My comments follow the poem. But before you read, consider the word “secular.” Contemporary usage varies. Generally, however, most of us think of the
world, the actions, and the thoughts that are not religious, not transcendent,
but of the temporal world. Here and now.
In the Secular Night by Margaret Atwood
In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
"In the Secular Night" by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. (c) Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
"In the Secular Night" by Margaret Atwood, from Morning in the Burned House. (c) Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.
Regardless of the difficulty in understand
what this poem “means,” a concern, but not my singular concern when reading poetry,
there is much that draws me in.
It’s the details and the contradictions that
swell my interest. The poet recalls past
and present. Its everyday experiences, thoughts,
things resonate in my experience. I omit
people because she only mentions those she encounters second hand, in the news.
The past’s grape juice and ginger ale, vanilla ice-cream, the forbidden smoke
that crawls up the chimney and the present’s lima beans, ritually prepared, and
the long creaking walk up the stairs and her search or at least contemplation
of the divine and the divine’s absence.
And in all these ponderings life (and death)
move mysteriously move forward back to another time.
