To Aunt Rose

Like many of Ginsberg’s poems, “To Aunt Rose” presents a fragmented picture of the poet’s mind and emotional state. Additionally, Ginsberg relies heavily on symbolism to tell both a personal and a public story, though both essentially communicate the same thoughts of grief and loss. And like Ginsberg’s two most famous poems, “Howl” (1956) and “Kaddish” (1961), this poem bathes in a feeling of melancholy and understated psychological and emotional loss.

Ginsberg opens the poem with the image of his aunt, and his portrait of her is honest. He avoids the poetic trope of romanticizing and exaggerating beauty, and instead focuses on her physical ailments. He establishes her rheumatism right away to introduce the idea of sickness into the poem, and he follows this with the image of her limp leg, suggesting injury. The imagery immediately establishes the poem’s focus on broken things, but it is also important to understand the introduction’s use of time.

By placing the poem during his childhood and specifically referencing the Spanish Civil War, Ginsberg locates the poem within a collective memory of a specific time. Even though the poem feels incredibly personal, Ginsberg is intentional in identifying this first memory within the context of the war. Because even though his aunt is physically wounded and aging, the scene is full of hope and togetherness. The partygoers gather around the piano, his aunt eagerly limps around the room collecting money, Ginsberg sings in a high-pitched voice for the listeners. There is a sense of urgency, organization, community, and action.

To a modern reader, it might be difficult to understand how this scene relates to the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War, but for readers of Ginsberg’s age in the 1960s, this association would probably make sense. During the 1930s, America was in the midst of the Great Depression, a time of great, widespread poverty and national suffering. At the same time, fascism was rising in Europe, and the Spanish Civil War was a physical manifestation of the battle between Leftism and Fascism. To Leftists like Ginsberg and his family, the war represented an existential crisis that would dictate the future of their lives. Yet America remained neutral to the war, burdened by its own problems at home.

For Ginsberg and others of his political ilk, this was devastating, and it represented a change in the course of history. While the crises of fascism and the Great Depression opened the opportunity for the west to embrace class consciousness and societal change, the United States ultimately chose to ramp up capitalism by using mass production and infrastructure to win WWII. And once the war ended, the rise of the Cold War killed any chance of America embracing a more equitable economic system, as Ginsberg believed Socialism was, ultimately resulting in militarism and wealth inequality exploding in America. This time period also marked the shift in the application of Leftism in the world, as Stalin’s regime took hold of the Soviet Union, effectively turning Communism into totalitarianism.

Ginsberg’s romanticism about the Leftist fervor during the 1930s and the general sense of hope and purpose his family had contrasts with the broken body of America, symbolized by Ginsberg’s aunt.

Intertwined with this, almost like how dreams run together, Ginsberg then moves to a personal memory of sexual awakening and the development of his own identity. The scene of his aunt washing his naked legs to soothe his poison ivy can represent a number of things, including the loss of innocence that came with the loss of that romantic spirit his Leftist family felt in the scene before, ultimately crushed by the weight of American militarism and capitalism.

But with Ginsberg, it is always important to remember the sporadic nature of his poetry and how that spontaneity always infused a dash of personal psychology into his work. In that sense, the scene represents Ginsberg coming to terms with his own sexuality, and he makes that clear as he mixes his gender by referring to himself as a man and then as a girl. The somewhat incestual nature of the scene and Ginsberg’s seemingly distanced and cold curiosity about how his aunt experiences the scene adds to the ambiguity of Ginsberg’s sexuality. He is preoccupied with her sexuality, but he is not interested in her sexually even though he wonders if she is interested in him. This suggests a disconnect between the heterosexual woman and the homosexual man in the scene, which again serves the exploration of Ginsberg’s burgeoning sexuality.

Ginsberg then shifts away from this moment, alluding to Hitler, Emily Brontë, and Tamburlaine. The allusions are almost random and might be explained as spontaneous associations in Ginsberg’s mind as he writes, although Ginsberg often referenced Hitler in his poetry. Being Jewish and a child of the WWII era, this is not unusual, as other writers like him, such as Sylvia Plath, also wrote of the dictator. Brontë could represent Aunt Rose (or even Ginsberg’s mother, who was never far from his mind), as she was an enigmatic, mysterious female figure from history who is suspected to have struggled with mental illness. Hitler could represent the time of the 1930s and 1940s when the Leftist spirit still held true and when Ginsberg’s aunt was still alive and active. Tamburlaine is a literary figure based on a real-life, medieval war lord Timur, who could be connected to Hitler’s aggressiveness and delusions of grandeur, or possibly to Ginsberg’s spirit of rebellion.

Ultimately, these are just conjectures, though. With Ginsberg, his allusions and references often were to deeply personal mementos and experiences, especially regarding things in which he was currently entrenched. For example, it is possible he was reading the play about Timur or reading Brontë at the time, and his mind associated them into the poem.

After these allusions, the poem becomes deeply personal with references to where Aunt Rose lived, and to mentions of Ginsberg’s father’s published works. All of these references build more memories of the past, but it is important to notice that all of these memories, like the past, have fully passed on. The publisher is out of business, the books are out of print, the people have stopped doing what they once did, Hitler is dead, and the war is over. Ginsberg is injecting a dose of reality into the fond recollections of the past that litter the first half of the poem. And because the poem is called “To Aunt Rose,” this suggests he is trying to convince his aunt to come to the present—to leave the past behind. This might suggest a disillusionment with that past, which would be a bit of a shift from early in the poem when he looks at the past with a sense of nostalgia.

The poem ends with the image of death. Not only has the war ended and not only has the past died, but Aunt Rose has also died. The wounds of the past, represented by her feeble body, have passed into memory. This is complex symbolism, but Ginsberg is doing a few things here. He is lamenting the loss of the romantic spirit of the past, he is coming to terms with a world that no longer exists, and he is crying out about how the memory of the struggle of the past no longer exists in the present.

For Ginsberg, the 1950s represented a break from the spiritual connection he believed America had before the post-WWII era. In the United States, 1950s were a time of luxury, conformity, and the suppression of anything that was not considered decent or bright. Many people preferred to focus on their wealth and on consumerism while segregating from anything they saw as indecent, including non-white people, people from the LGBTQ+ community, drug addicts, non-Christians, communists, and anybody practicing non-traditional lifestyles. Ginsberg had many issues with this, but one of them was what he viewed as a loss of collective memory. Having grown up during the Great Depression and seeing how people struggled, Ginsberg feared the materialism and wealth of the 1950s would strip people of the lessons the 1930s taught.

Overall, this poem, like many of Ginsberg’s, is complex and difficult to fully grasp. Because Ginsberg relied so much on spontaneous mind and free association, it is difficult to analyze specific images, lines, and references without the poet providing his own annotations. That being said, most of Ginsberg’s work from this period focused on a few key themes, the most important ones being the connection between the personal and the universal, a lament for the soul of America, political activism, a cry for individuality and difference, and an exploration of the human mind. All of these elements permeate “To Aunt Rose.”