The bloom was off the economic recovery.
“I just want to know one thing,” she said.
What was that one thing? He’ll never know,
Because at just that moment he heard the sound
Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there,
It was dark. His hand went to the wall
But the switch wasn’t where it was supposed to be
Which felt like déjà vu. And then she was gone.
And now he knew how it felt to stand
On the local platform as the express whizzes by
With people chatting in a dialect
Of English he couldn’t understand, because his English
Was current as of 1968 and no one speaks that way except
In certain books. So the hours spent in vain
Were minutes blown up into comic-book balloons full
Of Keats’s odes. “Goodbye, kid.” Tears streamed down
The boy’s face. It was a great feeling,
Like the feeling you get when you throw things away
After a funeral: clean and empty in the morning dark.
There was no time for locker-room oratory.
They knew they were facing a do-or-die situation,
With their backs to the wall, and no tomorrow.

Analysis, meaning and summary of David Lehman's poem Eleventh Hour

1 Comment

  1. edgar r. eslit says:

    The message of hope and survival is so strong that I can feel it so deeply from within. Mr. Lehman uses profound language to express it all. One of the things about it is that it separates ordinariness of idea from all other written poem that I’ve seen that it is so concise.A powerful poem that made up of fewer words. Each word must be the right word and precisely chosen for its exact meaning (denotation) and to its relativity or associated meanings (connotation). The difference between the right word and the almost right word, Mark Twain said, is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug. This deserves ‘same attention.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Do you have any comments, criticism, paraphrasis or analysis of this poem that you feel would assist other visitors in understanding the meaning or the theme of this poem by David Lehman better? If accepted, your analysis will be added to this page of American Poems. Together we can build a wealth of information, but it will take some discipline and determination.