Monday, February 5, 2007

The Hospital Window by James Dickey

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
and, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.


The first thing I notice about this poem is that it begins and ends with the line, "I have just come down from my father". That line can have different meanings for the author ranging from: he (the man in the poem) has literally just come down from visiting his father, he has just been released from his father's hold, or something along the lines of visiting his father in heaven. I notice that each stanza is exactly 6 lines each. Dickey uses imagery containing color and other words such as "tainted", "pale", "hue", etc. He also manages to create each image by describing sounds heard or by what he physically feels at the time. I enjoy the way Dickey portrays the present reality of life compared to the passing of the father in the poem. Dickey also makes another parallel aside from the first and last lines by giving the idea that people are born and die with the same blue color. There are also many references to windows, glass, and other items that the man in the poem can apparently see clearly through--this maybe is his internal realization of needing to be away from his father.

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