With “Geometry,” Dove employs a lyric three-line stanza to express delight in writing verse. She derives the title from a brother’s recommendation that she visualize shapes while working out geometric proofs. Selecting robust verbs for a series on remodeling, she re-creates the poet’s work as knocking out walls, removing windows, and forcing the ceiling up. To characterize the whole process, she retreats from activity with a satisfied sigh. The walls, made clear, free the odor of carnations, a funeral flower that takes its name from the Latin for flesh because the blossom gives off an odor like a decaying corpse. Thus, her energetic removal of restraints is also a reprieve from dismal reminders of mortality.
To meld into a conclusion, Dove breaks the last line of stanza II and hurries on to stanza III with joy in being “out in the open.” The invitation to look beyond confinement grows out of magical realism. For example, like cartoon shapes, the uptilted windows, tinged with sunlight, change into butterflies, a complex image of optimism and flight. Unconstrained in the act of composing poetry, Dove moves toward truths that await proving.
“Adolescents—I,” the beginning of a gemlike triad numbered I—III, presents teenage girls in secret conference. Dove describes the sight with symbol—the daring conspirators kneel behind “grandmother’s porch,” a reference to the rigid, elevated outlines of the previous society. Teased by grass at ground level, they speak a child’s immature truism—”a boy’s lips are soft.” As though looking toward the roles of wife and mother that await them, they characterize the feeling of a kiss with a prophetic, gently sibilant simile, “as soft as baby’s skin.” The meager light of a firefly precedes the lighting of street lamps, both small wattages that begin the illumination of a “feathery” adolescent awareness.
At the head of Dove’s accomplishments, Thomas and Beulah (1986) is a major contribution to her family’s lore. Dove has acknowledged in interviews that her ambitious work moved from a series of snapshots for a family album to more imaginative characterization. Among the changes necessary for her poetry was an alteration of Grandmother Georgianna’s name to Beulah, which suits the meter. Dove concludes the series with a chronology of events that stand out in an otherwise unremarkable family history.
The action accounts for the lasting marriage of two endearing nobodies: Tennessee-born Thomas wed to Beulah, a Georgia native whose family settled in Akron, Ohio, after they joined the Great Migration of Southern blacks to industrial centers of the Midwest. Their historical union spans from December 1924 to Thomas’s death at the end of July 1963. The significant and not-so-significant events that coincide with their private achievements and crises together underweave Dove’s appraisal of a commonplace couple who influenced her first decade of life.
Dove presents both points of view—male and female—and instructs the reader to peruse them in sequence. Opening on Thomas, the poet follows the pre-feminist thinking of the era by allowing the husband to dominate. She dots his share of the text with details that characterize a fictionalized version of her half-Cherokee grandfather. In the poem, he is an Appalachian mountaineer short on prosperity, but long on good looks and musical talent. Gifts to his intended are simple, yet as intimate as a scarf, “the yellow silk / still warm from his throat / around her shoulders.” Gently probing the foundations of a family, Dove depicts his fluttering heart as “slowly opening” to domesticity. As though convincing himself of worthiness, he promises, “I’ll give her a good life.”
Dove allows history to drift in and out of understated scenes. In an up mood, Beulah selects the color of their “sky blue Chandler” for a family visit back to Tennessee; in 1943, a personal and national decline overwhelms Thomas as he departs a movie theater under a veil of despair. Like a doting parent, in “Aurora Borealis,” the poet breaks through the character’s subconscious. With stodgy, clipped finality, the authoritarian voice commands, “Thomas, go home.” By halting on “home,” Dove implies that the husband’s answer to qualms and self-doubt is found in the solidity and comfort of his marriage to Beulah.
Beulah’s mental landscape meanders far from that traversed by Thomas. As though unaware of the greater cosmos, in “Sunday Greens,” Beulah seasons her cooking with hambone during the spare Depression years when precious little meat clung to spare frames. In flitting daydreams, she eludes fragrance of beebalm pomade by linking it to a distant cityscape. Looking out to the world, she fixes on “Turkish minarets against / a sky wrenched blue.”
Dove’s strongest feminist commentary derives from the housewife’s private burden in “Dusting,” the poet’s most analyzed, anthologized poem. Keeping physically and mentally busy, Beulah challenges a nagging despair with fantasy. While hands combat the “grainstorms” with a gray dustrag, her mind flies free of housewifery to ponder the name of a boy who kissed her at the fair. Was it Michael? As though polishing her life, she rubs the furniture to a bright shine. Too late, an answer comes to her—Maurice, an exotic not-Thomas kind of name. In subsequent entries, Dove pursues her grandmother’s emotional displacement. The grit of “Dusting” returns in the form of “Nightmare,” a twenty-four-line torment that ends with a memory of her mother’s cry—”you’ll ruin us”—for opening an umbrella indoors, a violation of folkways.
The verse cycle closes with “The Oriental Ballerina,” a shifting, iridescent picture story centering on the dancing figurine that spins and dips atop a jewelry box more suited to budding women than old ladies. Beulah, aged and widowed, lies in a ghost-ridden room and perceives the dancer as a Chinese woman on the opposite side of the globe, where “they do everything upside down.” Her association of classical ballet with Asia rather than France, where it began, suggests that her knowledge of culture is limited.
With the skill of a pointillist painter, Dove daubs the remains of her grandmother’s memories on a verbal canvas with too-candid flashes—”papered in vulgar flowers,” “background the color of grease,” and a disheartening reminder that the veneer of Beulah’s existence can never rise above “cracked imitation walnut.” The details anchor the room in a humdrum, working-class environment. Obviously, Beulah has few treasures to feed her fantasy.
The aged speaker is left husbandless and bedfast beside crumpled, camphor-soaked tissues and an invalid’s straw poking out of the glass like an accusing finger. Beyond Beulah’s idealism of a petite dancer atwirl on her toes, the poet remarks, “the rest is shadow.” Yet, bright rays against dull walls explode the invalid’s limited view into reflected patterns. Like theatrical light tricks, a dazzling transformation spatters the dismal room with “shabby tutus.” The sun-fed illusion becomes the poet’s blessing on a failing grandparent whose memory retains all that is left of a marriage. Still capable of fleeing place and body, Beulah thrives on the active fantasy that sustained her from early marriage through widowhood to the receding boundaries of her life.
