Volume 10 153
Poem Summary
Lines 1-6:
In the opening two stanzas, Graham provides
a time and a locale for the literal hiding place of
the title. The time is May of 1968, and the setting
is Paris. The uprisings of 1968 (called by the French
les evenements, the events) started with university
students at the Sorbonne on May 3, 1968. There
was confrontation between students and police at
the Sorbonne that led to a period of guerrilla war-
fare in the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris. Gra-
ham, who was a student at the Sorbonne during the
disturbances, lets the reader know she was there
through the use of “I” and the unusual use of “you”
to represent herself, as opposed to “one.” Though
she never says what the “it” is in the first stanza,
it can be assumed that she is referring to the hid-
ing place, about which a great deal will be revealed.
Emphasis is placed on certain words through the
use of italics, perhaps to call attention to words or
terms that carried loaded public connotations at the
time.Lines 7-10:
Graham moves from general descriptions of
the uprisings in the previous stanzas to a more au-
tobiographical mode. A kind of narrative emerges
about how long she stayed in the hiding place, and
her search for a certain leader, a man who is al-
ways connected with fire, is introduced. Like the
notion of the hiding place, Graham will return to
the motif of the man and the fire.The Hiding Place