Graveyard Blues

Natasha Trethewey frequently writes about topics such as family, the American South, historical figures, and what it means to be mixed-race. “Graveyard Blues” is no exception. Crafted in a formal structure with a set meter and rhyme scheme, the poem follows the frustrated and stalled narrative of the speaker’s mother’s death and funeral procession. As part of Trethewey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Native Guard, “Graveyard Blues” was written in the wake of Trethewey’s mother’s murder. Throughout the poem, the speaker moves through the memory of the mother’s burial while also revealing, through formal restraint, their grief. Largely written in the retrospective, the poem culminates in a final couplet in the present tense, bringing the speaker’s grief into the present day with a truth Trethewey admits about her mother’s passing: That it never really leaves her.

Poet Biography

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi in 1966. The daughter of a mixed-race couple, Trethewey’s parents divorced when she was six and she spent the rest of her childhood between Atlanta, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father, Eric Trethewey, was a poet and professor; because of this, education was highly valued and Trethewey was encouraged to read throughout her childhood. Trethewey studied English in college at the University of Georgia and went on to earn an MA in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Trethewey, whose mother Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough was a social worker, writes often about those who endure difficulties in life, often due to race and class in America. Her first collection of poetry, published in 2000, is named Domestic Work. This collection is based loosely on her grandmother’s life and the poems explore the working-class black population of the South. Domestic Work established Trethewey as an important up-and-coming poet, winning the Cave Canman Prize for a first book by an African American poet; the collection was selected by the prominent poet Rita Dove. The collection also won several other awards, landing Trethewey squarely on the poetry scene. These honors include the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry.

Trethewey has published five collections of poetry. Many of her collections, including her 2002 collection Bellocq’s Ophelia and her 2012 collection Thrall, explore past eras–namely the 18th century–and fictionalized characters based on real-life people and events. Trethewey, who is a mixed-race poet, often writes of the mixed-race experience in the deep South; a theme that recurs throughout her poetry.

Most notably, Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 2007 collection, Native Guard. No stranger to formal poetry, Native Guard includes a sonnet sequence along with several elegies written for her mother who tragically died when she was 19. Trethewey’s honors are vast. She is the recipient of several prominent fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and many others. From 2012-2016, Trethewey served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and from 2012-2014, she served as the 19th United States Poet Laureate.

Trethewey has held many teaching appointments throughout her career at prestigious institutions including Duke University, Emory University, Yale University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Currently, she teaches as the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University in Illinois.

Poem Text

Trethewey, Natasha. “Graveyard Blues.” 2021. Divasofverse.com

Summary

“Graveyard Blues” is told largely in the past tense; the narrative follows the speaker as they recall their mother’s funeral and burial. As hinted at in the title with the word “Blues,” the poem carries a melancholy tone as the speaker revisits the memory of lowering their mother into the ground. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the weather as they laid the mother to rest. Narrating backwards, the rain is present when the body is lowered into the ground, it follows from the church to the grave, and the resulting mud makes a “hollow sound” (Line 3) as it sucks at the attendees’ feet.

In the second stanza, the funeral service is described, with the speaker responding to the preacher, who is engaging the attendees in a call and response. The stanza ends with a quote, perhaps of the preacher, that asserts that while the body dies, the soul continues on.

The third stanza adds a note of discord for the speaker, who is already grieving. Here, the sun comes out as they walk away from the grave. It shines harsh light on the speaker, who reveals in the third stanza that the funeral is for their mother. The speaker walks away from the mother’s grave, “leaving her where she lay” (Line 9).

In the fourth stanza, the speaker notes that the drive home from the funeral was bumpy and “pocked with holes” (Line 10). They then note that a “home-going” (Line 11) road is always bumpy, referring this time to the nature of a ‘homegoing’ celebration more broadly. The stanza ends with the observation that while humans may slow down, time slows for no one.

In the final stanza, the poem shifts into the present tense when the speaker states, “I wander now among names of the dead” (Line 13). Here, the speaker has retuned to the site of the burial and is walking aimlessly through the cemetery. The poem ends when the speaker finds the mother’s headstone, which is referred to as a “stone pillow” (Line 14) for the speaker’s head.