Galway Kinnell\'s After Making Love

Galway Kinnell's "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps"

Love has been the subject for thousands of poems for thousands of years. What makes love such an interesting topic is the fact that we experience many different forms of love, with each form significant in its own way. Two of the strongest forms of love we experience in our lives are marital love and parental love. Galway Kinnell captures the essence of these types of love in his poem, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps."

This poem is decidedly personal but one would argue that it must be that way in order for us to experience it the way we do. We need to see the tender moment between husband and wife in order to appreciate the moment between parents and child. The poet utilizes irony and humor to lighten the mood and tone of the poem. What is most striking about the poem is its seemingly normal feel. While it may hit us much later after reading it, the poem is actually very deep in its meaning and reach. It serves to capture the force of love - not just one type of love but two forces that are intrinsically joined together. What happens is how the two types of love become one by the end of the poem. We are struck with how parent and child and husband and wife are forever connected through time. This brings the poet a sense of happiness and satisfaction as he shares a simple interruption of intimacy with his wife.

Richard Calhoun describes Kinnell's poetry as "demonstrably from his own times" (Calhoun). We can definitely see this in," After Making Love We Hear Footsteps." Calhoun also claims that Kinnell "is one of the most phenomenological poets of his generation in his concern, as recurrently a poet of landscapes, with things observed on a journey" (Calhoun). This style of poetry can be seen in, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" with the poet's landscape of the bedroom. The imagery places us in the room with the couple and it also allows us to feel the interruption of the small boy. The scene also represents the journey of a love relationship that has evolved over years.

Instances of imagery mix with the comedic to bring this poem to life. For example, we can almost hear the snoring like a "bullhorn" (Kinnell 1) and the loud conversation the poet might be having with a "loud Irishman" (3). The poet also allows us to see his son, Fergus, a young boy that somehow sleeps thorough the loudest of noises but can hear the most quiet of intimate moments the poet shares with his wife. The poet also allows us to "hear" the slight noises that awake the child. The "heavy breathing" (6) or the "stifled come-cry" (7) are real to parents that must almost silence their lovemaking. Here we see the humor one must find in life as a parent - the sneaking in of lovemaking and the subtle and innocent interruption of that lovemaking with a child. The irony is a little easier to take with it is humorous.

Christopher McGowan maintains that Kinnell's poetry is often filled with the "primal rhythms of birth and death, transcendence and mortality, raw confrontations of survival, sexual love, memory, and time" (MacGowan 134). In "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps," we see this the primal rhythm of lovemaking paired with birth - things that are inextricably linked with memory and time. MacGowan notes that Kinnell "sees poetry as having the status of personal expression, a human cry, rather than... A direct agent for social change or protest" (136). Indeed, "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps" is a poem that falls under the category of personal expression and a human cry. The poet is bringing us into one of the most sacred places there can be - his bedroom - and we walk away with a sense of understanding and appreciation after reading the poem.

Howard Nelson states that the poem "focuses on Yeats calls 'honey generation' the joys of lovemaking that lead to birth and the almost-instinctive yet gloriously conscious love parents and child" (Nelson 240). Nelson states that the poem is "balanced by ironies" (Nelson 238) noting that the most quiet intimate noises seem to attract the boy to his parents like a magnet. The poem "celebrates the root force of mortality's beginning: not death but the lovemaking that can lead to birth" (239).

The poem captures the love between and man and a woman in the final stanza, the poet sating:

In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body -- this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms. (16-21)

This image allows us to see the fullness of mature love. The poet looks at his wife and all they can do is smile at the life that is occurring around them. As their arms touch across their son's muscular body, they can only giggle to themselves that he would somehow be awakened by the primal force that brought him into being. The boy is a sleeper that only the mortal sounds of his parents can "sing awake" (20). This image allows us to see what the poet thinks of his relationship with his wife. Even after years of marriage, he still looks upon their relationship as one that makes music. We also see that the poet looks upon his son as a blessing of love. What we see most, however, the evolution of love. The couple can look back on their love life together and see it in stages - the birth of their son definitely marking one of the most important events. The price of a lifetime of love is a lifetime of memories and this poem shows us how love changes as people do.