17 pages • 34 minutes read
Naomi Shihab NyeFamous
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fish
The poem’s dramatic and understated opening line—“The river is famous to the fish” (Line 1)—at once establishes and upends reader expectations. It is a curious upcycling of the word “famous,” a threadbare and too-familiar buzzword for the post-postmodern world of easy celebrity and quick fame. The line compels the reader to redefine a familiar term, thus beginning what will quickly become a lesson in reimagining the world.
Like the birds who eye the cat from their birdhouse, like the tear-stained cheek, like the heart wherein a person keeps their deepest ideas, the fish symbolize all those who depend on but may not fully appreciate elements of their world vital to their very existence. In a poem that celebrates the thereness of things and people the fish symbolizes those who, immersed in the busy day-to-day routine, may not stop and appreciate the complex environment that sustains that busyness. The poem argues that nothing should be taken for granted. Appreciate the river, the poem argues to the fish. The collaboration of energies creates a world that, once perceived, reveals its complex operation and in turn its radiant design.
The Photograph
In a poem that celebrates the interconnection of elements of the natural world and the social world, Stanza 7 seems oddly out of place. The speaker describes a photograph that a person carries about with them. The fact that the photograph is creased and folded (“bent” [Line 13]) suggests that the person has perhaps carried the photograph for some time, testifying to how much it matters to them. Yet, the poem cautions, the photograph means far more to that person than to the subject of the photograph itself.
The photograph thus symbolizes the reality of alienation and emotional isolation that is possible even in a world where, as the rest of the poem argues, everything fits, where everything and everyone is famous to something or someone else. The image of a person alone carrying about a photo as a kind of faux-companion or memory serves as a kind of cautionary parable, a reminder that a fractal world teeming with connections often unsuspected does not necessarily prevent the kind of existential angst associated with emotional, psychological, and even spiritual alienation. You can still feel alone, Stanza 7 cautions, even in a world of connections.
The photograph then is famous, to borrow from the logic of Nye’s poem, to the person who carries it, reinforcing rather than erasing the emotional distance between that person and the subject of the photograph.
Stanza 7 then acts as an important corrective in a poem that might otherwise seem flippant in its optimism. Despite the insight into a breathtaking world where everything works together in a dynamic of dependency and trust, the poem uses the photograph to suggest the fragility of that perception.
The Pulley
The pulley introduced in the closing stanza symbolizes the poet. Ultimately the poem moves toward a celebration of the intrinsic place of the poet within a society/culture that often relegates poets to the margins. Turning personal and revelatory in the closing lines, the poet declares that poets “want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous” (Line 19). The pulley is a most inelegant contraption that lacks ornate touches or aesthetic elements. It is designed for function. It is a complex of carefully weighted elements to achieve an effect. It is a machine designed to defy gravity, to move objects against gravity, to impose a direction and movement on inert objects that would otherwise surrender to the heavy pull of gravity.
Like the grasping vision and perception of a poet, the pulley moves, lifts, elevates objects, defying the bleak surrender to stasis implied by gravity. The pulley changes the order of things if not in some grand cosmic way than in a humble and modest way; so, too, does a poet. The pulley creates motion where motion did not exist. The pulley creates elevation where before was unspectacular stasis. Much as a pulley converts an object into a load, the alchemic poet converts an object, inert and stubbornly there, into an unexpected image, even a powerful symbol. Importantly, however, like the pulley, an undistinguished and seldom noticed miracle machine, the poet does this elevation quietly without fanfare, never forgetting that the work of elevation is what a poet does.
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By Naomi Shihab Nye
