The poem begins with words that sound like they're from a fairy tale: “Once upon a time.” But the story the poem tells isn’t a fairy tale set in a far-off land that never was. Instead, it’s something sadder: a fairy tale about a real time, a time the speaker remembers.
Back in the day, the speaker tells their son, people “used to laugh with their hearts / and laugh with their eyes.” By this, the speaker means that their laughter was earnest and genuine: one could see their sincere feelings on their faces. Now, things have changed. People only “laugh with their teeth,” baring their fangs in an insincere grin. Meanwhile, their eyes are “ice-block-cold,” frigid and unwelcoming. They scan “behind [the speaker’s] shadow,” as if trying to uncover a dark secret.
No one, in other words, trusts anyone anymore. The same people who used to laugh openheartedly now put up a false front. The parallel language and sentence structures in lines 2-4 underscore the change, sharply juxtaposing the warm past with the chilly present:
they used to laugh with their hearts
and laugh with their eyes:
but now they only laugh with their teeth,
This, then, will be a poem about a discomfiting loss, a story in which a parent wistfully tells their child about better times.
The speaker will tell this tale across seven irregular stanzas of free verse. This flexible form, without a regular rhyme scheme or meter, allows the poem to change shape spontaneously to match the speaker’s emotions. In this first stanza, for instance, slow-paced lines of roughly equal length capture the speaker’s pensive, heavy mood.
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