Poems of Grief by Holden, Mrs. Caulfield, Phoebe, and Jane

Him/Me
By Holden Caulfield

Sitting in the shining
New red car smelling
Like the musk
Of his mitt

Gripping painfully,
My knuckles glaring
White against the black –
I am a ghost

Windshield splitting
The world into two parts.
I am lost in the rift
Of what could have been

Revelation slips into
My heart, it is caught –
Blazing against the dark
Abandonment

I will forget everything –
Break this glass box
Holding me to
The life I do not want


Faith
By Mrs. Caulfield

Oh God, it is finished. How could you…
be so cruel? My heart broken, my life ending,
The pale death mask has not my dear son,
Not even gold could capture him

For love, my husband lost his faith,
For love, I shall lose mine to protect the rest
My children shall not know your face
Nor the protection you promised that proved a lie

But there is no strength in me left, my mind
So erratic, unpredictable. I am not me.
I am lost without the joy and passion of new life
I will try to make myself anew

Dear Allie
By Phoebe Caulfield

Dear Allie,
I know you're in a better place,
It must be nice.
Holden is angry, Mother is sad,
They loved love you.
We seem to drown in silence,
You wouldn't like it.
I hope you're having fun there,
Playing baseball.
I'm glad you're not hurting now
I'll miss you.


Reading
By Jane Gallagher

He doesn't know it
But I see the sadness in his face.
From the back row
Even my kings can tell it's wrong.

Maybe he's scared –
Or scarred from the quick parting,
Holding back,
Protecting himself with reserve.

The tragic prince
Loaded down with baggage galore
The perfect luggage
Holding his secrets perfectly safe

I see his story there
Carved into every movement
His devastation
The exact mirror of mine, mistrust

I'm glad that I help
Alleviating the hurt is my intent
He is my friend
All I want is for him to be happy

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Analysis

These poems were written by Holden, Mrs. Caulfield, Phoebe, and Jane Gallagher. They explore how Allie's death affected their lives. Holden, Mrs. Caulfield, and Phoebe's poems were written right after the loss, possibly in the deepest part of their grief. Jane wrote about how Holden's deep-rooted sadness had affected him as well as making an impact on her life.

They are writing in journals and diaries that they have in order to get their feelings out. Holden wrote his as he was sitting in his family's car before he punched out the garage windows. He thinks that he should have died instead of Allie, and the disillusionment and unhappiness that had started with adolescence was magnified when he lost one of the only people he truly loved. Mrs. Caulfield writes about loss, the loss of her child, her faith, and the person she used to be. Now she is unsure of her path because her perfect plan for life did not include one of her children dying of leukemia. Phoebe writes in the supreme innocence of a child. She thinks that writing to Allie will make him feel less lonely in heaven. In Jane's poem, she speaks about her sympathy for Holden and a desire to relieve him of his emotional baggage.

Holden's poem is based on the story he tells about how his hand got injured. He says, "I slept in the garage the night he (Allie) died, and I broke all the goddam windows with my fist, just for the hell of it. I even tried to break all the windows on the station wagon we had that summer, but my hand was already broken and everything by that times, and I couldn't do it." This gives support for his anger, being in the car, breaking the windows of the garage, and the car being a new one.

Mrs. Caulfield's poem is based upon what Holden says about his mother's nervousness and his father giving up Catholicism for his mother. Holden says when he meets the nuns, "…my father was a Catholic once. He quit, though, when he married my mother." When he talks about not wanting to be home when his parents get the letter notifying them of his expulsion he says, " My mother gets very hysterical. She's not too bad after she gets something thoroughly digested, though." Before he meets the nuns Holden talks about his parents, "[My mother] hasn't felt too healthy since my brother Allie died. She's very nervous."

Phoebe's poem is a great example of her youth and innocence. Holden says that he would not want her to attend his funeral because she is so young. He says, "You never saw a little kid so pretty and smart in your whole life… She's only ten." That means that she would have been extremely young when Allie died. He also said, "she's a little too affectionate sometimes. She's very emotional, for a child." Her parents probably told her that Allie went to an extended summer camp to spare her the sadness, but because she's so smart she probably figured out that he died.

Jane's poem is about sympathy. Holden feels sympathy for Jane after the incident with her stepfather and cigarettes. When he sees that she was trying to hold back tears he said, "I don't know why, but it bothered hell out of me." I think that Jane was fairly perceptive and must have reciprocated the feeling. Holden said, "She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it. She'd never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine – before that, she went to Cape Cod – but I told her quite a lot about him. She was interested in that kind of stuff." She understood his grief and relates it with her own.

Each of these poems has deeper meanings and links to other people's lives. Holden's poem shows several stages of grief. Mrs. Caulfield's poem voices questions that we all have in our lives when life doesn't go our way. It shows the difficulty of parting with hopes and dreams, and facing reality. Phoebe's expresses the innate human desire to comfort those we love and hope that they are happy. Jane's also deals with the desire to comfort as well as the theory that people who are similar gravitate toward each other. It supports that people do not like being alone and that it is heartening to have someone to commiserate with.