170 Poetry for Students

Like the shepherd, he is a man of introspection and

observation, marked by history, rather than mark-

ing it. Nevertheless, like the soldier, he seeks (al-

beit through poetry, rather than warfare) to leave a

mark on history by creating a monument in words

as enduring, if ultimately meaningless, as the rep-

utation of Alexander the Great. For Dugan, the joke

and the tragedy of existence is that no one, not the

soldier, not the shepherd, not even a keen-eyed poet

like himself who perceives the ironies of history,

can escape from history, or irony.

Time

“How We Heard the Name” is a rumination in

and about time. Specifically, Dugan examines the

place of human beings, and of the history they

make, in time. To do this, he utilizes a common

metaphor, equating time with a river. Normally,

time is thought of (in another common metaphor)

as proceeding like an arrow in a straight line from

the past, through the present, and into the future.

But Dugan sees time differently. He perceives it as

circular in nature, or consisting of circular eddies

and counter-currents. The circular structure of the

first eight lines of the poem, a sentence beginning

and ending with the words “the river,” is Dugan’s

subtle way of alerting his readers to his unusual

conception of time.

If time is circular, then whatever is carried

downstream in its flow can come round again. In

the poem, the river not only carries dead horses and

dead men, as well as “military debris / Indicative

of war / Or official acts upstream,” it also carries

live, drunken men who shout their self-important

words at whoever happens to be watching them go

by. History, says Dugan, is “junk.” But that does-

n’t mean it can be ignored or escaped: certainly not

by the soldier, swept along in time’s river; nor by

the shepherds lining the riverbank, despite their be-

lief that “it all / Goes by, that is the thing / About

the river.”

Even though he is writing about events set in

the distant past, Dugan is also writing about the

present. Given the circularity of time, and the con-

sequent repetitiveness of history, past and present

are interchangeable, even identical. What seems a

philosophical conceit is actually a practical truth

for a man like Dugan, who fought in World War

II to deny the ambitions of Nazi dictator Adolph

Hitler, a man who saw himself as a modern-day

Alexander. The attitude Dugan expresses toward

humanity and the monuments it seeks to build to

itself in time—the “junk” of war, history, and

poetry—is marked by distance, irony, and resigna-

tion. The only solace Dugan provides his readers

or himself is the beauty and order possible in lan-

guage, in art. As Dugan said in an interview ap-

pearing in the fall, 1999 issue of Compostmaga-

zine, “Art is a very difficult thing. It doesn’t

necessarily improve people or ruin people, it just

is.” And for Dugan, it is all there is.

Style

“How We Heard the Name” consists of 24 lines of

varying length and meter. As such, it belongs to the

type of poetry known as free verse, a poem writ-

ten without any set meter or rhyme scheme. Writ-

ten as prose, these 24 lines translate into 4 com-

plete sentences. And indeed, there is something

prosaic about the language of the poem. Yet this

seeming artlessness is carefully and artfully con-

trived. As Dugan explained in Compost,“A poet is

a person who makes an assemblage of words that

don’t necessarily tell a story, but tries to transmit

a powerful emotion verbally.”

If there is no set meter or rhyme scheme, what

determines where Dugan breaks his lines? In free

How We Heard the Name

Topics for

Further

Study

• Explain the difference between rhetorical line
  breaks and the use of enjambment. Illustrate us-
  ing a different poem by Alan Dugan.


• Define the term “irony,” and give an example
  of its use in another of Dugan’s poems. Be sure
  to explain what makes your example ironic.


• Write a poem based on a famous historical event
  and narrated by an eyewitness to, or participant
  in, the event. Do not reveal the name of the event
  or the narrator anywhere in the poem.


• Prepare a report on the figure of Memnon, in-
  cluding his actions at the Battle of Granicus and
  his subsequent history. State whether or not you
  believe history has remembered him fairly, and
  why or why not.