How Some Of It Happened By Elaine Macfarlane Analysis

How Howe and Macfarlane Describe the Undescribable

In her heart wrenching poem, “How Some of It Happened”, Marie Howe tackles the effect that illness had on her arguably hypochondriac brother. He struggled with his health even before he had health issues to struggle with, and faced an ever present fear of harm. However, upon realizing he was sick and undergoing less-than-pleasant procedures to treat it, he learned to “lean into it”. As a counterpoint, Elaine Macfarlane also addresses the illness of another in “Cancer Diagnosis” - although you don’t fully realize this until the very last stanza. For the entirety of the poem, the reader is left to think that the hardship faced is faced by the narrator - not her own daughter. It underscores the reality that cancer is not just an illness to those who have it, but also to the family and friends of …show more content…
The range of emotions encountered after an unfortunate diagnosis well exceed sadness, and include a wealth of other seemingly unrelated feelings. Howe succeeds in taking the reader from the mind of one frightened by his own shadow, into an acceptance of fate. The roller coaster ride of his diagnosis reached a denouement - and it is in this final resting place that the tone is fully revealed. Somber - yet, content. Content with the reality that, yes, the unnamed brother is dying, but, no, he no longer fears “the unendurably specific, the exact thing”. One could make the argument, and here I will, that Macfarlane struck a rather selfish tone in her poem. Surely, a mother reserves the right to foster a broken heart in the face of her child being stricken with a deadly disease, but this daughter remains invisible until the very end of her poem, and even then, is only illuminated when she addresses her mother. Macfarlane is left with a metaphorical “cloud above her head”, irrespective of the veritable downpour which her daughter must be