Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

John Frederick Nims' "Old River Road" is a dense and intricate poem, a meditation on passion, consequence, and the inevitable erosion of human impulses by time and circumstance. Its title suggests a place steeped in history, an old path worn by years of travel, but also metaphorically evokes the passage of desire and memory through the currents of life. The poem’s language is rich with allusions, classical and contemporary, and its shifting tones—by turns wry, lyrical, and tragic—echo the complexities of love, reputation, and fleeting moments of splendor.

Opening with a reference to Dante’s Inferno, "Noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno"—“We who stained the world with blood”—the poem immediately frames its themes in terms of fate and reckoning. The lovers at the heart of the poem—caught in a moment of passion that will reverberate through their lives—are not simply individuals but archetypes, figures in a grand drama of human folly. The first section, with its image of a casual party and the seemingly innocent touch of hands in a dish of cashews, sets the stage for an upheaval. That moment of physical contact becomes electric, shattering their separate existences and throwing them into a whirlwind. The poem captures the way an accidental or impulsive act can unravel the stability of life: "Their hands! to play such lightning from the skies / As rocked impeccable homes to their foundation." The invocation of "lightning from the skies" aligns their passion with both divine and destructive forces, emphasizing its inevitability and the power it exerts beyond personal control.

The second section explores the fallout of their transgression, moving from the intimate moment to the wider consequences. Here, Nims employs a mix of wry humor and rueful observation. The lovers try to maintain a façade of control, but their "candor"—a term repeated throughout the poem—becomes their undoing. The image of "Laocoön"—the Trojan priest who, along with his sons, was ensnared by sea serpents for trying to expose the deception of the Trojan Horse—underscores their entrapment in their own honesty. Like Laocoön, they have seen too much, spoken too freely, and their fate is sealed. The partygoers, the gossips, the "husbands, / Bumbling men unbudgeable as trunks," all play their role in the judgment. Yet the lovers themselves are not entirely blameless victims; they embrace their own spectacle, making a show of their affair even as it spirals toward ruin.

The third section intensifies the sense of downfall, bringing in cosmic and mythic imagery. There is a blending of the sacred and profane as the lovers find themselves mirrored in ancient figures, "Angels beckoning Adam to the garden." The contrast between innocence and experience, between paradise and expulsion, is keenly felt here. The poem suggests that, for all the moralizing and scandal, love itself—pure, uncalculated—is rare and miraculous. The "bright balloon, heaven’s effervescence" is an image of fleeting beauty, its deflation an inevitable loss. This theme of ephemerality—of pleasure and passion transfigured by time into regret or mere memory—recurs in many of Nims’ works. The lovers "lap them in love, who shrivel as they wait," caught between the ecstasy of the moment and the withering of its aftermath.

In the final section, Nims broadens the scope of the poem further, linking the individual drama to the larger cycles of history and human folly. The "fugitive finger" of music, the rolling chords that soar before collapsing, mirror the rise and fall of passion, of cities, of empires. The lines, "Lightning: a lifeline between two and heaven (September’s not more pendulous on its stem)," suggest that what they shared, however ill-fated, was luminous, suspended between earth and the divine, just as September fruit teeters before its fall. The closing images—references to celestial signs, to "the Angel of Death in heaven", to the "ash of roses"—emphasize the inevitable reckoning of time. What once seemed singular, rebellious, grand, is reduced to dust and regret.

The poem’s elaborate structure, its shifting perspectives, and its dense allusiveness reflect the nature of the lovers’ experience: overwhelming, chaotic, yet ultimately decipherable as part of a grander pattern. Through classical references, rich imagery, and moments of ironic detachment, Nims captures the paradox of passion—that it feels eternal but is bound by time, that it grants meaning yet leads to loss. "Old River Road" is not merely about an affair or a scandal, but about how human lives, with all their turbulence and yearning, are caught in the inexorable currents of history, memory, and fate.

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