Late Fragment
joana meirim
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment”, A New Path to the Waterfall (1989). All of Us — The Collected Poems. Londres: The Harvill Press, 2003.
This is perhaps Raymond Carver’s most quoted poem, for the wrong reasons: people see in it an adequate description of the meaning of love in life, but Carver is not talking about the kind of love one assumes he is.
It is a posthumous poem in life. The title mimics the labels conferred on unpublished works found after an author’s death. Carver may appear self-mocking, but he is well aware that the poem is a fragment only because a body of work exists, and that a body of work can only be designated as such when the right people say so.
The lines present a staged dialogue similar to a Q&A, so much so that we can easily take them as part of a final interview with Carver — another aspect the title can point to. The first question contains two inflections that lend it provocation. First, the demonstrative pronoun “this” qualitatively demeans the kind of life it points to: “Did you get what you wanted from this life?” Carver judges himself negatively for having chosen to be a writer. Then, at the question’s end, the phrase “even so” underlines the tone: “Did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?” The “so” is the sum of events that make up Carver’s life, and the question boils down to: “Was it worth it?” The answer is unequivocal: Yes.
This is the last poem from A New Path to the Waterfall, published in 1989, a year after Carver’s death. The book was finished against the clock, after the diagnosis of a second lung cancer. It was only in that last stage that several inscriptions were added to the poems, most of them belonging to Chekhov. The purpose is clear: Carver reached the level of literary recognition he craved so much, considers himself worthy of such status and is openly taking hold of it. Now, he can establish his place in a legacy, without shame but also without delusions: although he spent his last years writing poems, he knows his art is the short story, the genre in which Chekhov is the master.
The answer to the second question is Carver’s confession of his deepest desire: “to feel beloved on the earth”. Everything was worth it because that came to be, though not thanks to the women or children, the parents or the friends he had — they would never suffice to replenish the earth which is a quintessential part of Carver’s desire. This is an earth inhabited by the people that acknowledged him as a writer and the people that will carry on his legacy — those are the ones to make him feel beloved. It would never be enough to have a woman whispering in his ear that he was about to be the next Chekhov.
Helena Carneiro
Helena Carneiro completed her Master at the Program in Literary Theory (University of Lisbon). She works as a redactor and as an editorial assistant at Imprensa da Universidade de Lisboa. People in her life have explained poetry to her. And she does enjoy Phillip Larkin, who, in his tombstone, has described himself as a “writer”.