18 pages • 36 minutes read
Tear it Down
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Themes
Reconceptualizing Relationships
In “Tear It Down,” the reader is asked to reconceptualize their relationship to the world. Throughout the poem, the speaker repeats a plea for the reader to re-envision what they know of life, love, and the world around them to better understand these concepts on a deeper level.
The early lines of the poem use verbs and phrasing like “dismantling” (Line 1), “redefining” (Line 2), “break through” (Line 4), “get beyond” (Line 5), and “unlearn” (Line 7). The verbiage relates the concept of the poem; even the title, “Tear It Down,” asks the reader to tear down what they know. Destruction is not the end goal, but a means of redefining the human relation to the world and each individual self. The commonality between the language displays and connects the theme of reconceptualization—whether it be people’s relationships with their hearts, love, joy, sorrow, or myriad other emotions and circumstances. Though the poem deals with internal feeling and thought, people’s personal mentalities and experiences directly correlate to how they connect to and move through the world.
The final line of the poem uses the infinitive “to reach” (Line 18), presenting what will occur once a person redefines their world—the ability to see beyond initial perceptions and reach a more meaningful, nuanced knowledge. The importance of reconceptualization lies in the limited time humans have before death; the speaker insists humans redefine their relationships while “there is still time” (Line 16).
Love
Love is a consistent theme of importance in Gilbert’s work and his life. To his editor, he once said, “Poetry is a word like love: an endless confusion of different things all warped into one word because no vocabulary of discrimination exists” (Gilbert, Jack, and Gordon Lish. “Jack Gilbert, Interviewed by Gordon Lish, 1962 (from Issue One of Genesis West).” UNSAID, Unsaid Magazine, 20 Nov. 2012, unsaidmagazine.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/jack-gilbert-interviewed-by-gordon-lish-1962-from-issue-one-of-genesis-west-part-one/).
In “Tear It Down,” the speaker asks the reader to redefine love from a place of superficiality into a more profound form of abstraction. Lines 5-6 first touch on the concept, declaring, “By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond / affection and wade mouth-deep into love.” Love has a definitive meaning of strong affection for a person, place, or thing, yet the concept of love is subjective, ambiguous, and unfixed. The speaker offers there is more that lies beyond the artifice of simple affection. Wading “mouth-deep” (Line 6) implies that the reader should not settle for a surface level interpretation of love and reach instead for a more extensive, complete perspective—one that only they will be able to understand as every human’s experience in life is distinctive unto themselves. Though the word stays the same in both lines, the reader can infer that the shallow “love” in Line 5 is not the same as the deep “love” in Line 6.
Lines 14-15 declare, “Love is not enough,” before the speaker begins talking about mortality. The reader can discern that this “love” is similar to the one described in line 5, because two lines later the speaker says, “We should insist while there is still time” (Line 16). This insistence on love could be associated with the same insistence from Line 5: The speaker wants the reader to reach deeper and demand a more fully realized love. This line could also be interpreted as love not being enough for a person in the grand scheme of life. The speaker states that love is not the only thing worth being “insist[ed]” (Line 14) upon or redefined. Therefore, the reader can assume that love is not enough because subjects aside from love are worth reanalyzing, as well.
Mortality
In the near-final lines of the poem, the reader begins to understand why the speaker insists on redefining the world: “We die and are put into the earth forever. / We should insist while there is still time” (Lines 15-16). The conciseness and definitiveness with which the speaker writes of death are blunt to the point of being jarring, and the harsh verbiage assists the speaker in conveying the importance of the message. Mortality, the limited amount of time humans have on earth, explains why the speaker believes in the importance of “insist[ing]” (Line 14) on the world in which humans live. In the finality of death, people are “put into the earth forever” (Line 15). There is a conclusion in the death the speaker claims, and there is no noted afterlife; this implies that once the mortal coil is complete, humans simply cease to exist. The physical body has restricted time and the speaker wants the audience—in the small amount of time given on earth—to more deeply connect with the world. In this way, death should be an inspiring force to live a more fully realized existence.
Interestingly, Gilbert did not close the poem with the ruminations on death. While it is widely understood that dying is the conclusion of life as is known, the speaker speaks only briefly of death before closing the poem with more sensuous and visceral imagery: “We must / eat through the wildness of her sweet body already / in our bed to reach the body within the body” (Lines 16-18). This was a deliberate choice and leaves the reader with a more positive feeling than if Gilbert had chosen to close the poem with assertions about death and dying. (See the subsequent section in Symbols and Motifs for more about the “Body.”)
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