We Live by What We See at Night (Themes)

Themes

Inheritance

When one considers what a child inherits from a parent, the things that come to mind most often are either tangible items — money, houses, furniture, and so forth — or certain physical and personality traits — brown eyes, big feet, a hot temper, and so on. In “We Live by What We See at Night,” Martín Espada addresses a different kind of inheritance, one more abstract and transcendental than the usual legacy. He has derived from his father the desire and the ability to dream of Puerto Rico, not in the typical sense of daydreaming about a beautiful tropical island but of a mental “transportation” there when he lies down to sleep.

Espada was born in New York, but his father was a native Puerto Rican. Before the poet ever had the opportunity to visit his family’s homeland, he learned about its simplistic beauty and lush terrain from his father who had left the island decades before. The strong bond between the Espadas is typical of Puerto Rican family life, and not even the many years they had spent in the United States lessened the ties. It is both a sense of undying unity among family and a “craving for that island birthplace” that the father wants to pass on to his children, and this poem reflects his success in doing so.

The theme of legacy plays out not only in such direct references as “This was the inheritance / of your son” but also in the description of parallel dreams between the poet and his father. The dominant object in each is the mountainous countryside of Puerto Rico, and both men can envision it despite their actual physical surroundings of “East Harlem rooftops” and “the projects” of Brooklyn. Although much of the island’s once-forested land has now been cleared for commercial purposes, still about 75 percent of the area consists of hills and mountains too steep for cultivation. This physical fact is likely a good reason that the mountainsides figure so heavily in the images that many Puerto Rican immigrants “crave” in the midst of skyscrapers and crowded streets. The father, here, has been able to convey that longing for and appreciation of the island’s natural beauty to his son, although the young Espada never grew up surrounded by it.

A preference of Puerto Rico’s attractive “moist green light” and the “green bamboo hillsides” over the very unattractive, poor areas of New York City is easy to understand. But an obvious partiality is not what makes inheritance so important in the Espada family. Actually, this theme stretches far beyond any one family to encompass the plight of many immigrants. People who have left their homelands to start new lives in America usually do so because they believe their lives will improve in many ways. Of course, that is not always the case, and leaving their homelands does not necessarily imply any hatred for the customs and natural surroundings of their native lands. Even though many families, including Espada’s, may move to another country for economic reasons, it is very important to retain a sense of family and cultural traditions. Inheritance is valued, not just as a means of passing on whatever possessions a parent may leave to a child but as a way of holding on to the customs, beliefs, rituals, and ethics of a family’s native land.

Dreams and Reality

Throughout “We Live by What We See at Night,” there is an interplay of dreams and reality. The poem begins with the father dreaming about “the mountains of Puerto Rico” before he awakens to the reality of “East Harlem rooftops / or Texas barracks.” The dream reference returns immediately with the father now dreaming about crossing a bridge in Puerto Rico with his grandfather, glancing at the river below. But this is a scene that he can envision “only in interrupted dreaming,” implying that wakefulness and, therefore, reality, keeps interfering with his ability to satisfy “the craving for that island birthplace” when he goes to sleep. The back-and-forth scenario is not as clear in the second stanza, but now it is the son, Espada himself, who fluctuates between pleasant dreams and harsh reality. He acknowledges that he, too, envisions at night the beautiful island where his father was born and was dreaming about Puerto Rico even before he had visited there himself. Reality checks back in with a mention of the “projects” in Brooklyn, the not-so-beautiful place where the poet actually lives.

The importance of dreams in the lives of immigrants and their offspring is evident in the title of the poem itself. To say one lives by what the mind sees at night while asleep makes a very strong statement about what day-to-day reality must be like. Many families who left Puerto Rico for the United States after the island became an American commonwealth in 1952 found themselves crowded into the slum areas of large cities, particularly New York, where the environment was a shocking change. Many also found themselves victims of racism as well as of poverty and unemployment, so it is easy to see why pleasant dreams of their native land were such a welcome relief after a day spent trying to survive harsh conditions, both mental and physical. Espada uses this theme very effectively in “We Live by What We See at Night” by concentrating on appealing descriptions of Puerto Rico while at the same time implying more subtly the ugliness of real life in a dilapidated area of a city.

Topics for Further Study

• Imagine a place where your ancestors lived that you would rather be in now, and write a poem describing it in detail.
• Compare the attitude of the speaker of this poem with the attitude of the speaker in Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” What does each poem say about experience? About family? Which speaker are you more inclined to agree with? Why?
• Do you think the beauty of Puerto Rico would be as important to the speaker if he lived in a beautiful place now? Is he saying that people should live in the past?