The Words Under the Words

“The Words Under the Words” is a type of blazon—a poetic form dating as far back as the Renaissance, in which a poet praises a beloved person by writing a flattering description of each of their various body parts or attributes. Based on the acknowledgement opening the poem and the personalized aspects of The Words Under the Words collection as a whole, it is safe to assume the speaker is also the poet. Nye honors her grandmother by writing praise for her “hands” (Line 1), “days” (Line 6), “voice” (Line 17), and “eyes” (Line 26). The pieces added together present a woman who finds hope and joy in her abiding faith while under the duress of war, exile, and separation from her family. The poem starts with behaviors a person might expect from a typical grandmother, but as it progresses the descriptions become more dramatic and metaphysical.

In the first stanza the speaker focuses on her grandmother’s hands. She immediately sets the reader in the location of the Middle East by focusing on the “grapes, / the damp shine of the goat’s new skin” (Lines 1-2). The grandmother performs activities that show her living a traditional, rural lifestyle—tending to bread, the orchard, and the olive press. She nurses her granddaughter when she is sick.

Other details reveal the grandmother lives in a situation that is more perilous than idyllic. “Nothing can surprise her” (Line 17) anymore, and she invites others to bring her those who have been shot or crippled. The grandmother is separated from her “son, / lost to America” (Lines 9-10), so she rarely gets letters from him or her granddaughter. In the third stanza, the speaker reveals her grandmother’s husband also died, leaving the grandmother isolated. She must have community of some kind around her, as there are unnamed people who read her the letters when they arrive.

Through all of the loss, the grandmother sustains herself with an abiding sense of faith in God. The speaker suggests a connection between her grandmother and religion in the first stanza with the description of her grandmother’s hands “covering [her] head like cool prayers” (Line 5). When her son’s letters arrive, she treats them like a “miracle” (Line 14). In the last stanza the speaker makes her grandmother’s faith even clearer when she writes “My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death” (Line 26). This helps to explain why the grandmother can accept that everyone who loves her will “fly from her like seeds into a deep sky” (Line 24) because she knows “[t]hey will plant themselves. We all will die” (Line 25). At the same time, she believes even those who die are still part of “Allah” (Line 26). In other words, she believes in an afterlife where they will meet again—even when people die, they are still connected through their relationship to Allah.

The title of the poem “The Words Under the Words” draws attention to the significance of the last quote of the poem. The grandmother thinks of “His” (Line 29) name first and foremost, even when she is seemingly speaking about the more mundane aspects of life like getting food from the orchard and the olive press. “His” (Line 29) is capitalized to imply it is the name of God, the name of Allah. To say that there are “words under the words” (Line 30) means the word Allah is underneath all of the other things the grandmother sees and experiences. Believing in Allah and believing Allah is everywhere allows the grandmother to be at peace with a world that has so many “rough edges” (Line 31). It is choosing this belief that allows her to maintain peace while living with so much turmoil.