The Good Life

Tracy K. Smith’s poem “The Good Life” begins with a sentence fragment, a subordinate clause that teases the reader without informing her just yet about the nature of the statement it is making. Even before it is grammatically completed in the second line, the interaction between the title and opening line already accomplishes a variety of effects. First, the topic of the title is confirmed immediately, foregrounding the subject matter of the poem before the reader has even a chance to reach the second line. The title “The Good Life” refers (at least) to its everyday meaning: a life of means, a life of money. Additionally, the conversational tone verging on cliché used in the first line “When some people talk about…” (Line 1), combined with the mundane idiom used for the title, creates a distinctly simple, vernacular tone that defines the poem moving forward. Finally, although the poem will go on to discuss the singular experience of the speaker, the title and first line emphasize a universal experience. Both the “Good Life” and “people talk[ing] about money” (Line 1) highlight common and widespread experience at the level of society rather than the individual.

The opening of the second line further entrenches the poem’s early focus on shared experience—the general “some people” (Line 1) make themselves heard, now “They speak” (Line 2). Here, the poem introduces its speaker implicitly, observing that the way people speak about money makes it seem similar to a “mysterious lover” (Line 2). Although slight, this marks a departure from the more practical connotations associated with money. Instead, the poem turns its readers toward not only the emotional connection of money to a lover, but specifically a “mysterious” (Line 2) lover. In other words, money becomes like a lover marked by his ability to exceed and confound mundane calculations. While mystery holds potential pleasures and fascinations, the lover of the simile maintains his mystery by leaving, even as he reveals some of himself to be someone who does leave unexpectedly. In this case, the lover goes “out to buy milk” and “never / [Comes] back” (Lines 3-4).

It is at this point in the poem that two important shifts take place. The change is marked by the first appearance of punctuation in the poem, here a comma after the opening phrase of the line “Came back” (Line 4). Following this first comma is the first explicit appearance of the speaker, for whom money (or the talk of money, or both) “make[ ] me nostalgic” (Line 4). Even while the poem transitions from one section to the next, it maintains its relaxed register. Smith adds her voice, “and it makes me nostalgic” (Line 4), almost as if she were riffing on the topic in a conversation with a friend.

In much the same way as she uses “milk” in Line 3, Smith grounds her musings on poverty with food, with “coffee and bread” (Line 5). Though the literary connotations of this diction are strongly mundane, Smith subtly reminds her readers of the high stakes of money with her choice of the verb “lived” (Line 5). If it weren’t for the scant money of this remembered time, the speaker would not be able to survive. Furthermore, the verb echoes with the “Good Life” of the first line, helpfully centering the subject matter for the reader at the midway point of the poem. The following line evokes the experience of living on modest means even as it explains it. The line is split in the middle by a comma that separates two clauses. This pause in the middle of a line is called a caesura, and its effect (similar to a rest in music) is particularly notable at the midpoint of the poem. The split line is made up of two phrases beginning with “Hungry,” and “walking” (Line 6). The placement of this adjective and adverb performs the dominance of hunger and effort in the experience of poverty, declaring themselves as states of being to the reader before any other context is given in the following words.

The following line continues to develop the speaker’s reminiscence, building an image of herself walking to work on payday “Like a woman” seeking “water” (Line 7). The next line completes the work of the couplet by expanding the simile—the speaker’s remembered walk to work on payday was not like a woman merely taking a stroll for water, but like a woman leaving her “village without a well” on a long “journey” against thirst (Lines 7-8). The survivalist elements of the speaker’s remembered past of little money seem at first glance far from “nostalgic” (Line 4). After all, Smith mostly spends time not on the positive things of her remembered past but on hunger, simplicity, and toil. However, the simplicity of the images Smith uses already combine to create an aesthetic appeal: “coffee and bread,” “walking to work,” “journeying for water” (Lines 5-7). The simple phrases and everyday sensory experiences they evoke have an undeniable, if austere, beauty. It is not until the final couplet, though, that the true argument of Smith’s poem becomes clear.

The couplet is preceded by an enjambed clause (that is, a phrase which is split apart by a line break) following a comma in Line 8. After the woman of Smith’s simile has finally arrived at her sought after water, she gets to enjoy “then living / […] like everyone else” for a short time (Lines 8-9). This concluding partial phrase at the end of Line 8 accomplishes in two words what the following couplet expands upon in two lines. Because the reader is forced to take a small pause at the end of the line, before the pause is over the woman appears to now be able to simply “liv[e]” (Line 8) after all her journeying. Additionally, because the eighth line enjambs its grammar, the final two lines parsing their syntax regularly make for an ending that sounds complete, that resolves the way most music does (excluding jazz). This neat ending naturally lends even more emphasis to what the final couplet communicates: that after a period of toil, just a small amount of money becomes satisfyingly extravagant to the modestly living speaker. Though the money keeps the constant—“all the time” (Line 6)—hunger at bay for only “One or two nights” (Line 9), the poem highlights the satisfaction of this brief period. The final line consists of nothing except the simple and sumptuous “roast chicken and red wine” (Line 10). The reflection on money, the similes and images, have all concluded in a single and simple expression of sensory pleasure. The matter-of-fact way this concluding line presents itself recalls the simplicity of the poem’s title, “The Good Life.” In a way, the final line seems to answer the question implicitly posed in the title.

Ultimately, the “chicken and red wine” (Line 10) of the poem’s last line are not in themselves typical images of wealth or decadence. The good life of the title is not unbridled wealth, then. The simple meal is special when it is compared to “liv[ing] on coffee and bread” (Line 5). Because the poem’s speaker is “nostalgic / For the years” (Lines 4-5) she struggled with money, it is implied that she now can have “chicken and red wine” (Line 10) whenever she wants, “like everyone else” (Line 9). From one point of view, then, the poem defines the good life as a life of modest means in which a person gains special appreciation for the hard-fought simple pleasures of life. However, the speaker’s admission of “nostalgi[a]” (Line 4) complicates this interpretation. While the images of the poem celebrate the simple life, Smith explicitly frames these conclusions in the memory of a speaker who now no longer struggles financially. In this way, the poem presents a wealthy person’s outside, nostalgic understanding of poverty as the titular “Good Life.”

The poem is too short and careful about what it includes for this framing device of memory to be ignored. However, Smith also devotes a relatively small amount of the poem to this “looking-back” on poverty compared to the development of the images. In this way, the poem is able to both present the simple gustatory pleasures of “roast chicken and red wine” (Line 10) to a hungry person as the good life, while simultaneously complicating its own conclusion. By incorporating these critiques and impediments to the poem’s thesis into such a short and simply expressed poem, Smith is able to create a text that is defined by its simple beauty without becoming flat or dull. “The Good Life” is easy to describe—or at least, it seems that way on the surface, Smith’s poem seems to say. This elusive good life is both ready-at-hand and just out of reach, both simple to name and hidden just behind the veil of memory. Smith’s poem is a lucid expression of the simple contradictions at the heart of the very human pursuit of “The Good Life.”