Summary
The speaker in "The Thing Is" addresses readers and instructs them to love life no matter what the circumstances are. Bass describes the type of challenging times that can stress a person to the point of nausea: when all the structure in a person's life falls apart, everything important crumbles like burnt paper.
The poet then uses natural phenomena as a metaphor for these challenging times that everyone faces in life. The "silt" (fine sediment) of heavy emotions (particularly grief) fills the throat. Grief sits with a person like tropical heat that thickens the air. This feeling of grief is as heavy as water, making it more fit for creatures who breathe through gills rather than those who use lungs.
Grief is compared to the weight of one's own flesh, except that grief is like an extreme extra weight. This extra weight is unhealthy; it is defined in the poem as "an obesity of grief" that causes a person to wonder how their body can withstand it.
Continuing on with the instructions, the speaker tells readers to hold life like a face between their palms. The face of life is plain, without a charming smile or violet eyes. Readers are then instructed to renew a loving relationship with life.
Analysis
In her poem "The Thing Is," Ellen Bass uses metaphors that evoke the experience of grief, and instructs readers how to embrace their grief and renew a loving relationship with life. The poem is written in free verse, but uses techniques such as alliteration and repetition in order to create a sense of rhythm. This sixteen-line poem is composed of a single stanza stemming from the phrase "the thing is," which is commonly used to introduce an explanation or issue.
In the first line, Bass jumps immediately to her proposed solution of loving life. This is communicated even before the problem of grief is introduced, which serves to emphasize the importance of loving life. This importance is further emphasized by the repetition of the word "love" in the line "to love life, to love it even." By using the word "it" to refer to life, Bass also clarifies that life is "the thing" itself that she is dealing with in the poem. In an interview with the writer Laurie Wagner, Bass states that for her, the essence of poetry is exploring something she wants to know more about, and allowing it to change her. The poem "The Thing Is" expresses this notion of transformation. Even after experiencing the immense weight of grief, the speaker in "The Thing Is" chooses to love life.
The speaker tells readers to love life "even / when you have no stomach for it." To not have a stomach for something means to be unwilling or reluctant, but the phrase also has interesting literal connotations. The stomach is an organ that breaks down food, and thus to "have no stomach" means that one cannot begin to metabolize what they take in. If someone does not have a stomach for life, then that means they are unable to fully process the events in their life.
Bass proceeds to use metaphors that describe what grief is like. Loss is first presented in the lines "everything you’ve held dear / crumbles like burnt paper in your hands." In other words, everything important that structures a person's life can fall apart, leaving them holding the ashes of whatever remains. The word "grief" is later used to specify this experience, but Bass uses a combination of specific metaphors and general circumstances to describe the feeling. Grief in the poem could apply to anyone who has lost a loved one, a job, a pet, a marriage, or anything else that holds significant weight in one's life. In this way, the poem applies to all readers.
"The Thing Is" uses a combination of natural and bodily metaphors to describe grief and loving life. This combination is apparent in the line "your throat filled with the silt of it," with "it" referring to the intense feelings that accompany loss. Silt is a solid, dust-like sediment made mostly of eroded quartz. Comparing the feeling of loss to silt portrays loss as a natural experience. Bass locates the feelings of loss in body parts such as the stomach and throat because they often are immediate responders to intense feelings. Heavy emotions tend to close the throat because the muscles tighten. This makes speaking and expressing oneself very difficult, and yet Bass encourages a love for life even amidst this difficulty.
Grief is personified as a being that "sits with you" in the sixth line. This makes grief both an internal feeling and an external presence that affects the atmosphere around a person (grief's "tropical heat / [thickens] the air"). The air around a grieving person is "heavy as water," making it difficult to breathe. Bass continues to center the descriptions on specific body parts when she writes that the heavy and water-like air of grief is "more fit for gills than lungs." Gills are the respiratory organs of aquatic organisms, and so this description begins to introduce an incredulity that human bodies can withstand grief. Indeed, a line that comes later in the poem reads, "How can a body withstand this?" Bass thus writes about embodied grief as being both natural in the sense that almost everyone will experience it, and strange in that it stresses the body's regular functions.
Grief is directly compared to the body in the line describing "when grief weights you down like your own flesh." This line is the longest in the poem, making it proportional to the immensity of grief. One cannot escape one's "own flesh" (their body); grief is thus portrayed as something inescapable. Not only is grief compared to flesh, but to an excessive amount of flesh ("an obesity of grief").
The anaphora of "when" is used throughout the poem to provide context, and the descriptions build in tension. Finally, the speaker says, "you think, How can a body withstand this?" at the moment that grief feels overwhelming and unbearable. It is at this point that the speaker provides instructions for how "to love life" as stated in the first line. Bass writes, "Then you hold life like a face / between your palms..."Just as grief was earlier personified as a figure, life is personified here through this simile. The face evoked in this image is plain, lacking a charming smile or other distinguishing feature. The face of life is specified as having "no violet eyes," which could refer to Bass's characterization of life as ordinary. Violet eyes may allude to royalty, which would mean that life (as personified in the poem) is a commoner.
Though the face of life is described as being "plain," the speaker urges readers to say to life, "yes, I will take you / I will love you, again." Despite the experience of grief brought about by life, this poem is about embracing life as a lover. Bass has spoken in interviews about living what she calls a "full life": one that sees every experience as having its own integrity, even if the experience causes suffering. This instructional poem, like much of Bass's poetry, insists upon love or joy even amidst difficult circumstances.
