Touch Me, by Stanley Kunitz

Resource for Grades 7-12

Touch Me, by Stanley Kunitz

Media Type:
Video

Running Time: 2m 09s
Size: 6.2 KB


Source: Poetry Everywhere

This media asset comes from Poetry Everywhere filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Resource Produced by:

WGBH Educational Foundation

Collection Developed by:

WGBH Educational Foundation

Collection Credits

Collection Funded by:


This video segment from Poetry Everywhere features the poet Stanley Kunitz reading his poem "Touch me" at the Dodge Poetry Festival. Stanley Kunitz wrote about new life—renewal, shaking off old habits and ideas, and the cycle of life and death. His poetry was always changing, and he continued to write new poems until his death at age 100 in 2006; in fact, he became Poet Laureate at the age of 95.

For a biography of the poet Stanley Kunitz please visit the Poetry Foundation Web site.

open Background Essay

This poem begins by reviving and renewing a line from a poem he wrote decades earlier: “Summer is late, my heart.” That early poem was about being young, and “wild with love,” but the person remembering that line is now an old man, sitting in the evening, listening to the “whistling wind and rain.” He is at the end of a long day, during which he was working in his garden. As he sits, the poet remembers the crickets chirping around him as he worked outside, and his own amazement at how loudly they chirped and how long they went on singing.

What makes the crickets sing like that, he wonders, and his question is not just about crickets. What makes the earth burst with plants and flowers every spring, when they will only die in the fall and winter? What makes animals call for mates each year, when they won’t have long to spend with them? What keeps life going when it always ends in death? Even the storm, which has been building up all day, will soon wear itself out, the clouds will disappear, and the rain will be over. The only answer is the basic desire of all things to live, no matter how briefly, and to celebrate the life they are given by living it to the full. Rain thrashes the trees with its force, cricket chirps at full volume, and the old man remembers his young love, and his desire, and celebrates it. It was not in vain simply because he and his beloved have grown old. With one touch from her, he can relive it all, coming full circle to briefly revive and renew his old self.

Read a biography of the poet Stanley Kunitz at the Poetry Foundation Web site.


open Discussion Questions

  • What do you think the lines “It is my heart that’s late/It is my song that’s flown” mean? What do they refer to? How does the poet speed and slow his language in the poem?
  • “Gunmetal” means grey; why might the poet use this word to describe the overcast sky?
  • “The longing for the dance/stirs in the buried life./One season only,/and it’s done.” What do these lines refer to? How would you put them in your own words?
  • Why do you think he is “kneeling to the crickets?” What is the literal explanation, and what is the metaphorical meaning?
  • How many ways does the poem talk about renewal?

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