'The Oxford of All Sicknesses'

I spent much of Monday in the hospital for “tests” involving various bodily fluids – one more reminder that the human body is profoundly ridiculous. In two weeks I’m scheduled for surgery. The text for the day was Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital,” one of seven poems he published in the July 1941 issue of Poetry. Five months later the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would enter World War II and Shapiro (1913-2000) would write the poems he is best remember for while serving in the Army in the South Pacific. “Hospital” is written by a twenty-eight-year-old poet very much under the sway, like so many young poets at the time, of W.H. Auden: 

“Inside or out, the key is pain. It holds

The florist to your pink medicinal rose,

The nickname to the corpse. One wipes it from

Blue German blades or drops it down the drain.

The novelist with a red tube up his nose

 Gingerly pets it. Nurse can turn it off.

 

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.

Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews

And actresses whose legs were always news.

In this black room the painter lost his sight,

The crippled dancer here put down her shoes,

And the scholar's memory broke, like an old clock.”

 

Joseph Epstein borrowed the title of his 2003 short story collection, Fabulous Small Jews, from the poem. Shapiro was one of my favorite poets when I was a teenager.