“Wait” was published in 1980 by Galway Kinnell in his collection of poems, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. The poem is a monologue communicating a message of hope, patience, and trust in the renewal of life to someone considering suicide after heartbreak. Kinnell, a professor at the time, wrote the poem for a student after she visited him during his office hours and confessed her desire to commit suicide following a breakup. The poem, like much of Kinnell’s poetry, is influenced by the work of Walt Whitman, and seeks to elevate the psychological and spiritual experience of humanity. “Wait” is one of Kinnell’s best known poems, written after his surrealist period in the 1960s and 1970s, and just before winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Selected Poems, published in 1982.

Poet Biography

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 1, 1927. He grew up in Pawtucket and later served in the U.S. Navy for two years before earning a BA from Princeton University in 1948. He received his MA from the University of Rochester in 1949 and traveled abroad for many years before returning to the United States in the 1960s.

Kinnell was active in the Civil Rights movement, helping to register African American voters in Louisiana as a member of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). He was an anti-Vietnam War demonstrator as well and signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” in 1968 where he vowed to refuse tax payments in protest of the war.

In his lifetime, Kinnell’s poetry received many awards including a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. Awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant in 1984, he later became the poet laureate for Vermont from 1989 to 1993, the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University, and a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. His marriage to his first wife Inés Delgado de Torres in 1965 lasted 20 years, and they had two children—Fergus and Maud. Kinnell married his second wife, Barbara Kammer Bristol, in 1997. He was a longtime resident of Vermont, where he died of leukemia on October 28, 2014 at the age of 87.

Poem Text

Kinnell, Galway. “Wait.” Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. Mariner Books, 1980. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

An unknown speaker addresses another at a time of personal crisis, telling them to wait and distrust everything about life except the passage of time. With passing time, the large and small things of life—like hair, pain, and flowers—will become interesting again as the broken heart heals. The speaker mentions the empty feeling left behind by lost love; like second-hand gloves on new hands, the speaker insists that emptiness will eventually seek fulfillment and, like the gloves, become lovely again with new love.

The speaker repeats the plea to the reader—who is tired of life and contemplating suicide—to wait, to stay for their own life, and to not leave too early. The poem asks the reader to listen for the music of their own life in the little and big things. That music is special and unique to each reader, and the speaker insists they stay to listen to the whole thing. The speaker concludes that while the “sorrows” rehearse that music of life, one can only hear and know the whole music of that life once it has been completely exhausted.