levelheaded: Morning Exercises

T.S. Eliot is depressing. There isn’t much uplift in “Prufrock” or “The Hollow Men.” Even when Eliot appropriates a line as innocuous (or not) as “Life is very long,” his speaker seems bogged down in bleakness and blackness and the recognition that everything is coming to an end. And “The Wasteland”—you don’t have to get past the title to know the poem’s an awesome bummer.

“Morning Exercises” is not depressing. We make the connection between Phelps’ and Eliot’s work because the final lines of this week’s poem (“Maybe today is how the whimper will end / with a universe”) are a reversed paraphrase of the final lines of “The Hollow Men” (“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”). Beyond this pair of final lines, the two poems converse more subtly, if at all. Phelps’ poem is not nearly as allusive as Eliot’s, though it does allude to Eliot’s poem. And Eliot’s poem is not nearly as hopeful as Phelps’, the latter’s purview being almost opposite of Eliot’s speaker’s in “The Hollow Men”…

Comparisons abound! But let us not be slurped entirely up the pin-striped drinking-straw of allusion. The phrase, “the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper” is almost so ingrained in the contemporary idiom that we might not even want to call Phelps’ lines a proper “allusion.” After all, if Phelps’ poem is alluding to “The Hollow Men,” it might be alluding to a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot more than we think.

Otherwise, “Morning Exercises” is structured pretty simply. It is a series of speculations about “today”—many of which are calamitous—that all turn out mostly okay in the end. Less simple are the bittersweet ways some of these speculations resolve themselves. Take the first stanza’s “electrical grid collapse.” Those few people who are “most annoyed / they can’t check their lottery numbers online” at first seem greedily self-absorbed. But while we’re all in the street looting diapers and killing each other for powdered milk, the lottery players are wondering whether the power will be back on tomorrow. And maybe it will be.

We aren’t sure we can fully sympathize with the lottery players in this scenario, but it’s enough that Phelps’ speaker thinks they could exist. On the same (sort of) hopeful note, maybe space aliens really will be as harmless as those in this poem, “listening / to our noise just shy of white.” Maybe they aren’t out to destroy America’s most recognizable pieces of architecture. Maybe cancer really is “cellular schizophrenia […] cured by holding still […] with the one you you are.” Maybe “the one you you are” is actually two “you’s.” Maybe math is your favorite subject. The more we repeat “maybe,” the more we sound like the poem itself. The more we repeat “maybe,” the more we realize the poem is a universe all by itself—one that doesn’t end with a whimper or a bang, but just is.

-The Editors