16 pages • 32 minutes read
Galway KinnellWait
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Suicide and Grief
Although Kinnell never explicitly mentions suicide in “Wait,” the heavy presence of grief and the poet’s pleas for the reader to stay—to wait out the heartbreak—implies the possibility of suicide. That possibility sparks Kinnell’s exploration of two other themes: the nature of love and the question of why one should stay alive until the natural end of life. The grief of heartbreak is a powerful force in “Wait,” as it has caused the listener to “distrust everything” (Line 2) about life, to lose interest in the minutia of life, and to feel the emptiness of the “desolation of lovers” (Lines 11-12). Grief here is not only characterized by numbness to love, pain, and “personal events” (Line 5), but also a tiredness that weighs on the recipient of the poem to the point they consider escaping that fatigue in death.
“Wait” acknowledges the weight of grief on the brokenhearted, the emptiness that seems like it will never be filled, and the exhaustion depression brings. The speaker’s respect for the listener’s emotionally fragile state can be seen in the gentle coaxing away from suicide, suggesting simple alternatives. He pleads, “don’t go too early” (Line 17), “wait a little” (Line 20), and “listen” (Line 20), affirming the pain while offering alternatives to suicide. These little commands betray how difficult even small actions can be when weighed down by despair. Like the basic imagery Kinnell uses to tether the reader to reality, these small actions work to combat that urge to end life by simply asking for small actions that add up to something significant.
Love Lost and Reborn
The nature of love, both lost and found, is central to “Wait.” The addressee in the poem is contemplating suicide because they have lost love. Here, love has become something for which to live and the speaker does not seem to deny this. Instead, the speaker affirms the weight of lost love. Losing that love leaves one uninterested by life, numb to pain, and empty: Kinnell here positions love as a core experience to human life.
However, his speaker insists that while love is absent, it is capable of renewing. “The hours” (Line 3) will step in to help with healing, and love will one day renew, along with an interest in life and the small, special things. He uses the metaphor of the “second-hand gloves” (Line 9) to convey this renewal, positing that like gloves that have become shaped to one pair of hands, the emptiness inside will call for new hands; this lack of love always drives the lover toward a new one, asking “to be filled” (Line 14) again. This metaphor also addresses the question of faithfulness and love, as moving on to a new love can feel like a betrayal of the first. Instead, Kinnell asserts that “the need / for the new love is faithfulness to the old” (Lines 14-15; author’s italics), where the deep impact of the first love leaves its legacy by driving the lover to seek it again. In “Wait,” love perseveres both in grief and in the need for new love, and it is apt to return given enough time.
In the second stanza, where Kinnell shifts his focus to the larger life story, love becomes a reoccurring motif in the fabric of life where looms eventually weave love back into the fabric again. Love is contextualized within the larger life story, not taking center stage, but instead identified as a part of life that comes and goes. Ultimately, Kinnell changes the focus of the poem from the importance of love to the greater importance of living the whole life, to persuade the listener to keep living while love comes and goes.
Emptiness and Exhaustion
Throughout the poem, Kinnell addresses the feelings of emptiness and exhaustion accompanying heartbreak and grief, and how these twin feelings can make life feel meaningless. The emptiness of that grief is symbolized in both the empty gloves and the lack of interest in the little things that make life fascinating and beautiful. Kinnell asserts that this emptiness, however, is truly faithfulness to the lost love and is the necessary force toward a new love.
In the second stanza, tiredness figures as another factor driving the heartbroken to suicide. Like emptiness, tiredness is universally experienced among the heartbroken and can be an excuse to “wait a little and listen” (Line 20). Kinnell’s speaker goes on to insist that neither emptiness nor tiredness is a reason to leave life early, and that tiredness is not total exhaustion. The half-lived life prohibits the listener from truly exhausting all the possibilities of their sole existence. In the end, Kinnell juxtaposes the life ended by suicide with one that is played into “total exhaustion” (Line 25), where all life’s potential has been spent and the lover can finally rest having heard the music of their entire being.
As such, Kinnell acknowledges the painfulness of both emptiness and fatigue, but likewise points to their necessity in the greater story of one’s life. He encourages the listener to sit with both of these difficult feelings, to give those feelings some time, and to expect that they will eventually lead to new love and a fuller life.
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By Galway Kinnell
