The Blue Bowl

Jane Kenyon

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2005

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Assonance & Consonance

Throughout the poem Kenyon employs rich sound texture, relying heavily on assonance, or repeated vowel sounds, and consonance, or repeated consonant sounds. Kenyon pulls in her reader in the beginning lines, “Bare-handed / we scraped sand and gravel / back into the hole” (Lines 2-4), repeating “a” sounds across the imagery, and creating echoes of the “b,” “s,” and “h” sounds as well. The repeated “s” sounds mimic the “hissing” (Line 4) sound Kenyon describes next, adding to the richness of the description and creating an auditory sense of the experience. The density of these repeating sounds draws the reader’s attention, pulling her into the rhythm of the poem and making the image of the burial precise and surprising.

Kenyon employs these devices throughout the poem to great effect. After the reference to the “sorrows much keener than these” (Line 10), she describes the speaker’s silence, and then says, “we worked, / ate, stared and slept. It stormed / all night; now it clears” (Lines 11-12). The sibilance of the repeating “s” sound lulls the reader into the rhythm of the day and sets up the shift that comes next. As she moves to the final lines, Kenyon shifts away from the “s” sounds with the “robin / burbles from a dripping bush,” (Line 17) and emphasizes “b” sounds that mimic the natural sound of water and emphasize the lushness of the image.

Simile

Kenyon employs two key similes over the course of the poem. The first occurs at the beginning: “Like primitives, we buried the cat” (Line 1). The simile allows the speaker to immediately establish a blunt, honest tone; the reader understands that this speaker, by referring to herself as “primitive,” will cast a critical, almost self-deprecating lens on her story. By using the simile to create this tone, Kenyon signals intimacy with her reader, letting readers know that this poem will take an honest, ambivalent look at death and grief, rather than casting a more comfortable lens over it.

Kenyon also ends the poem with a simile. She compares the singing robin to a “neighbor who means well / but always says the wrong thing” (Lines 15-16). Kenyon again employs simile to create surprise; she has set up a happy, pleasing image of a burbling robin, but immediately undercuts it with ambivalence, comparing it to a well-intentioned neighbor who nonetheless creates discomfort for the speaker. “The Blue Bowl” is rife with the speaker’s feelings of ambivalence and her attempt to work through her conflicting emotions. Kenyon’s similes support this tone and underscore the speaker’s experience of sorrow.

Volta

The volta, or tonal shift, that happens at the 10th line of “The Blue Bowl,” signals to the reader that the poem is “about” more than a simple burial of a house cat. From the Italian word for “turn,” the volta originated in the Italian sonnet form; poets continue to employ this rhetorical device today to create tension. The volta allows the poet to create emotional resonance for the reader and to draw attention to a particular turning point in the poem. In Kenyon’s poem, the volta occurs in Line 10, when she shifts away from the specifics of the cat’s burial to the larger thematic concern of the poem: “There are sorrows much keener than these” (Line 10). She employs the tonal shift as a way of surprising the reader and adding an additional layer of emotion to her poem. Kenyon’s volta provides the emotional core of the poem, signaling to the reader that she does not simply want to convey the grief of a pet’s death, but that she wants to acknowledge larger, more nebulous forms of sorrow.