The Boy
It is the boy in me who's looking out
the window, while someone across the street
mends a pillowcase, clouds shift, the gutter spout
pours rain, someone else lights a cigarette?
(Because he flinched, because he didn't whirl
around, face them, because he didn't hurl
the challenge back—"Fascists?"—not "Faggots"—Swine!
he briefly wonders—if he were a girl . . .)
He writes a line. He crosses out a line.
I'll never be a man, but there's a boy
crossing out words: the rain, the linen-mender,
are all the homework he will do today.
The absence and the priviledge of gender
confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail.
Not neuter—neutral human, and unmarked,
the younger brother in the fairy tale
except, boys shouted "Jew!" across the park
at him when he was coming home from school.
The book that he just read, about the war,
the partisans, is less a terrible
and thrilling story, more a warning, more
a code, and he must puzzle out the code.
He has short hair, a red sweatshirt. They know
something about him—that he should be proud
of? That's shameful if it shows?
That got you killed in 1942.
In his story, do the partisans
have sons? Have grandparents? Is he a Jew
more than he is a boy, who'll be a man
someday? Someone who'll never be a man
looks out the window at the rain he thought
might stop. He reads the sentence he began.
He writes down something that he crosses out.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Marilyn Hacker places the poem in a quiet, reflective moment: someone stands at a window while ordinary details of weather and domestic life pass by, and the mind begins to work through larger pressures beneath the surface. The poem's central consciousness is divided. It sees itself as both a boy and something beyond easy gender categories, while also feeling the force of antisemitism and homophobia in the surrounding world. Writing becomes part of that struggle, as the repeated act of composing and crossing out lines mirrors the effort to find a usable identity and language.
The poem moves from immediate observation to inward questioning, then toward a more historical and ethical awareness. Images of schoolyard insults, wartime partisans, and the memory of 1942 turn the private scene into a meditation on inheritance and danger. The boy's uncertainty is not simply personal confusion; it is shaped by what others can read on his body, what they may attack, and what survival might require. By the end, the poem does not solve these tensions. Instead, it leaves the reader with a mind still drafting, revising, and trying to understand whether boyhood, manhood, Jewishness, and gender can ever fully align.
Theme
- Gender uncertainty - The poem treats masculinity as unstable and difficult to inhabit, showing a consciousness that feels boyish yet does not fit conventional ideas of manhood.
- Jewish identity and vulnerability - Jewishness is presented not as an abstract label but as a lived position shaped by memory, threat, and the inherited knowledge of persecution.
- Writing as self-examination - The repeated crossing out of lines mirrors the poem's effort to revise identity, as if language itself is being tested against lived reality.
- Exposure to prejudice - Schoolyard slurs and the hostile world outside the window suggest how quickly difference becomes visible and punishable.
- Historical memory - The wartime references connect the boy's present uncertainty to the longer history of antisemitic violence, making memory a guide and warning.
- Ambivalence about becoming - The poem resists a simple coming-of-age narrative; growing up is entangled with shame, fear, pride, and incomplete self-knowledge.
Literary Devices
- Free verse - The loose, unforced structure suits the poem's hesitant thought process and its movement between perception, memory, and self-questioning.
- Interior monologue - The poem follows a mind talking to itself, letting readers hear doubt, revision, and sudden realizations as they occur.
- Repetition - Repeated references to writing, crossing out, and manhood emphasize the speaker's uncertainty and the unfinished quality of identity.
- Enjambment - Lines spill into one another, creating momentum that mimics thinking while also suggesting instability and hesitation.
- Parenthetical aside - The aside about flinching and insults interrupts the flow, exposing a painful private memory within the larger meditation.
- Rhetorical question - Questions about how others see him, what he is supposed to be, and what his history means deepen the poem's uncertainty.
- Juxtaposition - Everyday domestic details are placed beside insults and wartime recollection, showing how ordinary life and historical fear coexist.
Symbolism
- Window - The window suggests both observation and separation, marking the distance between the inward self and the threatening world outside.
- Rain - The rain reflects the poem's muted, unsettled mood and the sense of a day suspended in uncertainty.
- Crossing out words - This action symbolizes revision, self-censorship, and the difficulty of arriving at a stable identity or statement.
- Schoolyard insults - The shouted slurs stand for social violence and the early shaping force of humiliation.
- Partisans - The wartime fighters symbolize courage, resistance, and the unbearable pressure of historical survival.
- Red sweatshirt - The clothing item becomes a sign of visible identity, something others can read and judge.
Tone
Hacker's tone is intimate, searching, and unsentimental, with a steady intelligence that keeps returning to hard questions rather than easy resolution. The emotional atmosphere is quieter but more tense: ordinary details feel charged, and the reader senses vulnerability, alertness, and the ache of self-scrutiny beneath the calm surface.
Historical Context
Marilyn Hacker writes from a late twentieth-century literary landscape shaped by feminist poetry, LGBTQ+ visibility, and a stronger willingness to confront private identity as a public and political issue. Her work often engages questions of gender, sexuality, Jewishness, and formal self-awareness, placing personal experience in conversation with history.
The poem also resonates with the postwar memory of fascism and the Holocaust, especially through its references to wartime partisans and 1942. That historical backdrop gives the poem's struggle over identity an added urgency: difference is not only social discomfort but something that has been marked, policed, and, in extreme cases, targeted for destruction.
Similar Poems
- One Art - Elizabeth Bishop
- Lady Lazarus - Sylvia Plath
- Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
- Monologue of a Dog - Frank O'Hara
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