levelheaded: Elsa, One Way To Avoid Date Rape Is

 

We may be stating the obvious here, but when this speaker addresses Elsa she’s not really addressing Elsa. She’s addressing us, and she’s addressing her own interests, compulsions, and worries. Though the poem is propelled by the speaker’s interest in Elsa, she operates out of self-examination rather than from a genuine impulse to protect Elsa. We see this in the absurdity of her “one way to avoid date rape.” It’s comical, but when it’s understood as a guarded reaction to a real threat, it suddenly seems deadly serious. Her idea “to fake-drink alcohol and wear a / corset at all times” is a sarcastic but prickly response to date rape—sarcastic because it’s not a practical solution, prickly because it highlights that there is no good way to avoid date rape since deception and malice and surprise are fundamental to the crime.

 

The poem’s “date rape” sets the tone early in the poem. It gives an additional edge to a first suitor who “smashed clocks with his / walking cane.” It gives an additional edge to the very idea of a “suitor.” Still, we don’t mean to size this poem down to a polemic against sexual violence. More broadly, we mean to emphasize that contemporary concerns get buried behind the poem’s apostrophe to Elsa. In the poem’s dissolution into a strange 18th/19th century fantasyland—a world of corsets, walking canes, deathbeds, Marly—Elsa becomes a sounding board for the speaker’s own concerns. In speaking to us through Elsa, the speaker and Elsa are adjoined.

 

There’s a pointedly informal quality to phrases like “fake-drink,” “boobs squished,” and the conversational “[b]ack then.” For the first two-thirds of the poem, this informality helps fashion the speaker’s nostalgic daydream with a spirit of incredulity. We hear doubt in “I guess the / men were less dexterous then.” “Date rape” is a relatively new phrase, but the concept must be ancient. The speaker knows this, and her doubt in the protective power of corsets makes sure we know she holds no reverence for this particular time of yore or its pervasive religion.

 

It’s worth noting the poem is a sonnet—14 lines, (mostly) 10 syllables each—primarily because it makes good use of the form’s conventional volta. At the end of the fifth line, the speaker readdresses Elsa. There, the poem makes a distinct shift in tone. What was slangy and straightforward becomes solemn and lyrical. The speaker returns to present tense with her non sequitur “I keep mistaking rhinos for hippos.” The specificity of this mistake is strange. Sure, they’re both large, squatty, grey mammals with long names that can be shortened to five letters ending with an “o,” but what of it? This is followed by a secretive memory of “Marly,” which is stranger since it signals back to her daydream. But she becomes especially philosophical in the reflexively self-aware lines “you swallowed so much / mist you became mist” and a moment later “The sounds of people / upstairs remind us of being people.” The repetition of “mist” and “people” is a formal choice that underlines that we’re reading a poem and restates the speaker’s exploration of identity.

 

 

– The Editors