Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Naomi Shihab Nye’s "All Things Not Considered" is a stark, unflinching meditation on violence, loss, and the failure of ideology to protect the most vulnerable. Structured as a series of fragmented narratives and observations, the poem resists neat conclusions, instead exposing the devastation wrought by conflict, particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Through a restrained yet deeply humane voice, Nye questions the justification of violence and challenges the sanctity of religious and nationalistic ideologies that perpetuate suffering.

The poem opens with a simple yet devastating image: "You cannot stitch the breath / back into this boy." The directness of these lines forces the reader into an immediate confrontation with death, erasing any possibility of reversal or redemption. There is no poetic embellishment here—just the stark finality of loss. The following lines expand this image, presenting a brother and sister at play when their "room exploded." The innocence of childhood is abruptly, senselessly shattered, and the poem demands that the reader consider the enormity of such a moment.

The rhetorical question "In what language / is this holy?" serves as an indictment of the justifications used for violence. Religious and political rhetoric often seeks to sanctify conflict, but Nye strips these justifications bare, questioning the very language that frames destruction as divinely sanctioned.

The poem then moves through a series of individual tragedies, each offering a brief but searing portrait of a life lost. Jewish boys skipping school and playing in a cave, a Palestinian teenager "who believed in the field beyond right and wrong where people came together to talk," only to be shot while kneeling to help someone else. These moments underscore the universality of suffering, refusing to privilege one narrative over another. The inclusion of both Jewish and Palestinian victims is crucial—it dismantles any attempt to frame the conflict in purely binary terms. The poem refuses to take sides in the traditional sense, instead exposing how violence consumes lives indiscriminately.

The repetition of "holy" in various contexts—particularly in "If this is holy, / could we have some new religions please?"—continues the poem’s interrogation of ideology. The speaker does not merely critique acts of war but questions the structures that sustain them, the belief systems that allow for the killing of children under the guise of righteousness.

The next section shifts in tone, introducing a deeply personal lament: "Most of us would take our children over land." This assertion, spoken with quiet certainty, challenges the notion that land is worth more than life. The following lines imagine a world where people would rather wander homeless than sacrifice their children to war. However, Nye undercuts this idealism with a sharp acknowledgment: "This is what we say from a distance / because we can say whatever we want." The speaker recognizes the privilege of those who theorize about conflict from afar, insulated from the immediate, brutal choices that people in war zones must make.

The poem then moves toward a kind of elegy for justice: "No one was right. / Everyone was wrong." Here, Nye rejects the notion of moral absolutes in favor of a reckoning with collective failure. The idea that "at a certain point / the flawed narrator wins" suggests that history is often written by those who justify their own mistakes rather than acknowledge shared guilt.

The final stanza revisits the conditions that sustain conflict. "People made mistakes for decades. / Everyone hurt in similar ways / at different times." This perspective challenges the cyclical nature of violence—each generation absorbing the wounds of the last. The repetition of "some picked up guns because guns were given" and "some picked up stones because they had them" highlights the arbitrary nature of the weapons used, emphasizing that violence often stems from access rather than ideology. The final juxtaposition—"at the same time people were studying history, / going to school"—is one of the most haunting elements of the poem. It underscores the tragic simultaneity of violence and normalcy, how war exists alongside, and even within, everyday life.

Structurally, the poem is written in free verse, with fragmented, uneven stanzas that reflect the disorder and unpredictability of conflict. The enjambment and spacing create a sense of breathlessness, mimicking both the urgency of the subject matter and the relentless passage of time. The use of simple, declarative sentences throughout the poem reinforces its stark realism—there is no need for embellishment when the facts themselves are harrowing.

"All Things Not Considered" is ultimately a plea for a different kind of reckoning. By rejecting conventional narratives of good versus evil, it forces the reader to confront the shared humanity beneath the divisions. It does not offer solutions, nor does it attempt to soften the horror of war. Instead, it asks us to reconsider the structures—political, religious, ideological—that sustain cycles of violence. In doing so, it leaves us with an unsettling, necessary question: if what we call holy permits such suffering, then what, if anything, can truly be sacred?

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