Hum (Poem Summary)

Poem Summary

Lines 1-18

The first line of the poem, "The days are beautiful," is immediately repeated as the second line — and, in fact, the line appears a total of nine times; five of those repetitions come within the first fourteen lines. This type of repetition is called anaphora and usually serves to underscore a point the narrator wants to make. In the most literal sense, "The days are beautiful" could refer to the weather in New York on September 11, 2001, which was unusually warm and sunny.

In the second stanza, the narrator's framework becomes circuitous. She states, "I know what days are," perhaps calling the word "beautiful" to the mind of the reader, but then states, "The other is weather," and the reader is given no clue as to what "the other" is referring. At this point, the reader is required to bring his or her own imagination into the poem. Also, the third line, "I know what days are," sets up another anaphoric parallel, with the fifth line, "I know what weather is."

The fourth stanza introduces new words and images: "Things are incidental. / Someone is weeping." "Things," like "other," is entirely nonspecific and represents another opportunity for the reader to overlay his or her own ideas onto the poem. Similarly, the reader is not told who is weeping. As such, the precise "things" and "someone" may be seen as of secondary importance. The next line, on the other hand, reveals that the narrator is herself weeping "for the incidental." Then, the first line of the poem is repeated.

The sixth stanza introduces the theme of time with the question, "Where is tomorrow?" The next line is, "Everyone will weep." Thus, in three successive stanzas the narrator has related that someone is weeping, she herself is weeping, and everyone will be weeping. That is, the act of weeping is to a certain extent universal. The seventh and eighth stanzas begin with the same line: "Tomorrow was yesterday." Here, the narrator sustains her puzzlelike framework with even more anaphora. In the eighth stanza, in fact, the narrator refers to yesterday, tomorrow, and today, deepening the focus on shifting perceptions of time. With the ninth stanza, "The sound of the weather / is everyone weeping" — the first stanza in which the two lines of the couplet constitute a single sentence — the previously introduced ideas and sorrowful tone of the poem are more firmly established.

Lines 19-38

The universality of the unnamed cause of the weeping is indicated in the tenth stanza: "Everyone is incidental. / Everyone weeps." The first of those lines could be literally understood to mean that every individual is subject to the forces of chance, while the second may indicate that these forces can cause great sadness. The next stanza returns to the issue of passing time, asserting that today's tears will extinguish tomorrow, conveying a certain hopelessness.

The twelfth stanza returns to weather imagery: "The rain is ashes. / The days are beautiful." The two lines create a dissonant image. Raining ashes would seem to be at odds with beautiful days. With the next lines, "The rain falls down. / The sound is falling," the imagery becomes more complex. Rain, ashes, and sound are all falling. More ominously, line 27 states, "The sky is a cloud." Together, these lines create an image of a cloud filled with rain, ashes, and sound. The narrator then becomes more specific, stating in line 29, "The sky is dust." The image of a sky filled with dust, ashes, rain, and the sound of mass weeping undoubtedly stirs negative feelings in the reader. The narrator, meanwhile, still refrains from directly naming what she sees, instead presenting only fragmentary images.

Lines 30 and 31 are the same: "The weather is yesterday." This is something of an inversion of line 16, "Today is weather." Line 32 returns to the sound of weeping, briefly, before the narrator asks her second question in line 33, as if underscoring a certain confusion: "What is this dust?" Stanza 18 provides the first concrete clue to the subject of the poem: "The days are beautiful. / The towers are yesterday." That second line may be read as another way of stating that the towers, which are given no physical description, no longer exist.

The narrator then declares in line 37, "The towers are incidental," harking back to lines 7 and 19, in which "things" and "everyone" are also described as incidental, and line 9, "I weep for the incidental." The next line is another question, a companion to line 33: "What are these ashes?" The repetition of the words "ashes" and "dust" is reminiscent of the common incantation of Christian burial rites, as written in the Book of Common Prayer, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," which in turn was inspired by Genesis 3:19: "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." As such, the notion of death, not explicitly mentioned, may also be called to mind.

Lines 39-54

In the last section of the poem, the narrator abruptly switches focus. Gone is concern with time, as the words "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow" do not again appear. Instead, each stanza, in a continuation of the poem's reliance on anaphora for dramatic effect, begins with the word "here." These last eight stanzas present a catalog of images that are abstract and expressionist in their randomness. The narrator speaks of a robe, books, and stones, and in the context of the poem, all of these objects have undergone some transformation, even as they are still "here." The words are "retired to their books," while the stones are "loosed from their settings."

The last three stanzas present three final ambiguous images. "Here is the place / where the sun came up" gives particular importance to the sun's coming up on one particular occasion in one particular place. Stanza 26, "Here is a season / dry in the fireplace," implies the burning up of an entire season. In view of earlier references, the final lines call to mind burning and death on the one hand, light and beauty on the other: "Here are the ashes. / The days are beautiful."