17 pages • 34 minutes read
Julie SheehanHate Poem
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Hate
Hate repeats throughout the poem like a motif, evident on just about every line of the poem. In Sheehan’s poem, hate is quite elastic, for not only does the speaker have this hate in her mind, she projects the intense feeling into various body parts and smallest cells, acts it out with her gestures and tone of voice, and even invokes the past—her ancestors and the history of a keychain—to back up her side.
“Hate Poem” makes hate something practiced, something articulated, and something that other things symbolize. The repetition of the word “hate” first adds a repeated, aspirated sound, like a breathy hissing in the aspiration of ha-. This is followed by the sharp -te that combines to create a repeated harsh, mono-syllabic cadence in the poem. This repetition of “hate” punctuates the poem, like a period, or a breath, at the end of each line. That breath is what her lungs, the “duplicitous twins” (Line 23) cannot get enough of at the end of the poem.
Two Lungs and a Submarine
In the final line of the poem, the speaker evokes the imagery of “a broken submarine” (Line 24). This image arrives at the end of the poem’s longest sentence, which is punctuated by multiple clauses. After enumerating all of the ways she hates “everything” (Line 2) about her partner, she likens her own lungs to two “duplicitous twins” (Line 23) who are living off of that hate like it is oxygen. Though it feels like this hate is keeping her going, her lungs cannot get enough of hating the partner, an activity they revel in “breathlessly” (Line 24). Her idealism, or her desire for perfection from a human partner who could never reach it, must confront the reality that indulging in this kind of hate is making her body a “broken submarine” (Line 24) that will suffocate her lung and her along with them. The speaker’s obsession with her partner’s flaws may sustain her for awhile, but soon she must confront her own imperfections, particularly if she wants to ensure the success of their relationship.
A Closed Window
Stanza four is a one-line interjection that reflects on the symbolism of a closed window. The line is a humorous aside, breaking the interiority of the previous and subsequent longer flowing stanzas by focusing on a part of the speaker’s environment rather than her body and mind. It is almost as though in the midst of wallowing in her anger, she has momentarily looked up and noticed a feature of the room where she is. Before the speaker endows the window with symbolic meaning, it functions as the locus of an argument between people who cannot agree on room temperature, or whether the window should be open or closed.
Reading into the line, we see that it slyly mocks Sheehan’s previous symbolist works by echoing a famous quip about symbols attributed to early 20th century psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” alluding to the recurrence of phallic imagery in his writings about dreams. Here, if a woman is creating symbolic meaning for mundane objects, the “closed window” (Line 13) is no longer a yonic symbol that could be open to the partner. Instead, it is only an “obvious symbol” (Line 13) of how her brooding hate has resulted in her refusing sex. This little aside gets its own line, giving it special emphasis, but also breaking up the rhythm of the poem written in conversational free verse.
