WHEREAS

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Get-Together

The reader understands that the setting for this poem is a gathering—a “get-together” (Line 14)—before the event is identified as such. At the onset of the poem, a man “leans back into a swig of beer” (Line 1) with “work-weary lips” (Line 1), and “enters the discussion” (Line 2). The scene is easily interpreted as an after-work event for teachers, or for the otherwise “scholarly” (Line 4).

The intended purpose of the get-together is not likely to be discord, but communion. A pleasant outdoor setting, a few beers, and congenial conversation is conducive to a social gathering of peers. There is a tacit agreement that the conversation will be just as congenial. The discussion, then, of the “Apology” (Line 3) becomes a kind of test. To be a member of this group is to agree with the status quo, which, in the guise of the “string-bean blue-eyed man” (Line 1), is to accept the least that is offered by way of apology.

The Circle

In “WHEREAS,” the circle, “each of them scholarly” (Line 4), tightens around the speaker until she is compelled to leave it. Rather than a symbol of intimacy, the circle in the poem creates a sphere of influence. It constricts more than the speaker, as eventually, “someone’s discomfort leaks out in a well-stated ‘Hmmm’” (Line 8).

While the circle feels constricting in the first 19 lines of the poem, it veers lethal at “Whereas in a stirred conflict between settlers and an Indian that night in a circle” (Line 20). The speaker has already introduced the reader to the idea that “conflict” (Line 7) is a stand-in for “genocide” (Line 16). In this contemporary moment in the poem, the speaker—the Indian—is surrounded and under attack.

There is circular motion, as well, in the returning, at each stanza, to the term “Whereas”—a looping that compels the poem both forward and back onto itself.

The Beer Bottle

The beer bottle, rather than the beer itself, makes itself visible with the word “bottleneck” (Line 3). A bottleneck represents the slim upper portion of a glass bottle, or a narrow section of road through which traffic slows. The concept arrives in the poem just before the man says, “Well, at least there was an Apology” (Line 3). This statement works to slow the movement of the poem. In the following stanza the speaker is rendered motionless under the starry sky.

The man’s “wrist [is] loose at the bottleneck” (Line 3), implying a swinging or otherwise rhythmic action. He uses it for emphasis. In Hollywood movies of the Old West, bottles were often slammed against the bar and broken to be used as weapons. This hint of impending violence and defense of territory returns when the speaker replays at “the get-together how the man and his beer bottle stated / their piece and I reel” (Lines 14-15).