Full Measure

-- Kay Ryan

You will get your full measure. But, as when asking fairies for favors, there is a trick: it comes in a block. And of course one block is not like another. Some respond to water, giving everything wet a little flavor. Some succumb to heat like butter. Others give to steady pressure. Others shatter at a tap. But some resist; nothing in nature softens up their bulk and no personal attack works. People whose gift will not break live by it all their lives; it shadows every empty act they undertake.

I know I posted this once before, but it's just so good. I am truly in awe of how Ryan is able to convey the whole, sweeping sense of something in a few succinct measures--and of how her poems convey a thought or meaning, then often subvert it and make you question your interpretation and judgments by the end, and see things in a new light.

This poem, "Full Measure," begins with an almost Biblical assurance: you will get your full measure in life--you will be given the same gifts and chances as everyone else. We are all equal in this sense, and the beginning is almost hopeful. But then in the very next line, she introduces a note of warning by evoking the trickster fairies of the original fairy tales (think Tam Lin, or even the fairies in Jonathan Strange, not the Brothers Grimm). Yes, this allusion says ominously, you will get the gift you wanted--but beware that what you want has a way of turning against you.

Then she gets to the meat of the poem: what happens to your gift? In my reading, what I took "gift" to mean talent or ability of whatever kind is precious to you and makes you feel that you're doing what you're meant to do. You know--your passion, what makes you different or special. We read in the next 8 lines of the many, myriad ways a gift can slip away from you: dissolving in water or melting in heat like butter; draining away after a lifetime of constant, nagging pressure; or being broken to pieces in one hard blow. These descriptions all have a ring of the unfortunate to them--with words like "succumb" and "shatter," each sounds like the description of a loss of talent or gifts. At the end of this passage, only a few are left able to resist; nothing in nature softens up/their bulk and no personal attack works. Ah, we think. A fortunate few are able to resist the awful pressures of life, whether it is the constant drain of the daily grind, or a series of misfortunes, or one terrible accident that leaves you emptied of the gift that you were given. People whose gift will not break, we read, live by it all their lives ...

But there is no line break here, and as you read your eye cannot stop on that reassuring sentiment. Instead, it runs on past the semicolon, which after all is only a pause and can only provide a temporary respite against the truth that lies in the corollary to this statement:

People whose gift will not break live by it all their lives; it shadows every empty act they undertake.

You can read this last line and a half in two ways. Firstly, having reached the end of the poem assuming that possession of a gift is a good thing, you can read "shadow" in one of its secondary interpretations, as a faint or reflected image. If your gift "shadows every empty act [you] undertake," then perhaps the emptiness of your actions is redeemed somewhat by reflecting, in some small way, the greatness it could be achieving. In other words, you may not be painting world-renowned works of art 99% of the time, but you bring your painter's eye and appreciation of color and design to everything, even the fliers you make at work, and this makes it worthwhile.

But in the second way to read this--the way I, and, I think, Kay Ryan would read it--these final lines don't seem to be saying that having your gift intact serves you all your life. Instead, they say, you are subservient to it. Having a gift, and knowing you have it, looms over you through all the days you will live, casting its long shadow over every empty act you undertake--and God knows 99% of the acts we do are empty. That's what most of life is, not grand moments of passion or triumph, but a long series of motions and responses in order to get past the thing you're in now, or get to the place you're going, to get along with life, to get through it, to get by. And here Ryan says that every time you do this, you'll feel the weight and disappointment of not doing more, of not doing the full measure of what you're capable of.

So, in the end, my reading of the earlier lines fell into question. What's better: to know you have a rare talent, but to live constantly disappointed by your own inability to realize your potential; or to let that gift slip away, and then merely get on with the business of living? Which cuts you worse? Do you truly want to know the full measure of what you're capable of, or will it be a further burden?

Her poem is a statement and a question, and how you read & interpret it depends on who you are and what you believe. What is the most amazing to me is that what took me 5 lengthy paragraphs to enunciate, she was able to imply/evoke in a scant 14 lines. That's the magic of poetry--how a few words or phrases call to mind a much larger question and evoke all of the warring ideas in the discussion, yet does this with such swift precision and linguistic beauty. I'm seriously in awe.