Essay for Fun

The Miner’s Wife
By Jacqueline Lyons

sees dark crescent moons
in a sky of light
the dirt forever curving
under his fingernails.
When he goes below the earth
unnaturally, farther than
he could go alone, farther
than he would go for himself,
her own gravity threatens
to tear loose. At the store
she might rise and bump
the shelves of flour and sugar,
making them shudder
and sift themselves down.
Dreams her husband in a jar
she can see into through no light
passes through or reaches
his night inside it.
He works the black
with bare hands, becoming darker
and darker, disappearing,
and she shakes the jar
to make him reappear.


From Her Point of View

“The Miner’s Wife” by Jacqueline Lyons is a poem in free verse, using one long stanza. There are, however, little spurts of rhymes throughout the poem such as “sugar” and “shudder” at the ends of lines 12 and 13, and also “jar” and “reappear” on the the last two lines. Lyons begins the poem with the title, the first line acting as the second line of the poem so that it reads, “The Miner’s Wife / sees dark crescent moons.” This is an abrupt beginning (if one begins reading at the first line and fails to read the title), but a clever one—I have not seen many poets use this device. The speaker talks of this wife in an informal manner, by cutting the “she” out of sentences and starting with verbs like, “Dreams her husband in a jar” instead of saying “She dreams...” which would be the more obvious choice, and not as interesting for me, as a reader.
Lyons is concise with her word choices—she uses limited adjectives which give the poem strength—the topic of a miner’s wife being a strong woman and the emphasis on nouns instead of adjectives alludes to that. The outcome of this noun-heavy poem pleases me. The language is subtle—it took me a couple of reads before I realized the lack of adjectives. The words that the author uses are simple but definitive like, “fingernails,” “moons,” “earth,” and “dirt.” In fact, one of the only places where an adjective is used is where the speaker says “bare hands.” The unexpected adjective describing “hands” is also a device that places stress on those “hands” which is the only part of the miner’s body that the speaker describes.
Hands are subject of the first couple lines, and then the subject toward the end of the poem as well. It seems as though the speaker wants the readers to understand the hardship of the job. Hands symbolize work and difficult labor, and the hands are parts of the body which are visible—and dirty hands have been the scarlet letter on physical laborers for centuries.
The poem’s subject is the wife of a miner, and the readers learn about how she worries for his safety—mining is a dangerous and difficult job. The speaker communicates how the wife deals with his worry, by imagining her husband, and seeing what he sees, “she can see into through no light / passes through or reaches / his night inside it.” The speaker discusses the husband going underground in this poem. The references to death and to the demands of the job:

When he goes below the earth
unnaturally, farther than
he could go alone, farther
than he would go for himself.

The speaker is likening mining to being buried after death (“farther than / he could go alone”), and also making the point that his job was not chosen out of love for the work, (“farther / than he would go for himself”). However, the speaker describes mining with the adverb “unnaturally,” which the speaker has highlighted with the line break and the comma. This brings environmental concerns to mind—and also the impending danger of mining—if Mother Nature did not intend for men to dig, what will happen to those that try?
This question is never answered in this poem, which seems intentional. The miner’s wife will continue to worry, to try to imagine what her husband sees down underground in the dark. Jacqueline Lyons brings the miner’s hands to life in this poem, and thankfully, they can exist there every time I read this piece.