While researching a piece on the David Foster Wallace collection at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, writer Justine Tal Goldberg discovered a gem in the archives: a mournful bit of verse written by a young Wallace, “presumably for a grade-school class.”
The sheet of composition paper (which you can see in all its handwritten glory on Goldberg’s site ) reads:
David. My moth-
er Works So hard
So hard and for bread she needs some lard
She bakes the bread. And makes
the bed. And when she’s
threw she Feels she’s daydD
a
v
i
d
Goldberg offers a pretty convincing reading of the poem, noting Wallace’s uncommonly mature phrasings and his “ear for spoken language.” She even brought the poem to a psychoanalyst, who also sensed that young Wallace had been listening carefully to his mother’s words
:
the line “she Feels she’s dayd” perhaps echoing his mother’s own complaint of being “dead tired.” The doctor goes on to explain, in Goldberg’s words, that:
from a psychoanalytic perspective, this poem smacks of loneliness. In third person narration, Wallace observes his mother attending to her work, and wonders if she has energy enough to attend to him; he observes his mother in a state of physical exhaustion, and wonders if her capacity for affection has been exhausted as well. After all the housework — making the bed and baking the bread — will she have anything left for him?
If this is the case, consider the symbolic implications of dead: separate, detached, absent, unavailable. In the simplest terms, feeling dead means not feeling alive.
And what were
your
elementary school poems about?
Elsewhere in
Slate
:
Read
the words David Foster Wallace underlined in his dictionary
, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.
(Via the Guardian )
Follow Brow Beat on Twitter . For more culture coverage, like Slate Culture on Facebook.
