As I read the poem “Lullaby” by Francisco Márquez for the first time, I felt it didn’t exactly resemble the poems we read in class. Initially, it seemed more like what would be found in a children’s book, similar to what my elementary school teachers would read to us. A resemblance I did find between the poems we’ve read in class, especially the works of Emily Dickenson, and this poem was how the middle stanzas wouldn’t conclude on a complete sentence, causing the previous stanza to flow into the next. This poem seemed straightforward enough in the first two and a half stanzas, only really prompting me to figure out the more profound meaning in the last stanza and a half.
I immediately noticed some details about this poem, including its title, “Lullaby,” and its organized structure that made it easy to read. Based on the title, I believed the poem would be calming and lyrical, possibly without a meaning that’s too hidden. After reading the poem, I realized the importance of the lullaby for both the boy and the speaker. The speaker, who we can assume is young based on their mother singing to them when they are unable to sleep, has something the boy within the lullaby does not have, being the method of achieving peace and rest. Using words with a dreamlike connotation such as “flown,” “heaven,” “doves,” and “music,” the tone of the poem stays peaceful throughout and invokes a relaxing feeling. The poem is broken down into four clearly defined stanzas separated by white space. Each of the four stanzas has four lines, displaying the security in knowing what comes next and the general cyclical nature of the poem. The poem reads more like a short story with two main characters, the speaker being sung to and the boy in the lullaby, instead of having a lyrical feel. I felt as though this feeling was intentional because it didn’t give us, the audience, the speaker’s direct experience, but instead put us in the shoes of the boy who isn’t able to achieve that peace. The poem demonstrates the boy’s cycle of repeatedly climbing up and down the tower, showing how he yearns for the idea of heaven. To clarify this cycle, the author repeats the word “everyday” when talking about him climbing both ways. Since he goes up and down the tower daily, he returns to where he started every time. By thinking about this idea of going back to where one started, I found another reference to this cyclical nature when the poem starts off talking about the speaker, then describes the story of the boy, then goes back to the speaker, resembling the idea of the boy being down, going up, and coming back down.
I initially found this poem difficult in various places, especially the last stanza, because I was interpreting the boy wanting to be “flown to heaven” as a more literal reference of wanting to pass away instead of interpreting it as him wanting to reach peace. I was fixating on details like the meaning behind the blue doves or the repeated idea of flying, but I found that these details weren’t as integral to understanding the meaning of the poem as a whole. To combat this confusion about the purpose of the story of the boy in the lullaby, I began thinking about heaven as a reference to eternal peace and satisfaction. I paid heavy attention to the last stanza to understand how it ties into the poem’s meaning and eventually found the most clarity in the line that confused me the most, being “where music waits to be sung.” This one line greatly connects the speaker and the boy by showing how the boy is waiting for his own lullaby. The speaker, feeling restless at the start, is calmed into sleep by the lullaby their mom sings. I began realizing this lullaby was their method of transport, their wings to be flown into a world of relaxation, one that the boy in the lullaby did not have. This new knowledge of the poem makes the reread much smoother, even making more sense of the line where the speaker thought of “what it was like for him, wingless,” because the speaker can’t relate to the struggles of not having wings to take them to sleep. I can still not find full clarity in the section “his second life repeating in the otherworld.” This part comes right before the music waiting to be sung, which is why I couldn’t exactly tell what the second life and otherworld are referring to. Either the otherworld could mean the heaven the boy is yearning for, which doesn’t entirely make sense because why would the music need to be sung after the boy has already found peace, or it could mean at the top of the tower where he is reaching for heaven, waiting for the music. The otherworld could also mean the world separate from the speaker rather than another world of the boy since this poem is from the speaker’s perspective. Figuring out what exactly the otherworld means would aid in figuring out what “his second life” is referring to, which could be his life after achieving peace.
The seemingly direct indirectness of this poem makes it more impactful than just being outright simple or difficult, which is why I have grown to love its whimsical nature of being as complex as you make it.