The Blue Bowl

“The Blue Bowl” initially appeared in the June 1987 issue of Poetry magazine and was later published in 1990 as part of Jane Kenyon’s third poetry collection, Let Evening Come. The poem explores several subjects common in Kenyon’s poetry— the natural world, death, depression, and grief—and utilizes spare, natural imagery to highlight her themes. Writing in free verse, Kenyon’s quiet, detailed rendition of the natural world draws comparisons with the English Romantic-era poet John Keats, whose influence is present in the examinations of inarticulable loss that undergird the poem and its portrayal of nature.

“The Blue Bowl” fits neatly within Kenyon’s canon of work, with imagery evocative of her home state of New Hampshire, portraying in deceptively simple language universal human experiences of grief and loss. As a person with manic depression, Kenyon often grapples with how to convey her experience to those unfamiliar with mental illness and how to use poetry to find relief from the burden of her depression. “The Blue Bowl” uses the death of a cat as an opportunity to talk about a much deeper sorrow that Kenyon struggles to articulate, as well as the experience of being in a state of grief as the surrounding world moves on.

Poet Biography

Jane Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She attended the University of Michigan for her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees; during her tenure there, she met poet Donald Hall, and the two married in 1972. The couple moved to Eagle Pond Farm, Hall’s family property, in New Hampshire in 1972. The scenery proved inspirational for Kenyon’s work over the next decades. Influenced by this new setting, Kenyon’s poems often took rural and domestic scenes as their subjects. In 1993, filmmaker Bill Moyers profiled the couple in the documentary A Life Together, in which both poets discussed their life on the farm, their poetry, and their writing; additionally, Kenyon described her experience with manic depression, noting that many others in her family likely experienced mental illness as well. Kenyon dealt with this depression her entire life, but she did not receive a diagnosis until she was 38.

In 1978, Kenyon published her first collection, From Room to Room. She went on to publish only four collections of poetry in her lifetime; however, each collection received critical acclaim. Her fourth collection, Constance, more explicitly examined her experience with depression, and led some critics to compare her to Sylvia Plath. She regularly published poems in Poetry magazine, The New Yorker, Atlantic and many other journals. The National Endowment for the Arts granted her a fellowship in 1981, and in 1994 she won the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. She became Poet Laureate of New Hampshire in 1995, shortly before her death. In addition to poetry, Kenyon was a translator, focusing on the work of Soviet poet Anna Akhmatova. She was also an essayist. Much of her prose was published posthumously.

Kenyon died of leukemia on April 22, 1995 at the age of 47. She continued writing poetry until the end of her life, with many of her final poems appearing in the collection Otherwise: New and Selected Poems in the year following her death. Kenyon’s work, particularly these later poems, deftly explored the complexities of human depression, grief, and suffering. After her death, Donald Hall published The Best Day the Worst Day, a memoir about their married life.

Poem Text

Kenyon, Jane. “The Blue Bowl.” 1990. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“The Blue Bowl” begins with the poem’s speaker describing the burial of a pet cat, recounting the actions she and the person accompanying her take to place the cat in a rudimentary grave along with his bowl. She describes the cat’s physical appearance, noting “his long red fur, the white feathers / […] between his toes,” and his “long, not to say aquiline, nose” (Lines 6-8). When the speaker and her partner finish the burial, they brush each other off. She remarks that there are “sorrows much keener than these” (Line 10), suggesting a more profound layer of grief. The speaker and her partner then go on with their day in silence, working, eating, and sleeping in a kind of grief-stricken daze. Overnight, a storm comes, and when it passes, the speaker describes seeing a robin “burbl[ing] from a dripping bush” (Line 17), a happy image that she finds discordant with her grief. The poem ends with the speaker in a state of ambivalence as the speaker compares this robin to a “neighbor who means well / but always says the wrong thing” (Lines 15-16).