"On the Nature of Understanding" by Kay Ryan
Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it halfway.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it's
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.
Kay Ryan, the multiple award-winning United States Poet Laureate, published her poem “On the Nature of Understanding” in The New Yorker July 25, 2011. After years of fighting the War on Terror in the Middle East and battling the falling economy, Americans can strongly empathize with Ryan’s poem, in which she discusses one’s desperate attempt to tame something wild—only to have the process backfire. By demonstrating the inevitable unsuccessful results of trying to tame something wild, Ryan encourages people to accept that some things will—and should—always stay out of their control. From the very first line, Ryan makes clear that one can never domesticate something wild in stating: “Say you hoped to/ tame something” (1-2). Ryan’s diction of “hoped” implies that one rarely succeeds at taming wild things, asserting that one’s efforts would prove futile. Because of her assertion, the reader finds situational irony when the person who tries to tame the wild thinks that “it’s/ strange when it/ attacks” (15-17). Ryan therefore indirectly characterizes any tamer of the wild as naïve for trying to impress his or herself upon a stronger force. Instead, Ryan promotes a more accepting view of the world, in which one understands that life necessitates an unstable variable in order to stay diverse and change for the better. If one tries to control that unstable variable, he/she will actually inhibit his/her opportunity to learn and grow from it. In discouraging the taming of something unpredictable, Ryan urges those who feel threatened by the unknown to approach it with an open mind, hence allowing people to learn from each other’s differences.
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