18 pages • 36 minutes read

The Blue Terrance

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2006

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Intermingling of Love and Loss

As much as happily-ever-after is a staple of romantic myths and tales, so is the trope of great love that is unconsummated or lost. In many legends, love is in fact inseparable from loss. True love seldom has a permanent resolution in the form of happy partnerships. Hayes plays with this idea in “The Blue Terrance,” where the speaker is as much in love with the end of love as he is with his lover. In Lines 25-26, he confesses he’s in trouble: “Especially if you love as I love / falling to the earth.” The reader might have previously assumed the speaker loathes his (supposed) failures in love, but these lines reverse that assumption: The speaker loves “falling to earth” or the feeling of despair itself. He romanticizes yearning. If love were easy, he wouldn’t find it worth pursuing. Conflict and tension elevate a romance for the speaker: “That’s why nothing’s more romantic / than working your teeth through / the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic / than the way good love can take leave of you” (Lines 34-37). The metaphor of biting through muscle does not signify literal or physical violence, but the struggle between preserving and annihilating the individual self that love represents. Further, the phrase “working your teeth through / the muscle” evokes labor and effort, an image that has an erotic connotation but is also associated with creativity and craft. The speaker implies that any valuable emotion or action, like love or poetry, involves hard work and tension.

By describing love as a yoking together of contradictory forces, Hayes is working within the Romantic tradition. Romantic poetry, such as that by John Keats, often explores one’s impossible longing to simultaneously exist in life and death, in love and separation. Hayes touches upon these themes and reinvents them. The most apt metaphor for the coexisting of life, love, and death is the romantic having sex in a burning house. The speaker of the poem does not literally lose himself in making love in a house on fire; if he did, he wouldn’t be around to tell the tale. He, however, is open about being swayed by the power of that image. Yet, he subtly acknowledges that practical realities are never far behind. Throughout the poem, the speaker wishes to speak of love in abstraction, but always grounds it with concrete details that evoke identity and class. It is important to note that the burning house he describes is a burning row-house, a dwelling sometimes associated with the working class. Previously, he had only a dirty rag to wipe the brow of a righteous woman. The burning row-house, the dirty rag, even the lapsing into all-American dialect as the poem ends “doggone / lonesome” (Line 38) highlight the tension between the abstraction of love and the stiffness of reality. The miracle then is that the speaker—now representing humanity as a whole—is able to experience and enact romance at all.

Blues Music and Black Identity

Hayes often discusses personal themes in his poems, and the self is an object of great scrutiny in his oeuvre. Characteristically, he uses self-examination as a launching pad for exploring historical, cultural, and literary realities. In “The Blue Terrance,” the blue or depressed sad self is tied with the speaker’s sensitive, poetic self, his Blackness, and the persona that loves blues music. Blues music is a metaphor for the speaker’s individual temperament as well as his identity as a Black man. The poem itself is composed as a tribute to a blues song, with odd enjambments (line breaks) and improvised rhymes mimicking the “bloodshot octaves” of the music. Yet the music is highly formal—much like Hayes’s poem, which rhymes and is arranged in neat tercets—as the octaves suggests. This is the reality of the speaker’s existence.

Blue recurs as a motif, and the poem explores the idea of blueness in many ways. Blues music was an indelible part of the speaker’s childhood and youth. It expressed and shaped his desire and longing, and it continues to express his reality, never going out of fashion, because blues music aesthetically captures the complexities of the Black experience. It also is a historical and cultural record of Black American identity. Many historians believe early blues music gave a cultural context to a people—enslaved people and their descendants who had been forcibly removed from their cultural context. With its roots in Black spirituals and protest song, the blues also is the voice of dissent. When the speaker hears the blues, it provides him both with aesthetic pleasure and roots him in a unique tradition that reflects his identity. The poem continues to build on the symbolism of the blues, underscoring the fact that it was music that arose as a vehicle for ineffable sadness. This sadness is a part of human existence in general, but for the originators of the blues, it was the sadness of dislocation. The blues expressed the sadness and mollified it.

The Wild, Individual Self

Hayes describes himself as a “Whitmanesque” poet, in the sense that his poems encompass multitudes of human selves and experiences, much like his poetic predecessor, Walt Whitman. Hayes expresses and celebrates the contradictions and layers of the implacable, wild self, as is evident in “The Blue Terrance.” The poem is an ode to the poet’s melancholy self, which is not just the poem’s speaker or Terrance Hayes, the poet. This self is also the reprimanded young boy in math class, the Black boy who feels rejected because of his identity, the young man in love with blues music, and the poet with a contradictory temperament. This self is characteristically American—with his funk machine and proclamations of being “so doggone lonesome” (Line 38)—and yet universal. It is a self that composes a poem in the formal, classical style, yet animates it with references to blues music and the pop star Prince.

Hayes uses several allusions and images to conjure up the wildness of the human self. Even when it follows rules, and identifies with categories, it cannot be fully defined or decoded. It is all its identities, yet more, both in the political and personal sense. Hayes, the poet, writes in the tradition of Langston Hughes (1901-1967) and Walt Whitman, in tercets of classical poetry and the “bloodshot octaves” (Line 23) of the blues. Through alluding to this multiplicity of influences, Hayes establishes that his heritage—like that of everyone else—is complex.