Introduction: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
“What the Living Do” by Marie Howe first appeared in her 1997 collection of the same name, and from the first line it announces itself as a work of startling simplicity that conceals within it the inexhaustible depths of elegy. This is a poem written for her brother John, claimed by AIDS, yet it refuses the grandiose and the rhetorical; instead, it immerses itself in the clogged kitchen sink, the Drano’s acrid smell, the spilled coffee on a Cambridge sidewalk. Such details, seemingly banal, become the very theatre of survival, the testament of what remains when the dead are remembered through the unendurable persistence of the everyday. “This is what the living do”—the refrain hovers between sorrow and exaltation, a chant of grief transfigured into a hymn for the common life. The reason for its enduring popularity is not sentimentality but rather Howe’s gift for locating the sacred in the utterly ordinary, the moment when one glimpses oneself in a window and is “gripped by a cherishing so deep” that life itself, even in its chapped faces and unbuttoned coats, becomes a form of astonishment. The poem survives, as her brother does not, because it embodies the terrible beauty of continuing.
Text: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
From What the Living Do, copyright © 1998 by Marie Howe. Used by permission of W. W. Norton. All rights reserved.
Annotations: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
| Line / Excerpt | Annotation (Simple English) | Device(s) |
| “Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.” | She speaks to her brother Johnny. The clogged sink shows daily struggles. | Apostrophe 👤, Symbolism 🔧 |
| “And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called.” | Chores pile up; life continues in small frustrations. | Imagery 👃🍽️, Realism 🏠 |
| “This is the everyday we spoke of.” | She recalls conversations with Johnny about ordinary life. | Memory 🕰️, Refrain 🔔 |
| “It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.” | Nature’s beauty (sky, sunlight) contrasts with indoor discomfort. | Personification 🌌, Imagery ☀️ |
| “For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do.” | Simple acts (driving, groceries falling) symbolize the fragility of life. | Symbolism 🛒, Refrain 🔔 |
| “And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.” | Everyday events (coffee spill, buying a hairbrush) remind her that she is alive. | Imagery ☕, Repetition 🔁 |
| “Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.” | Short fragments mimic breath and daily actions. | Fragmented Syntax ✂️, Realism ❄️ |
| “What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.” | Johnny called it yearning; he gave it up in death. Contrast between living and dying. | Contrast ⚖️, Ellipsis … 💔 |
| “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.” | Human desire for renewal, love, and connection. Endless yearning. | Anaphora 🌱, Repetition 🔁, Symbolism 💌 |
| “But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:” | Reflection becomes a moment of revelation; she cherishes her imperfect life. | Metaphor 🪞, Juxtaposition ❤️❄️, Epiphany ✨ |
| “I am living. I remember you.” | Final declaration: to live is to remember. Life and memory coexist. | Paradox ⚖️, Closure 🔚 |
Literary And Poetic Devices: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
| Device | Example | Explanation |
| Alliteration 🎶 | “won’t work”; “We want”; “bag breaking”; “walking, when” | Repetition of the same initial consonant sound in successive words adds rhythmic emphasis and mimics the poem’s physical, lived motion. |
| Anaphora 🌱 | “We want the spring… We want whoever to call…” | Repeating “We want” highlights insatiable human longing for renewal, contact, and more life. |
| Apostrophe 🌸 | “Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…” | Direct address to her deceased brother creates intimacy and a conversation with absence. |
| Closure 🔚 | “I am living. I remember you.” | Ends by tying survival and memory together, offering a firm, resonant finish. |
| Colloquial Diction 👜 | “buying a hairbrush” | Plain, everyday vocabulary roots the poem in ordinary speech and experience. |
| Contrast ⚖️ | “What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.” | Sets life’s desire against the finality of death, sharpening grief’s edge. |
| Ellipsis … | “What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.” | The sense of an unfinished thought enacts the inexpressibility and rupture of loss. |
| Epiphany ✨ | “I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living.” | A sudden, transformative realization of the miracle of being alive in ordinary time. |
| Fragmented Syntax ✂️ | “Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.” | Abrupt, breath-like fragments mirror bodily movement and the mind in grief. |
| Imagery (Olfactory) 🌿 | “Drano… smells dangerous” | Smell detail grounds the scene in the gritty textures of daily life. |
| Imagery (Visual) 🌅 | “The sky’s a deep, headstrong blue” | Vivid color and quality of light amplify the ordinary day’s stark beauty. |
| Juxtaposition ❤️❄️ | “blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” | Sets imperfect, rough details beside profound cherishing to reveal beauty in the ordinary. |
| Metaphor 🪞 | “glimpse of myself in the window glass” | Reflection becomes a figure for sudden self-awareness and living presence. |
| Paradox ♾️ | “I am living. I remember you.” | Life and grief coexist; to live fully is to carry memory of the dead. |
| Personification 🌌 | “sky’s a deep, headstrong blue” | Grants the sky a willf |
Themes: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
🌸 The Sanctification of the Ordinary: In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the clogged sink, the broken grocery bag, the spilled coffee—all these details of banality become sacraments of survival. Howe knows, as Whitman knew, that the commonplace is never merely common, that to name the ordinary is to redeem it. When she writes, “This is what the living do,” she affirms that existence does not reside in heroic deeds but in the stubborn endurance of the daily. The “headstrong blue” sky pouring light through the window is not a metaphor for transcendence but a reminder that life itself resists reduction. Howe’s genius lies in this transfiguration of the mundane into the sublime, so that the cracked syntax of chores and errands becomes a liturgy of presence. This theme asserts that the act of living, in all its frustrating interruptions, is the miracle we too often overlook.
🌿 Grief as Continuance: “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe is at once a lament and a testament: it speaks to her dead brother John while insisting on the survivor’s stubborn persistence. To address him—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—is to refuse silence, to enact an intimacy across the abyss of death. The poem’s rhythm is fractured, like the heart that utters it, yet it insists: “I am living. I remember you.” Memory is grief’s extension into life, and grief itself becomes a mode of continuation. Here Howe aligns herself with Dickinson’s paradox: to mourn is to live twice, once for oneself and once for the absent beloved. This theme recognizes that grief is not opposed to vitality; rather, it is its condition. To remember the dead is not to deny life but to deepen it, transforming mourning into an ongoing testimony of being.
🌹 Yearning and Insatiability: In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, yearning emerges as the most human of hungers, endless and unappeasable. She writes, “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.” Here desire is portrayed not as romantic aspiration but as a relentless condition of existence, a refusal ever to be satisfied. This yearning, which her brother “finally gave up,” is both tragic and luminous: tragic because it leads inevitably to loss, luminous because it is the engine of life itself. Howe touches the Emersonian impulse that to live is to desire without end, to reach toward an impossible plenitude. The poem makes clear that such insatiability is not weakness but strength—the will to continue in a world where absence defines presence.
🌼 Self-Awareness and Cherishing: “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe culminates in a moment of startling epiphany: “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living.” Here the theme is not narcissism but self-recognition as existence itself. To see one’s own “blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” and to love it is to discover the inexhaustible gift of being. Howe elevates the shabby particulars of the self into revelations of vitality, echoing Whitman’s celebration of the imperfect body as divine text. This cherishing is not vanity but gratitude, a recognition that survival is both privilege and responsibility. In Bloom’s terms, this is Howe’s clinamen, her strong misreading of elegy: she writes not only of the dead but also of the living self as a fragile, beloved figure. The theme insists that self-awareness, in its rawest form, is the highest affirmation.
Literary Theories and “What the Living Do” by Marie How
| Theory | Application to the Poem | References from the Poem |
| New Criticism 🌸 | Focuses on the poem’s language, imagery, and structure without outside context. The repetition of “This is what the living do” functions as a refrain, reinforcing the central theme of survival through ordinary acts. The fragmented syntax—“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”—creates rhythm and reflects the texture of daily life. | “This is what the living do.” / “Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.” |
| Psychoanalytic Theory 🌿 | Reads the poem as a working-through of grief and unconscious desire. Addressing her dead brother Johnny—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—acts as a therapeutic dialogue with absence. The yearning for “more and more” suggests an insatiable desire rooted in loss and Freud’s notion of mourning and melancholia. | “Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days…” / “We want more and more and then more of it.” |
| Feminist Theory 🌹 | Howe writes in a voice that elevates domestic, everyday tasks (dishes, groceries, coffee spills) traditionally dismissed as “women’s work.” By sacralizing the ordinary—“the crusty dishes have piled up”—she resists patriarchal hierarchies that privilege heroic or public acts over the private sphere. | “The crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber…” / “buying a hairbrush” |
| Reader-Response Theory 🌼 | The poem invites readers to insert their own experiences into the litany of ordinary acts. When Howe writes “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… I am living. I remember you,” the reader feels both the affirmation of life and the burden of memory, recognizing their own reflections of grief and survival. | “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass…” / “I am living. I remember you.” |
Critical Questions about “What the Living Do” by Marie How
🌸 Question 1: How does Howe sanctify the ordinary in her elegy? In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the ordinary becomes luminous, almost sacramental, precisely because it resists transcendence. The clogged kitchen sink, the dangerous smell of Drano, the spilled coffee—all are beneath the register of traditional elegy, yet they become its central liturgy. Howe insists that “This is what the living do”—a phrase that is less lament than credo. In Bloom’s sense, she performs a revisionary act, wrenching the grandeur of mourning into the sphere of domestic banality, and thereby enlarging it. The sanctification lies not in metaphor but in the refusal of metaphor; the sink remains a sink, the groceries remain broken in the street. This radical literalism elevates the poem into a hymn of the everyday, where life is measured not in triumphs but in interruptions. Howe redeems the ordinary by naming it, reminding us that survival itself is a kind of sacred persistence.
🌿 Question 2: What role does grief play in shaping the voice of the poem? “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe begins as direct address to her dead brother John—“Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days”—and never releases that intimacy. Grief here is not merely subject matter but the structural rhythm of the poem: fractured, halting, interrupted. The syntax breaks into fragments—“Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.”—as though thought itself were staggered by loss. Yet grief does not paralyze; it propels. The voice is both burdened and liberated by remembering. In Bloomian terms, this is Howe’s agon with death: she wrestles against the silence left by her brother’s absence, and the poem emerges as her victorious utterance. Grief shapes the voice into a paradox: intimate yet public, broken yet enduring, mourning yet cherishing. To grieve, Howe reminds us, is not to relinquish life but to deepen one’s claim upon it, carrying the dead within every breath of the living.
🌹 Question 3: How does Howe’s refrain “This is what the living do” define human desire?
In “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe, the refrain “This is what the living do” carries with it an Emersonian grandeur disguised in domestic garb. Life, as Howe presents it, is not a heroic striving but a yearning—“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass… We want more and more and then more of it.” This desire is insatiable, a hunger for renewal, for love, for contact. Her brother, she says, “finally gave up” this yearning, but the living cannot: their desire multiplies endlessly. Bloom would call this a strong misreading of elegy: instead of lamenting desire’s futility, Howe celebrates its excess. The refrain becomes a chant, defining the human condition as restless wanting, the refusal of finality. It is both tragic and redemptive: tragic because it guarantees loss, redemptive because it guarantees persistence. Human desire, for Howe, is the pulse of life itself.
🌼 Question 4: What is the significance of self-recognition in the poem’s closing lines?
The climax of “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe occurs not in grand revelation but in a moment of self-recognition: “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass… and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep… I am living. I remember you.” This is a Bloomian clinamen, a revisionary swerve in the tradition of elegy. Instead of focusing solely on the absent beloved, Howe locates grief’s culmination in the surviving self. The “blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat” are not noble images but ordinary imperfections; yet in them she perceives the miracle of existence. Self-recognition here is not vanity but gratitude: to see oneself alive is to affirm life against the pull of death. The closing lines enact a paradox: she lives, yet she remembers; she cherishes herself, yet she honors her brother. The significance lies in this doubleness, where mourning and vitality become inseparable companions.
Literary Works Similar to “What the Living Do” by Marie How
- 🌸 “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Like Howe’s poem, Bishop’s villanelle sanctifies the losses of everyday life, turning the act of “losing” into both discipline and elegy. - 🌹 “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
Shares Howe’s focus on the ordinary rhythms of existence, where the mundane (a tired musician) transforms into a deeper reflection on survival. - 🌼 “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden
Mirrors Howe’s elevation of domestic tasks—Hayden’s father polishing shoes, Howe’s dishes piling up—as acts filled with love and unspoken grief. - 🌺 “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
Parallels Howe’s blending of mortality and life, where the everyday carriage ride (Dickinson) and clogged sink (Howe) illuminate the inevitability of death through the lens of living.
Representative Quotations of “What the Living Do” by Marie How
| Quotation | Context | Theoretical Perspective |
| “Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days” | Opens with direct address to her deceased brother; establishes intimacy through the mundane. | Psychoanalytic Theory 🌸 – Mourning as dialogue with absence, working through grief. |
| “And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous” | A domestic image that highlights both frustration and fragility of survival. | New Criticism 🌿 – Close reading of imagery; ordinariness becomes symbolic of life’s messiness. |
| “This is the everyday we spoke of.” | Remembrance of shared conversations, grounding memory in the banal. | Reader-Response 🌹 – Readers project their own ordinary routines into the text. |
| “It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue” | Contrasts beauty of the natural world with small domestic discomforts. | Ecocriticism 🌼 – Sky and sunlight act as forces of vitality, shaping human emotion. |
| “For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking” | The fragility of life revealed in trivial accidents of daily routine. | Symbolism 🌺 – Groceries breaking as emblem of precariousness and survival. |
| “Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.” | Fragmented syntax mirrors lived reality; ordinary actions gain weight. | Structuralism 🌻 – Syntax and rhythm reflect the fractured texture of life after loss. |
| “What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up.” | Direct contrast between her brother’s surrender and her persistence. | Existentialism 🌷 – Yearning defines human condition; death marks its refusal. |
| “We want the spring to come and the winter to pass… We want more and more and then more of it.” | Universalizes desire; longing becomes endless and insatiable. | Post-Structuralism 🌾 – Desire as endless deferral, never fully satisfied. |
| “I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass” | Epiphany of self-recognition; cherishing life despite imperfection. | Feminist Theory 🌵 – Elevates female domestic and bodily presence as worthy of reverence. |
| “I am living. I remember you.” | Closing affirmation binds survival and grief into one. | Phenomenology 🌼 – Consciousness of being alive inseparably tied to memory of the dead. |
Suggested Readings: “What the Living Do” by Marie How
📚 Books
- Howe, Marie. What the Living Do. W. W. Norton, 1997.
- Howe, Marie. Magdalene: Poems. W. W. Norton, 2017.
📖 Academic Articles - Howe, Marie, and Victoria Redel. “Marie Howe.” BOMB, no. 61, 1997, pp. 66–70. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40425442. Accessed 28 Sept. 2025.
- Daniel, David. “About Marie Howe.” Ploughshares, vol. 18, no. 4, 1992, pp. 224–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40351038. Accessed 28 Sept. 2025.
🌐 Website Poems
- Howe, Marie. “What the Living Do.” Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52954/what-the-living-do - Howe, Marie. “The Gate.” Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52953/the-gate