Poetry for Students Vol. 10

Volume 10 163

or what it actually was. More importantly, it is un-
clear whether such a place even existed. Through-
out the poem, it is clear that opportunities to “hide”
are rare, if not impossible. On a literal level, there
is nowhere to hide from the police. Inevitably, “The
ACRS would swarm in around dawn / in small blue
vans and round us up.” On another level, there is
no chance for privacy, no way even for the rebels
to “hide” themselves from each other, for in the
Sorbonne, they had to hold meetings “above the
sleeping bodies” and in jail “no one could sit or
lean. / People peed on each other.” On a larger,
more universal and abstract scale, there is no place
to hide from history itself. Whenever one looks
“straight back into the century,” one cannot deny
or be protected from the knowledge that humans
have always been cruel to one another and the
world has always been unbalanced by those who
have and those who have not.

The poem is a straightforward account of
events that occurred in the streets and in the jails
of Paris at that time, but it is also interwoven with
images of fire and light, implying some type of rev-
elation, but never quite revealingthe answer. The
speaker runs from the university to look for one of
the student leaders and finds “his face above an
open streetfire” and his voice refusing to make con-
cessions “above the fire as if there were no fire.”
Later, as the police vans arrive, the speaker watches
“the searchbeams play on some flames. / the flames
push up into the corridor of light.” In the jail cell,
shadows play off light like “slatted brilliant bits,”
and in the streets it is the “light running down them”
that seems strange to those who have been impris-
oned. At the end of the poem, the speaker sits in
her room with the windows open and watches the
white curtain blow in the breeze “until the lights /
outside made it gold.” The poem then returns to the
image of the “man above the fire,” still proclaim-
ing “no concessions.”

A run-through of the general premise of the
poem helps place people and events in somewhat
chronological order, but one can also examine how
the fire/light imagery is incorporated into the un-
dercurrent of irony of the idea of a “hiding place”
where there is no place to hide. Graham paints a
very vivid picture of Paris in 1968 in the poem’s
fifth line: “Marches, sit-ins, helicopters, gas.”
These four words describe the actions of both sides
of the struggle, marches and sit-ins by the stu-
dents/workers and helicopters and gas as used by
the CRS. The “certain leader” for whom the
speaker searches does not appear even to attempt
to hide, for he stands near a fire in the street, ig-

noring its existence and all the turmoil and violence

that the flames represent. He is determined not to

give in to the authorities, nor to concede anything

through negotiation. In a sense, this student reflects

the more universal and historical perspective on

hiding. He is the one at the end of the poem who

looks “straight back into the century,” seeming to

recall all the atrocities that have occurred in the past

and using that knowledge as an impetus to keep

fighting, to refuse any concessions. Compare the

description of him at the end of the poem (“The

look in his eyes, shoving out, into the open”) to a

line in the tenth stanza describing the open air: “The

open squeezed for space until the hollows spill out,

/ story upon story of them / starting to light up.”

What the student’s eyes “light up” is perhaps the

entire point of Graham’s poem. There is no place

to hide from history, and the only way to prevent

any future needto is to continue to fight for human

and civil rights.

Critic Peter Sacks, writing for the New York

Times Book Review,calls Region of Unlikeness,

Graham’s collection containing “The Hiding

Place,” the poet’s “darkest book,” alluding to the

number of poems that involve “a terrifying experi-

ence of crisis” and compulsions for release, for “the

capacity to face and survive one’s own implication

in stories of entrapment and unredeemable pain.”

It is true, on one hand, that the people who find

themselves in jail in this poem are there due to their

“own implication” in the social uprising. If the

speaker or any of the other students or workers had

The Hiding Place

Whenever one looks

“straight back into the

century,” one cannot deny

or be protected from the

knowledge that humans

have always been cruel to

one another and the world

has always been

unbalanced by those who

have and those who have

not.”