Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

Hello and welcome back to The Young Reader’s Review! It has indeed been a while but today I am back, fresh and rested, for a new review! You might have heard that, a few days ago, Joy Harjo was nominated as the first Native American U.S. poet laureate. To celebrate this, I thought that I could discuss on here one of my favorite poems of hers: “Perhaps the World Ends Here”. 

“Perhaps the World Ends Here” is itself an enthralling title, playing with our curiosity with its almost apocalyptic undertones and the visions it is saturated with: we imagine the “here” to refer to the abysses of a never-ending canyon that stands inches before our feet, where the phrase “perhaps the world ends here” may in fact edge its way into our frightened mind. But this title also arises questions in the semantic domain: what does the “world” refer to? Is it the world as we see it, or is it our individual world that orbits around us? And, most importantly, what does “here” refer to? Personally, this particular word choice was probably one of the motivating factors to why I read the poem. This title contains a sort of announced fatality: the “world”, whatever it refers to, will in fact end. This being said, “Perhaps” grammatically modulates the sentence and greatly changes the sense of this fatality: it is “wavering”, uncertain, which makes it all the more exciting. We read through the poem, knowing that there is in fact some sort of end. The poem is itself constructed with seemingly disparate lines, as if every one of these lines could be the end itself. 

“The world begins at a kitchen table”. The entire poem takes this line as its base, the kitchen table being elaborated as an extended metaphor for the “world”, for life in all its essence. The familiarity of the image of the “kitchen table” contrasts with this grandiose idea enunciated in the title of the world ending, which strikes as incongruous. The use of this present tense as we can note with “begins” conveys a generalizing, eternal effect and also sets a solemn tone for the poem. This kitchen table is welcoming: babies are not afraid to “teethe at its corners” (l.8), we “put ourselves back together” (l.10) at this kitchen table, it is a place where, “our dreams drink coffee” (l. 9), which is not only amusing and inventive imagery but also successfully conveys this sense of security and well-being that can be found at this kitchen table. 

This kitchen table does not only bring us back to this wholesome feel of family life, but it also, as daunting as this may sound, encompasses the entirety of human life. We can say this since the metaphor of the “kitchen table” is also constructed with significant paradoxes. We can notice this in the details of the poem, with the chiasmus in line 12 “a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun”, the oxymoron “terrible victory” (l.14). Line 15 antithetically associates “birth” and “burial” and also includes, and we can see at line 17 a double antithesis of the nouns “joy”, “sorrow” and of “suffering” and “remorse”. On a more general level, the kitchen table associates the trivial aspects of life, such as “gossip” (l.9), “laughing” (l.19) or, once again, “drink[ing] coffee” (l.9), with its much graver aspects, such as death, the “shadow of terror” (l.13-14) and the eerie vein of the “last sweet bite” (l.20) that ends the poem. 

We can also note that the poem is cyclic and if this were a narrative, we would say that it is linear: it begins with the beginning, the world “beginning” at this “kitchen table” (l.1) and then ends with a grammatically similar line: “perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table” (l.20). Now, as you may notice, the only difference with these two lines (apart from the interchanged antithetical verbs “begin” and “end”), would be “perhaps”, as discussed before, as well as the very finical choice of the preposition “the” instead of “a”, which is an interesting change. The first line opens the poem on an undeniable statement, a certainty, but the last one is speculative: perhaps. The indefinite article “a” turns the phrase into a generalization, meanwhile “the” is demonstrative: we now know what this kitchen table symbolizes, we can imagine it. We now know what the “here” in the title represents, even if it’s not concrete, but it is that familiar place where all began.

That is it for today’s review! If you enjoyed this little analysis, don’t forget to share this on social media and to leave a comment down below if you have any suggestions. I am currently summer break so I have a lot of free time to read and to write reviews, so stay tuned and see you next time!

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© Margaux Emmanuel