Hector Sifuentes
Professor Brown
English 102
13 December 2014
The Vacuum: Symbol of Sorrow
Have you ever lost someone you were close to? The loss of a loved one is a tough experience to go through and the poem, “The Vacuum” by Howard Nemerov, illustrates it in no better way. In the poem the speaker lost his wife and is constantly reminded of her by the old vacuum she used to use. Nemerov uses the speaker, setting, and figurative language to portray the grief and sorrow that death brings.
The speaker of the poem is a widower who is having trouble in dealing with his wife’s death. There is a vacuum in his house that used to belong to his wife. When his wife was still alive “she used to crawl, in the corner and under the stair” (line 12), vacuuming every little place. Now his wife has passed away and the house has gone to waste.
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The widower says that “when my old woman died her soul went into that vacuum cleaner” (line 7). This shows that it is very difficult for him to even remotely look at it, let alone use it. Like the speaker of the poem there are many people who have gone through that same phase. Lost a loved one, now stuck in sadness and cannot help but be reminded of that one person through an inanimate object such as the vacuum cleaner Nemerov uses in his poem. One may think that an object serves no purpose to that of one’s death, but someone close to a deceased person may “see” their soul in an object, giving it meaning. The setting is the speaker’s house where he just sits in mourning. The house used to be full of life when his wife was there, using the vacuum to clean, but now she passed away and “the house is so quiet now” (line 1). The vacuum is not being used anymore and that noise it brought to the house is no more and now there is only silence depicting his wife’s death. Not only is the house silent now, but “there is old filth everywhere” (1ine 11) as well. The wife cleaned everything around the house, but with her death and as time passed filth has gathered around the house. The widower cannot bring himself to clean the house because it only reminds him of how his wife took care of the house. As well as the setting, figurative language plays a major role in the poem.
Nemerov’s use of figurative language can be defined as anything but accidental. He uses it show to show this sense of gloom and misery. In the second line of the poem the speaker says, “the vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet” (line 2). The word sulk is being used in this line to describe the vacuum as if it were sad, giving it human attributes. This also reflects towards how the widower is feeling, both the vacuum and the husband “sulking” at the death of his wife. He then later says, “but when my old woman died her soul went into that vacuum cleaner” (line 7) as if his wife’s soul was literally sucked up by the vacuum. The widower sees his wife in that vacuum, but she isn’t there using it anymore and that brings him the most sorrow. The vacuum itself symbolizes life in that when one vacuums it becomes louder and louder as it gets near, but then the noise fades away as it passes. Life too becomes loud at its highest peak comparing it to the time the couple spent together, but when the noise fades away as a vacuum moves on, it compares to the death of the
wife. Ultimately the point of the poem is to interpret how death is filled with despair. This poem was aimed towards others who have lost a beloved one, like that of the widower in “The Vacuum.” I too, have lost someone near and dear to me and like the speaker of the poem I am constantly reminded of that person’s life through a simple football.
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