Menashe

Pity us
By the sea
On the sands
So briefly

On a crowded bus leaving the seashore, a friend directed my attention to the poem above, relegated to the dust jacket of Samuel Menashe’s awesome Library of America “Neglected Master” edition.

Now “Pity us” is the first poem I show my students. I ask: Does the poem have meter? Is it metaphorical? What kind of sounds does it have, and to what effects? Today they focused on the unvoiced s's and f ("like listening to waves"), and the final line's surprise beat ("brief") and unstressed rhyme on the third syllable, and how those sounds reinforce the poem's meaning.

As I left the room after class (and the students’ remarkable and diverse explications) a young man asked if those ten words were really all, if I had excerpted the poem from some longer work. That’s it, I told him. He said, “it’s mind-blowing.”