Rita Dove was born on August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio to Ray and Elvira Dove; doting

parents who encouraged their daughter in her academic pursuit. Rita was a
phenomenally gifted student and her poems started appearing in publications at the
young age of 22. Her first major poetry collection, ‘The Yellow House on the Corner’
was published in 1980. As in this work and ‘Museum’ (1983), in the words of author
Gene Andrew Jarrett, ”Dove skillfully blends autobiography with history and this very
principle paved the way for her masterpiece ‘Thomas and Beulah’,” which will be the
main focus of this essay.

When Rita Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for her collection ‘Thomas and Beulah’,
she was the first African American woman to do so since Gwendolyn Brooks. Also the
first African American Poet Laureate of the United States, she is one of the preeminent
voices in contemporary American poetry.

Thomas and Beulah offers a sequence of poems that tells the story of a black couple
living out their lives in the industrial Midwest from 1900s to the 1960s. Like other writers
who use the Great Migration as a historical backdrop – August Wilson with his
compelling family dramas, for example – Dove infuses the personal history of a black
couple which in reality are her maternal grandparents, with the social history of America
to create a mosaic of not just two people but a complete generation that migrated north
to urban industrial centers and the lives they made there, escaping the infamous Jim
Crow laws.

Thomas and Beulah offers two sections- “Mandolin,” 23 poems devoted to Thomas and
“Canary in Bloom,” 22 poems devoted to Beulah—which gives us two points of view
about the same story, a man’s and woman’s life together. Their movement through the
stages of human experience—youth, marriage, parenthood, aging and death reflects
the familiar, uneventful lives that most of us live. Yet, they are lives full of epiphanic
moments. Read in order, the poems come together like a collage to form a family
portrait of a couple whom we might see as our own relatives coping with a changing
personal universe and experiencing joy and pain. Thomas’s pain is especially
poignantly rendered through several significant poems in the first section.

The “Mandolin” section commences with a poem titled The Event which narrates the
incident that became the catalyst for this work. As a child, Dove was told a story about
her grandfather: travelling North on a river boat, he dared his friend to swim the
Mississippi River, and the friend drowned. Through Dove’s characterization of Thomas,
she explores how one copes with such guilt. She explains in an interview with Susan
Stamberg that the exploration of questions like “How could he have borne it? How does
anyone bear guilt that is irretrievable?” provided impetus for this poem and later, the
collection.
In The Event we are introduced to the young Thomas, a penniless migrant from
Tennessee looking for a more promising life up North, who along with his friend Lem,
has “nothing to boast of / but good looks and a mandolin”. Already the first stanza
thwarts the reader’s expectations: tercets, not couplets, open a sequence of marriage
poems and “they” does not refer to husband and wife but two inseparable riverboat
musicians. The poem proceeds with Lem playing “to Thomas’ silver falsetto,” until he
took a dare and, drunk, “Dove / quick as a gasp” upon Thomas’s request.

The fatal jump leaves the reader to wonder why a man would ever dive for the price of
mere chestnuts. As it happens, the friends are on their way to Ohio, the Buckeye State,
ready to become “buckeyes”, that is horse-chestnuts, as the inhabitants of Ohio are
nicknamed. To me, this jump symbolizes the desperation with which Lem and perhaps
Thomas too, wanted to better his life. The two “Negroes” were perhaps so oppressed
and marginalized that they would go to any depths to rise up, even if their lives were at
stake.

Thomas is thus, the cause of and an eye witness to the death of his best friend. His
beloved chum Lem has disappeared and all that is left behind is his “half-shell
mandolin”. Thomas feels responsible for the drowning of Lem and laments that drunken
dare for the rest of his life.

It is also interesting to note the skillful use of colour markers used by the poet in this
piece. When in the beginning she uses the word “Negroes” to instill a dark image, just
three lines later a completely non-racial silver is used to describe the same man’s
falsetto. The intermingling of the “black and the white” and the creation of the gray or
the silver—which represents the space available to the African-Americans for
negotiation, is yet another vivid image that starts at the sea in The Event and is later
used in a lot of poems.

Thomas bewails Lem’s fate in Variation on Pain while simultaneously learning to play
the mandolin which can be seen as either a tribute to Lem or Thomas’s way of keeping
his friend’s memory alive. Following the primordial “Event”, Variation on Pain
commemorates Thomas’s decision to survive and carry on and to transform loss, guilt,
sorrow and loneliness by means of music.

The first tercet and the following sestets formally mirror a very powerful imagery for
Thomas’s pain and also its artistic remedy. He is at a tremendous loss and is not
coping very well with the guilt that came with the drowning. “A man gurgling air”
confirms Lem’s disappearance. Only “the needle” in his head (echoing the globe drilled
through in Beulah’s final poem The Oriental Ballerina) remains without a fitting thread.

Thomas’s initial pain, “Two strings [for Lem’s mandolin], one pierced cry [for Thomas’s
pain],” is balanced in the end—on the surface at least—by the pierced earlobes.
However, these piercings also indicate the loss of Thomas’s innocence. “The past is
forgiven” but not forgotten until the final poem Thomas at the Wheel where it confront
him again with “the river he had to swim’ when “his chest was filling with water”. His own
“drowning” reminds him of the “writing on the water”—of Lem’s death.

Thus, The Event is perhaps the most challenging memory in Thomas’s life and even
though he has forgiven himself in Variation in Pain, he has never been able to forget the
unfortunate dare he proposed. It haunts him throughout his life, right to his own death
when he comes full circle in Thomas at the Wheel.

Therefore, after finishing the “Mandolin” section, the reader realizes that just like the
four pairs of strings of a mandolin, Thomas’s life reverberates both gleeful and
melancholic music at the same time.

The reader is left in awe of the poet who claims that, “All poetry is political. Poetry fires
the soul. That can easily turn into something political.” Indeed, her works combine the
“beautiful arts” with the issues of the state so well that this connection seems absolutely
just. One can now, only look forward to the next section “Canary in Bloom” in
anticipation of what life was for Beulah in the experience of a doubly-marginalized
existence.

Thank you