To Aunt Rose

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1959

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Ginsberg writes in a free verse style with no set rhyme scheme and no consistent meter. The poem contains six stanzas that contain a variety of lines ranging from three to seventeen lines each. The free verse style gives the reader the impression of natural speech, which works well for a poem that explores the intimate relationship Ginsberg had with his aunt, while approximating the way memories naturally come and go from the mind.

Alliteration, Rhythm, and Rhyme

In contrast to this unstructured style, the poem has plenty of internal rhymes, examples of alliteration, and certainly moments of singsong and rising/falling rhythms scattered throughout the lines. Ginsberg focuses on s sounds, and in some places they dominate the poem. For example, the beginning of the second stanza relies heavily on the repetition: “your long sad face / your tears of sexual frustration / (what smothered sobs and bony hips / under the pillows of Osborne Terrace)” (Lines 18-21). Ginsberg uses a lot of these subtle moments of alliteration to give his phrases and lines some musical qualities. A particularly subtle and effective phrase, for example, is “pale skull protruding under ashen skin” (Line 50), which relies on hard, repeated p sounds along with the soft, breathy sh/sk sound repeated in “ashen skin” (Line 50).

Ginsberg writes the poem to be spoken, and he used a unique cadence when he read, so it is worth listening to his rendition to get a sense of the rhythm and the undulations throughout the poem. When he read, Ginsberg exaggerated his stresses and enjambed his cadences with little regard for the punctuation in the written poem or for the enjambment on the page. He also tended to stress long chains of syllables when he read as well as drawing out the individual sounds in words. This amplified the effect of the rambling, list-like quality of his poetry. It is best to read the poem with his voice and cadence in mind.

Spontaneous Mind (First Thought/Best Thought) / Free Association and Fragmentation

When Ginsberg first began writing poetry, he wrote in a more classical style, more in line with his father and his writing instructors. But as Ginsberg got older, his influences changed. Ginsberg’s biggest artistic influence would become Jack Kerouac, the famed Beat writer. Kerouac has achieved legendary status in America not only for his finished novels, but also for his approach to writing. When Kerouac wrote On the Road, the legend goes that he wrote the entire book in a drug-fueled, multi-day, non-stop writing session, and he turned in the original first draft to his publisher for publication. While this is more legend than fact, there is an element of truth to it. Kerouac did write the first draft in a three-week period on one giant scroll, but the book was a compilation of years worth of journaling, note taking, and observing, and he spent a lot of time editing and perfecting the book after the first draft. The idea, though, of his spontaneous prose was to present the narrative in a sort of rambling style that better reflected the natural thought process of the human mind.

Ginsberg applied this approach to poetry. Both Ginsberg and Kerouac were inspired by their friend Neal Cassady, who had written them a letter in the spontaneous style years before. The letter felt raw and real to the writers, so they adopted the style to their professional endeavors.

The best way to understand how this style affects Ginsberg’s writing is to look at some of the seemingly random associations throughout his poetry, the rambling nature of his lines, and the strange breaks and combinations that litter his verse.

A good example in “To Aunt Rose” is the way Ginsberg jumps from memory to memory with no sense of transition or indication to the reader that a change is happening. He uses very little punctuation, though this poem does utilize line and stanza breaks to indicate change much more than he does in some of his other poetry.

Ultimately, the idea here is that Ginsberg is trying to capture the free association that the mind has when remembering memories or processing information. Often, the human mind does not operate in narrative fashion— it picks up on fragments of information, and memories are often scattered and fragmented. By telling a narrative in a non-narrative and non-linear form, Ginsberg is able to mimic a natural thought process, which he believed helped him get closer to being intellectually and emotionally honest at a time when he saw the world as incredibly dishonest and inauthentic.