The Blue Bowl

“The Blue Bowl” portrays a small but vivid experience of grief for the speaker of the poem, an unnamed figure, whom the reader could interpret to be Kenyon herself. Kenyon wrote eloquently and prolifically about her own experience with depression, and “The Blue Bowl” fits within this subset of her work. It examines the weight of grief and sadness, attempting to give language to something that often feels beyond words. The poem’s shift to articulate the “sorrows much keener” (Line 10) than the death of the cat, the inciting incident of the poem, cast a new light over the entirety of the text, suggesting that Kenyon uses the cat’s burial as a way to process a deeper kind of sadness through language and poetic form.

Kenyon does not address a specific audience with “The Blue Bowl”; rather, she allows the reader into her own intimate experience. The use of the first-person plural, the “we” introduced in the first line, suggests that Kenyon is writing for and to a figure close to her, a romantic partner (perhaps her husband, Donald Hall), or another loved one. By creating this intimacy on the page with the other person, Kenyon draws the reader in and allows them to experience both her sadness and her ambivalence about the beauty of the natural world around her.