Analysis Of Nearly A Valediction By Marilyn Hacker

“You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.” - Marilyn Hacker, “Nearly a Valediction” Marilyn Hacker is a successful poet of her time. She was born in the Bronx, New York on November 27, 1942. At the age of five she began writing quatrains. She calls herself a leftist activist and translates French poetry (Sugarman, 3). She uses her feminist ideals to get her point of equality across, as well as her views and opinions over love, war, and many social issues. Hacker uses these subjects in her poetry to spread equality for everyone, regardless of their sexuality, race, or religion. In the 1970s, Hacker taught at numerous colleges and universities. Every reader can tell how openly gay

She wrote about love almost religiously, using her poems to express how she felt. She associates love with happiness, but also with death in some of her more morbid poems. In one of her poems, “Nearly a Valediction”, Hacker intensely describes love and how it can hit people out of nowhere. She expresses how love is a bond between two people who truly belong together. She advocates for equality for gay relationships. She’s been openly gay since the 1970’s and has always been fighting for gay rights with her poetry.(Marilyn Hacker, 1). She especially wrote about love between two women in “[Didn’t Sappho Say Her Guts Clutched Up Like This?]”. The poem itself is pretty self-explanatory and extremely descriptive over a love between two women. This is just one of Hacker’s pieces that shows how much she cares about equality for all people. In “On Marriage”, she basically just testifies to the ideal that marriage isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, and how people just rush into the decision and celebrate something that could potentially hinder two peoples’

A few of the lines where people are shouting at the boy, they spew awful phrases such as “-he didn’t hurl the challenge back- “Fascist?”- not “Faggots”- Swine!”. Hacker uses lines like this one to show how intolerant people can be and how anti-semitism is a real issue that many people have to deal with in daily life. In the poem it advocates for equality for race and religion. It goes into depth over Jewish Immigration as well as freedom of religion and gender identity. The boy himself is a symbol of people, mainly Jewish people who struggle with experiencing religious tolerance. Of course, the boy also symbolizes many other subjects such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and race. He symbolizes how people who identify themselves as something that off kilters society’s standards struggle through daily life; they experience intolerance and ignorance and Hacker shows it repeatedly throughout the poem.(The Boy, 1). This is especially true in lines “confound in him, soprano, clumsy, frail. Not neuter- neutral human, and unmarked, the younger brother in a fairy tale except boys shouted “Jew!” across the park”. This line shows the religious intolerance that Hacker was trying to stop. The boy’s clumsy frailness also goes along with the theme that he doesn’t necessary fit in well with society’s standards of tall brutish all around Christian American boys. Hacker also