The Blue Bowl

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Rhetorical Context

“The Blue Bowl” portrays a small but vivid experience of grief for the speaker of the poem, an unnamed figure, whom the reader could interpret to be Kenyon herself. Kenyon wrote eloquently and prolifically about her own experience with depression, and “The Blue Bowl” fits within this subset of her work. It examines the weight of grief and sadness, attempting to give language to something that often feels beyond words. The poem’s shift to articulate the “sorrows much keener” (Line 10) than the death of the cat, the inciting incident of the poem, cast a new light over the entirety of the text, suggesting that Kenyon uses the cat’s burial as a way to process a deeper kind of sadness through language and poetic form.

Kenyon does not address a specific audience with “The Blue Bowl”; rather, she allows the reader into her own intimate experience. The use of the first-person plural, the “we” introduced in the first line, suggests that Kenyon is writing for and to a figure close to her, a romantic partner (perhaps her husband, Donald Hall), or another loved one. By creating this intimacy on the page with the other person, Kenyon draws the reader in and allows them to experience both her sadness and her ambivalence about the beauty of the natural world around her. While she has a certain appreciation for the clear morning after the storm, replete with the hopeful robin, she wants the reader to understand how difficult it is to experience joy within the midst of her depression. In an interview with Bill Moyers in 1993, Kenyon said, “I’m trying to explain to people who have never experienced this kind of desolation what it is; and I want to ease people’s burdens.” (Moyers, Bill. Interview. "A Life Together: Poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon." 1993. BillMoyers.com). Her poetry offered a way to convey the experience of depression to her readers.

Literary Context

Critics often praise Kenyon’s poetry for its sparse yet specific imagery and detail, its celebration of the natural world, and the aura of melancholy that pervades her lines. Kenyon identified with the English Romantic tradition of John Keats, whose odes like “To Autumn” examined and celebrated the natural world while also establishing an undercurrent of change and death. In reviewing Kenyon’s collection The Boat of Quiet Hours, Carol Muske emphasizes the connection between Kenyon and Keats, noting: “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” (Muske, Carol. “Reading Their Signals.” New York Times, 21 June 1987.)

Muske also draws a connection between Kenyon’s poems and Keats’s concept of “Negative Capability,” or the capacity to “be in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (“Negative Capability.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed on 17 Sept 2021.) Keats was more interested in aesthetics and the experience of awe and beauty, and the opportunities that arose from contemplation, rather than a single-minded quest for reason. Poems like “The Blue Bowl” operate on a similar theory, contemplating the feeling and experience of sorrow, and looking at the ways in which the natural world reflects it, while also acknowledging the ineffability of grief and depression. In “The Blue Bowl,” the speaker is in a state of processing her grief and must sit with the uncertainty of the future. The natural world is mysterious to her, both encompassing the trauma of death and also celebrating beauty and new life. The poem acknowledges both of these realities without attempting to offer a rationale for either’s existence.