Poem of the Day: ‘Last Supper’

Elinor Wylie (1885–1928) emerges among her literary peers — Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, both of whose poems have appeared frequently as the Sun’s Poem of the Day — as a singular, strange voice. Her tight formal control and the polished, straightforward surfaces of her poems place her in the company of those other women whose work flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, as does her inclination to melancholy. At the same time, Wylie stands apart. Millay’s particular bent is for bleak irony, as in this Poem of the Day from June 2022. Teasdale’s is for an almost unbearable intensity of emotion, on display in “Blue Squills,” which ran in this space last August. We might say that Wylie encompasses both those turns of mind in her work. Yet the Edward Hopperesque scene of her “A Crowded Trolley Car,” the Sun’s Poem of the Day last September, displays her striking interest in the human world, and her capacity for perceiving spiritual reality in the images of this world. We see that capacity again in today’s Poem of the Day. The title, of course, is evocative. We can’t read it without reading into it the Last Supper, with Christ and his apostles in the upper room, which precedes the agony in the garden of Gethsemane, the sufferings of Good Friday, and the crucifixion itself. Rather than writing openly about that sequence of events, however, or allowing some other final meal — that of a prisoner before execution, say — to figure allegorically as that more famous last supper, Wylie has chosen, in this brief poem, to do something more restrained and subtle. In three tetrameter abab quatrains, this is a poem of renunciation, and of savoring small but potent things for the last time. The speaker is clearly not Christ, who might speak of leaving the earth he loves, but not of loving nothing else. This “Last Supper” is not that Last Supper. Whatever the precise situation may be, this is a human leavetaking, not a divine one. Still, the resonances of association persist.The meal the speaker rejoices in consuming, with all the senses, consists not of bread and wine, but of an apple: again, an evocative choice, with its echoes of Eden and the Fall. We can’t escape the suggestion of something transgressive, to which the speaker is bidding a long, reluctant farewell. The poem’s focus rests entirely on the experience of the meal as a lyric moment, not on whatever its literal context is. With the speaker, we as readers enter utterly into that moment, to taste and see, before the thing to be renounced — a love, a way of life, or life itself — is renounced. Last Supper by Elinor Wylie Now that the shutter of the dusk Begins to tremble in its groove, I am constrained to strip the husk From everything I truly love. So short a time remains to taste The ivory pulp, the seven pips, My heart is happy without haste, With revelation at its lips. So calm a beauty shapes the core, So grave a blossom frames the stem, In this last minute and no more, My eyes alone shall eat of them. ___________________________________________With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘Last Supper’

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