Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

(From:  A New Path To The Waterfall, by Raymond Carver.  Copyright © 1989 by the estate of Raymond Carver.  Introduction copyright © 1989 by Tess Gallagher.  ISBN 978-0-87113-374-8)

“Late Fragment” is the last poem in Carver’s last book, a collection of poems he wrote when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. In the introduction to A New Path To the Waterfall, his companion Tess Gallagher starts with these lines:

“This is a last book and last things, as we learn, have rights of their own.  They don’t need us, but in our need of them we commemorate and make more real that finality which encircles us, and draws us again into that central question of any death:  What is life for?”

Reflection on poem

Surely Carver did not ask for this at age 50 – but how often do any of us get exactly what we ask for in life?  Yet in the end he knows that what he has desired in life has also been given him – to feel that he is beloved.  I’ve treasured this poem for a long time.  In such simple and poignant words it shows me a man who talks as honestly as he can in the time left to him before his death.  It reads like a sort of benediction to the value of living each day fully.  And it’s a reminder to me that in the end, to be able to “call myself beloved and to feel myself beloved” will be enough.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988) was an American poet and also known as a major influence in reviving the short-story in the 1980s, which was thought by some to be a dying literary form. His collection of short fiction entitled Where I’m Calling From (1988) was released shortly before he died and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Thiessen, Feb 2020

Recent Posts