Wait

Kinnell’s poem “Wait” is a plea to the listener to stay alive and reject giving up on life, despite the overwhelming pain of heartbreak. Kinnell never directly mentions suicide, but he implies it throughout as he implores “Don’t go too early” (Line 17). The poem is written in an intimate, conversational tone, which is aided by an informal, free verse structure dividing the poem into two uneven stanzas with non-rhyming verses. The imagery Kinnell uses to reinforce this intimacy closely focuses on small, common objects, as if to never lift the eyes from the immediate space in which one exists. This microfocus mirrors the acuteness of heartbreak, which makes it difficult to see beyond the painful, present moment. However, objects like “hair” (Lines 6 and 21), “buds that open out of season” (Line 8), “second-hand gloves” (Line 9), and “looms” (Line 23) also work to anchor the listener in tangible, rustic experiences, grounding them in a moment of intense emotional tumult.

In the first stanza, the speaker’s voice is insistent but gentle, starting the first line with a brief “Wait,” which is tempered with “for now” (Line 1), as if the speaker understands the delicate and dangerous nature of heartbreak and does not wish to push the listener too much. With some desperation, in the second verse the speaker acknowledges the listener’s world has been turned upside down, advising, “Distrust everything if you have to” (Line 2), so the reader can survive this moment of difficulty. However, he qualifies this with, “But trust the hours” (Line 3), personifying time by asking, “Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now?” (Lines 3-4). While the reader might have lost all faith in the world, Kinnell insists that time will continue, carrying the reader forward to something new if they only wait out the heartbreak. “The hours” (Line 3) may also be a reference to the Horae of Greek mythology, the goddesses of the seasons and time who also oversaw order and justice. The allusion implies that with patience, time—or the hours—will return the listener’s life to order. Here, Kinnell introduces a major theme of the poem: If the listener chooses to live, time will, by nature, heal heartbreak and renew the listener’s ability to love again.

Mimicking the small, passing moments of time, Kinnell explores this gradual renewal with a repetition of “will become interesting” over Lines 5-8. The things becoming interesting are simple elements of daily life: “hair” (Line 6), “buds” (Line 8), a vague “personal events” (Line 5), and “pain” (Line 7), suggesting even pain is worth living for. The speaker switches from “interesting” to the more romantic “lovely” (Line 9) with a metaphor about second-hand gloves, personifying this everyday object. More than most objects, gloves convey the intimacy of an object literally shaped to the original wearer’s hands. Moreover, lovers, like a hand in a glove, often both physically and personally adjust to fit one another. Now empty, the gloves long to be filled again by new hands, just as desolated lovers long for the fulfillment of new love. Kinnell forms a metaphor between those empty, longing gloves and the emptiness of solitary lovers, ending the stanza by insisting that need to be filled by new love is, rather than a betrayal of the first love, a form of faithfulness to the once thriving love.

If the first stanza starts with a gentle “Wait, for now” (Line 1), the second stanza pleads with more confidence and intensity, declaratively stating, “Wait” (Line 16). Here, the momentum grows along with this shift in tone, as Kinnell connects to the earlier theme of time’s steadfast movement by implying that an act against oneself would be leaving one’s life “too early” (Line 17). The speaker acknowledges the reader’s fatigue, but ties that to a universal experience of living rather than a reason to give up. He again makes a simple request to the reader, to “wait a little and listen” (Line 20) for the “music” of hair, of pain, and of looms “weaving our loves again” (Lines 21-23). The implicit rhythm and meter of music, which starts so quietly that one must listen for it, dovetails with the image of time and the hours, and is emphasized again through the repetition of “music of” over Lines 21-23. Each image Kinnell chose here evokes the tendrils slowly joining together to form something fuller—whether hair, threads on a loom, components of music, or the complex experience pain gives to life.

In the last lines, Kinnell fleshes out music as a metaphor to convey the idea of the listener’s one unique life. The speaker insists the reader live out that life to hear and fully understand their “whole existence” (Line 25). Mentioning “the sorrows” (Line 26) as a bookend to “the hours” of Line 3, Kinnell returns to that allusion, as the sorrows (or the Algea), were the spirits of pain, suffering, and grief. Yet here, the sorrows only rehearse the music of life, while the greater performance is a much fuller collapse of every possibility of life, playing “itself into total exhaustion” (Line 26). In “Wait,” rather than reject the pain of heartbreak, Kinnell suggests it is a necessary (if not beautiful) component of life that must be endured, but which gives the reader a deeper connection to their full human existence. As such, the reader should “be there to hear it” (Line 24). Only having lived that full experience of love and pain can the life naturally come to rest in “total exhaustion” (Line 26).