16 pages • 32 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeAlphabet
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998A 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
Houses
From the empty homes of the dead to the home the speaker sees from the airplane, houses appear several times in this poem. Shihab Nye uses the physical remnants of these empty homes, such as “rusted chairs” (Line 29) and “peach tree[s]” (Line 27) to emphasize that the metaphysical, not the physical, is what makes an otherwise random assortment of houses a community. While the speaker mourns the physical presence of their older friends, they realize that their greatest value was their collective memory and knowledge, which cannot be transferred to the objects they have left behind. The speaker further considers this point, remembering how the bird’s eye view from the airplane stripped their house of its meaning and transformed it into “the tiniest / ‘i’” (Lines 38 and 39). Traditionally a symbol of safety, shelter, and family, the home here is rendered small and insignificant in the face of the great loss the speaker is contemplating.
The Sky
The speaker makes several references to the sky throughout the poem, opening with the image of the dead “going up / into the air” (Lines 4-5), comparing their feelings of loss to “the sky / over our whole neighborhood” (Lines 34-35), and ending on the image of themself viewing the neighborhood from “high above our street” (Line 36). The first image plays with the sky’s religious connotations, the words “going up” turning the elderly’s passing away into a bare event devoid of any comforting symbols that might suggest heaven as a destination; instead, they seem to be lifted into nothing at all, just “the air” (Line 5). This image sets the poem’s eerie tone, one stemming from the speaker’s emerging horror at the wrongness of their neighborhood’s loss and their own mortality. The sky also serves to symbolizes just how large the speaker’s feelings of grief are: Their sadness is so immense as to lay over them like the sky, emphasizing their feelings of insignificance, their sense that they are the “tiniest” (Line 39).
Nature and Material Objects
Natural imagery melds with the material world to create a tone of inevitable loss. While the speaker notices that the dead’s household objects have disappeared—the “housecoats” (Line 15) and “cupcakes” (Line 17)—or deteriorated, like the “rusted chairs” (Line 29), they also see that nature remains as vibrant as ever. For example, “their yards / still wear / small white narcissus / sweetening winter” (Lines 6-9), and “their stones / glisten / under the sun” (Lines 10-12). In other words, while the human world and its material trappings fade or vanish, nature remains. Even the peach tree “bends a little” (Lines 27-28), and the gesture, though sad, suggests the tree’s ongoing life and familiarity with loss. These natural, environmental details throw human life’s brevity into relief. By using vague diction to wonder “what stood in that / brushy spot” (Lines 23-25), the speaker emphasizes that the “brushy spot” itself is at no risk of disappearing—it has been there for at least 90 years, and the ending of one era of humanity’s projections onto it is of no significance. With these natural images, Shihab Nye compounds the poem’s existential dread.
Related Titles
By Naomi Shihab Nye
