Swept --- Hayden Carruth

SWEPT

When we say I
miss you what
we mean is I’m
filled with

dread. At night
alone going
to bed is
like lying down

in a wave. Total
absence of light.
Swept away to
gone.

---Hayden Carruth


Hayden Carruth's Swept


Thirty five words. Twelve Lines. Four sentences. Three Stanzas. Hayden Carruth was focused in his poem “Swept.” No line contains more than four words and no line exceeds five syllables. All signs point to describing this poem as simple, but that would be a tremendous mistake. In fact, it’s some of the most complex pieces of writing that scrub away the excess to reveal vulnerable roots. Carruth dug into his pain and sorted it into orderly, straightforward lines. That is truly amazing. Consider a moment of your own pain and you’ll see how daunting the nature of this task is. Hayden Carruth directs “Swept” through the what, the why, and the how, and when the poem crashes it does so completely and unabashedly, so natural in its destruction.

While Carruth employs tidy lines in “Swept,” the tightness is offset by a hazy introduction of characters and tense line breaks. Carruth begins “When we say I / miss you what / we mean is I’m / filled with.” The line breaks are disorienting, but not without purpose. Notice how the first and third lines end on Carruth’s “I” character. He becomes the center, one of the poles through which the poem’s emotion will charge to and from. In this shift, the “I” is separated from the “we” so that the “I” and “you” will become the core relationship. Are we confused yet? A man is the “I,” with his wife he forms the “we,” and his lost love is the “you.” Or maybe the man is the “I,” with his wife he forms the “we,” and his deceased child is the “you.” I could propose a few more of these character combinations, but that would just serve to illustrate my point: it’s up to the reader to decide who the people inhabiting this poem are. Hayden Carruth has his version and that doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be your version too.

Before going further into the poem it’s important to return to the line breaks. Check out how the lines in the first stanza (and first line of the second stanza) are broken (or enjambed). Then scan to the right and check out a sterilized version I created with a few small edits. Seeing these two versions side-by-side illustrates how powerful the line breaks are in keeping readers off kilter. The confusion in Carruth’s version mirrors the confusion that accompanies horrible pain.

Carruth’s Version
When we say I
miss you what
we mean is I’m
filled with

dread.

My Edited Version
When we say
I miss you
what we mean
is I'm filled

with dread.

Now let’s move on to the meat of the poem. In the course of a few lines “we miss you” is translated to mean “I’m filled with dread.” As readers, we fall squarely into the “I” character’s viewpoint. He uses the second stanza to move from dread to sleeping alone at night. This movement from sharp emotion to an image of the aftermath seems like a wave…which strangely crashes upon us in the first line of the final stanza: “At night / alone going / to bed is / like lying down // in a wave.” The painful longing slams down upon Carruth’s speaker each night as he goes to sleep. He misses the “you” character terribly and this yearning is the emotion he sends out into the world, hoping it will reach her. But days, months, maybe even years of this practice have left him broken. How could making a routine of heartache not leave a human being in shambles? The ending is remarkably understated, just as a wave receding back to where it came from. “Total / absence of light. / Swept away to / gone.” We lose some of ourselves in the relationships that disintegrate and end before our liking. We even lose some of ourselves in the relationships that merely cool over time. In each of these losses a part of us is swept away. I’m not sure where it goes, but we’ll spend our days chasing the pieces that left us. Hayden Carruth knew this chase well. As Galway Kinnell points out: “This is not a man who sits down to 'write a poem'; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being.”