” This moment reflects how people attempt to escape the anxiety of anticipation through temporary pleasures, yet the causes of their waiting—“waiting to see if we get into Law School, bag the Scholarship, drag home the Prize”—persist, showing that these distractions do little to alleviate the underlying uncertainty.

Webb’s list expands into life-defining moments: “Waiting to marry and begin our lives. Waiting to know if she’s too hurt to stay, too in love to go.” The first phrase speaks to the societal expectation that life truly starts with marriage, suggesting that much of adulthood is spent waiting for the right conditions to “begin.” The second phrase, more emotionally fraught, acknowledges the difficulty of waiting within relationships, where indecision about staying or leaving can be its own form of torment.

From here, the poem escalates into darker territory, invoking high-stakes forms of waiting: “Waiting for quitting time, for results of the biopsy, AIDS test, licensing exam.” The shift to medical results introduces mortality, the ultimate source of human anxiety. Waiting for a diagnosis, or a confirmation of life-altering illness, dwarfs the trivial irritations from earlier in the poem. The next two lines—“Waiting for the proctologist to withdraw, the nurse to suck out enough blood”—juxtapose the humorous and the clinical, highlighting how even in medical contexts, human discomfort varies from the awkward to the terrifying.

The repetition of “Oh hurry, hurry, we intone. Oh please, oh please.” functions as a refrain, reinforcing the universal desperation to accelerate time. This plea mirrors the impatience embedded in every stage of life, from minor inconveniences to existential fears.

The poem returns to smaller but deeply relatable moments of waiting: “Waiting for Sister to get out of the bathroom. Waiting for our turn at bat; an autumn trout trip; two weeks in Maui.” These moments recall childhood sibling dynamics, sports anticipation, and vacation longing—again emphasizing how waiting is a lifelong condition. The sudden shift—“Wondering if the earthquake’s over, or an 8.0 waits, cracking its knuckles in the dark.”—reintroduces anxiety and uncertainty, turning the natural world into another ominous source of dread. The personification of the earthquake as “cracking its knuckles in the dark” adds to the tension, as though disaster itself is waiting for the right moment to strike.

The poem continues listing more concerns that span health, personal insecurity, and seasonal anticipation: “Waiting to see if the cold sore heals before school pictures; if our metatarsal mends, or we limp all our lives.” These lines reflect both vanity and deeper fears about lasting physical impairments, again illustrating the way human worries exist on a spectrum from superficial to life-altering.

The final cascade of images—“Waiting for the Picasso show, spring columbines, summer vacation, fall duck hunting, snow and skis”—moves through cultural, natural, and recreational events that mark the passing of time. The emphasis on seasonal change underscores how much of human life is structured around looking ahead rather than appreciating the present. The poem’s concluding revelation—“forgetting—Oh hurry, hurry. Please, oh please—what horse we’re spurring toward what finish line.”—delivers a striking commentary on the futility of this constant anticipation. By framing life itself as a race toward an unspecified finish line, Webb suggests that waiting, rather than living, becomes the default mode of existence. The urgency to move forward blinds people to the fact that they are propelling themselves toward an endpoint they may not even understand or desire.

"Waiting" is both a humorous and poignant exploration of the universal human tendency to fixate on the future at the expense of the present. Webb masterfully weaves together trivial frustrations, existential dread, and poetic irony, capturing the restless impatience that defines modern existence. The poem serves as a meditation on time, urging readers to consider whether the things they are waiting for will ever bring the satisfaction they expect—or if they are simply waiting for the sake of waiting.

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