And the People Stayed Home

When Kitty O’Meara posted “And the People Stayed Home” on her Facebook page on March 13, 2020, there was no need to specify the context of her meditation on how a disruption of people’s daily routines could lead to personal and social transformation. Her original readers immediately understood that she wrote these words in reaction to the global spread of the COVID-19 virus. Two days earlier, on March 11, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and former President Donald Trump announced a national emergency on March 13. Global air travel became restricted. Schools and universities moved their classes online. Entertainment venues began closing, and most restaurants switched to providing only take-out service. Millions of people were forced to work from home or temporarily or permanently lost their jobs. By April, the virus was rampant in all parts of the United States, and Americans were becoming used to living in a lockdown and wearing masks in public. The situation was already dire in Europe and parts of Asia, and by the second half of 2020 the virus was daily killing thousands of people worldwide.

Even though O’Meara wrote the poem during the preliminary stages of the pandemic, it was already becoming clear that this disease would cause a profound and lasting disruption of human activities and potentially change the very fabric of life. People were increasingly aware that difficult and sorrowful times were ahead, so it took quite a leap of faith to imagine, as O’Meara did, that tragedy and disorder would ultimately lead to positive personal and social changes. The poem does not dwell on the negative consequences of the pandemic, but it certainly presents loss and grief as the inevitable precursors of the beneficial transformation it envisions. While clearly inspired by the pandemic, the poem places this specific crisis into a broader context of the global environmental and social crises. This virus, the poem suggests, is only one in a series of serious problems threatening humanity and the earth itself. Nevertheless, quiet optimism prevails.

On her blog and in her video recording of the poem (see Listen to Poem), O’Meara gives it a title: “In the Time of Pandemic.” That title clarifies the poem’s social context and could be useful to a reader who encounters the poem with no previous knowledge of its origin. However, the poem is better known by its first line—“And the People Stayed Home”—which is listed as its title in most places where the poem appears online or in print. One reason for that might be that the poem had already become an internet sensation before the author gave it the new title, but more importantly, that first sentence is powerfully evocative and more memorable. Anyone who knows that the pandemic inspired the poem will immediately understand why “the people stayed home” (Line 1), but even those unfamiliar with the context will find that statement striking and intriguing. It forebodes something extraordinary and menacing. The inclusion of the word “and” indicates that something already happened, so what follows should be seen as a consequence of that event. Also, the repetition of “and” throughout the poem, in the form of anaphora and polysyndeton, is the key rhetorical device in the poem (see Literary Devices). Therefore, “And the People Stayed Home” captures both the tone and the narrative strategy of the poem, which makes it a fitting and haunting title.

The poem tells a story, and its narrative strategy is to provide a series of causally related events, gradually strengthening in effect and intensity until they reach a profound transformation. The initial outcomes of the disruption in people’s routines appear mundane and modest. People simply spend more time doing activities they enjoy: “[T]hey read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games” (Line 2). The following statement, however, reveals that sustaining these minor adjustments amounts to a major change since the people “learned new ways of being” (Line 3). This assertion may mean that these pleasant activities have become more prominent and significant in people’s lives, but it implies more than that: Temporarily freed from the constraints of strict work schedules and reminded of the fragility of human life, people may reconsider their priorities and place personal fulfillment and self-care above career goals and moneymaking. The sentence purposefully ends with the idea that people learned to be “still” (Line 3). In other words, the desired new way of being is based on the ability to suspend hectic habits, be more present in the moment, and assess what really matters rather than put life on autopilot and perpetuate patterns of behavior resulting in stress and dissatisfaction.

The third stanza develops the implications of being still and takes the changes in people’s lives to the next level. More than before, people meditate, pray, and dance—all activities that promote being in tune with one’s mind and body. These are also activities one can perform alone or in the company of others. So, the assertion that people now “listened more deeply” (Line 4) implies that they people pay more attention to both their own inner selves and those around them. Meditation trains a person to concentrate on the body, to “listen” to it, but that skill is transferable to concentrating on others in conversation. Prayer is about one’s personal spiritual state as well as an expression of good will toward others. Dancing requires finding the rhythm in the body but also in harmony with the moving bodies of other people. Being truly present makes it easier to be genuinely present for fellow human beings. However, such self-awareness also opens people’s eyes to the darker side of who they are. As O’Meara puts it, people “met their / shadows” (Lines 4-5); they confronted aspects of themselves which were previously repressed or ignored. All these changes make it possible to “think differently” (Line 5) than before patterns of behavior and thought were interrupted by the pandemic. (For more on listening and on meeting one’s shadow, see Symbols & Motifs.)

The fourth stanza contains only one short sentence, like the first stanza, and signals a shift in emphasis from personal to global transformation. The crisis has passed and “the people healed” (Line 6), so now “the earth / [begins] to heal” (Lines 7-8), as well. This is where the poem’s environmental message becomes apparent. In a sense, the poem anticipates the fact that a reduction in human activity (industrial production, transportation, etc.) leads to a reduction in pollution. Air quality significantly improved in many places during the months of strict lockdowns. Cooped up at home, humans were simply unable to pollute as much as usual. The pandemic forced people to suspend “ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways” (Line 7) that harm and threaten the earth’s biosphere. However, O’Meara has in mind something more profound and lasting. The poem predicts, or expresses the hope, that these imposed changes in behavior will lead to deliberate personal and social choices that could eventually heal the earth.

The final stanza imagines that hoped-for future. Once the danger is over, people are “joined together again” (Line 9) to help each other grieve and begin making “new choices” (Line 10). That will require imagination (dreaming “new images”) and creativity (creating “new ways to live”), so that people could “heal the / earth fully, as they had been healed” (Lines 10-11). The passive voice may suggest limited human agency: People “had been healed” (Line 11) as if by an extraneous force, a divine intervention, rather than “we had healed,” which would imply that people healed themselves. However, the passive construction also invokes a sense of duty: Having escaped peril, humans should do everything possible to prevent other crises taking a deadly toll. The final words of the poem suggest the pandemic experience should serve as a lesson about how vulnerable humans are while remaining capable of solving problems when collaborating to create change. It took merely one year to produce vaccines against COVID-19, which help curb the pandemic and protect human life. Could humans not address other global threats with equal success? “And the People Stayed Home” implies people could—and must try to—resolve the many problems that threaten the wellbeing of the earth and all it represents (for multiple implications of “the earth” in the poem, see Symbols & Motifs).