The Remembrance of Regret: An Analysis of Gregory Orr’s “A Litany”
When Gregory Orr was a child, a terrible tragedy visited his family. Orr shot his brother while hunting accidentally. Many years later, he wrote this poem, which details how he remembers the incident and the events after it. Orr’s poem a Litany gives the reader a look inside a mind that is full of remorse. Through dark imagery, repetition and intense verb use that is meant to make the reader’s heart quicken, this poem presses the message that regret makes a person draw into himself and away from others.
The poem is one of the darkest ever written as to be on the same level as Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart.” The poem starts out with blood seeping across the speaker’s brother’s parka after he was shot and then the speaker running back to the house. Here we see use of the intense verbs. They are “running,” “screaming” and “hiding” (1,3,4). Throughout the poem, we do not get an explicit look into the character’s mind. There is no line that says, “I felt guilty, despite the fact that the whole poem is centered on guilt. The reader instead must infer how the speaker feels by paying attention to the speaker’s actions.
These verbs then, show how the speaker reacts to his giant mistake of shooting his brother. He runs and hides from his problem, unwilling to face taking responsibility. This is the first of many clues we get about how the speaker draws into himself in response to the guilt of killing his brother.
The second clue of how the speaker thinks comes between lines four and seven. These lines describe how the speaker hides in his room after getting away from the site where he killed his brother. The speaker says: “It was hard to breathe” (5). This connotes that he is afraid of something. The only thing to be afraid of would be his brother’s death. the poem does not make it clear that the brother has died, stating later that he “shot” (12) his brother not “killed” his brother. The speaker then goes on to say that he, “kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.” This goes back to what we get from the first three lines, that the speaker is afraid of taking responsibility for the act and afraid of the guilt that will afflict him later. In the next line, the speaker says he is, “pressing my knuckles into [his] eyes.” This is the first hard evidence of guilt since line three. Pressing the knuckles into his eyes knotes the desire to escape from his situation, similar to pinching yourself to wake up from a bad dream.
After line seven, the dark imagery starts, creating a dark landscape in preparation for the poem to end, similar to a camera shot that zooms out so the viewer can view the area around the acton. It starts when the speaker looks out the window, and begins to describe what he sees. The first things he sees is an ambulance, backing up. The reader assumes that it carries the bloodied person. The two lines, nine and ten, contribute to the short plot, which is at the center of the poem. The next line however, blackens the landscape into a dead mass with a clever trick with a lines break. “Someone hung from a tree near the barn/the deer we killed just before I shot my brother” (11,12) The reader reads, “someone hung from a tree near the barn” (11) in one line before moving onto the next. This line alone is a complete sentence and on its own it would conjure up an image of a person who has just been hung from the neck left on a tree.
Line eleven gives the reader an incredibly morbid image before the next line, a dependant clause, clarifies that someone hung a deer that the family killed before the speaker shot his brother. This helps form a morbid film that settles over the eyes of the speaker. The speaker sees the world as gothic and depressing, so the reader sees it the same way. Line twelve takes away the image of the person hanging from the tree, but makes the reader think of death, because there is still something dead being described. There is also the word: “killed” being used in line twelve, which lets the reader know that the brother is dead.
The poem finally comes to a conclusion in lines fourteen to seventeen. The speaker is brought soup by an unnamed person. The low amount of focus on the person reinforces the speaker’s focus on himself and his guilt. There is one more piece of dark imagery in line sixteen before the poem ends. The beginning of the line is: “pale shapes,” which brings up the image of bodies. As the line goes on the speaker describes his soup and the pale shapes of alphabet noodles in them.
“A Litany” is at it’s core about guilt, and how Orr, the speaker of the poem, responded to it. by withdrawing away from the outside world and into himself. The artful thing about the poem is that it perfectly conveys the feeling of guilt without mentioning the word once.
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