The Blue Terrance

Narrated through the persona of a melancholy or “blue” individual, “The Blue Terrance” is a romantic, lyric poem about love and loss. What is distinctive about this love poem is that the object of love varies: it is interchangeably a person, society, and above all, the speaker’s own self. Hence, the title of the poem, “The Blue Terrance,” where the speaker’s alter-ego—the sad, lonesome Terrance—is the real addressee of his love letter. The speaker loves and despairs of his blue self, tries to describe and define it, and also to soothe its hurts, much as he would with a lover. Loving this self is very easy and very difficult at the same time, because neither the self, nor the feeling of love, exist in a vacuum. Complex historical and social realities surround and compose the self and its idea of love. The blue Terrance in therefore not only a jilted lover, but he is also a Black man in America trying to get mainstream society to accept him. Even though he knows he doesn’t need to be accepted by white society and is perfect the way he is, he also experiences the contradictory and universal human impulse of wanting to be loved and liked by everyone.

The speaker is in a blue mood, possibly recovering from heartbreak. Addressing his lonely self as “you,” he chooses the metaphor of mathematical subtraction to convey his mood of loss. He wants to subtract the years and return to the romanticized state of childhood, but he finds the memory of being young mixed with a series of romantic diminishments and minus signs. The feeling of smallness returns him to a classroom with a blackboard marked with his errors. The shame he felt is represented by the toe-ring his math teacher wears. The poet conjures up an image of an errant child hanging his head in shame and staring at the ground: The shame is compounded by the fact that his failure is being enacted in front of a teacher whom—it is implied—he possibly admires. Admiring someone romantically or erotically becomes associated in his mind with failure. As a Black boy, not even the plainest looking of his classmates paid him attention, which now makes the speaker develop a painful relationship with his romantic, masculine, and Black selves.

In the second stanza, the self-loathing engendered in the previous lines reaches a peak. The speaker now describes his body as “these bones / in their funk machine” (Lines 7-8), a match-box size bag of bones. Pronouns such as “you” and “this” distance the poet from his self and body, allowing him to criticize it. How can the girls like him the way he is, he questions. But the metaphor of the funk-machine has multiple meanings, with funk being a music genre popularized by Black American musicians in the mid-1960s. Colloquially, the word “funk” refers to both a state of depression or blues, as well as a strong odor sometimes associated with sex. Further, “Funk Machine” is also an album by the pop star Prince (1977). Given these multiple associations, it can be inferred that the speaker’s body is something that makes him self-conscious but also provides him pleasure. It is a dancing machine, moving to the beats of funk music. It is also an instrument of self-gratification, the speaker’s thumb worn “smooth / as the belly of a shovel” (Lines 8-9). With self-deprecatory humor, the speaker describes his younger, unloved-by-girls self as masturbating so often his thumb was worn out. The “Thump. Thump” (Line 10) of music, sex, and despair become the beat or rhythm of his life.

The humorous tone of Stanza 2 is undone in the next few stanzas, with the speaker now sometimes using the first person. This indicates that the distance between the persona and the speaker’s true self is crumbling. Now he melancholically proclaims that “everything I hold takes root” (Line 10), conflating the sexual metaphor with one of permanence and decay. Root is a rough colloquialism for the sexual act and genitalia, and the phrase “taking root” also implies the speaker’s hurts and losses becoming permanent. He has a hard time shrugging off his disappointments. The speaker now uses the extended metaphor of blues music to explain his coming of age and his subsequent struggle with love. Blues music made him aware of romance and filled him with longing. Before he heard the music, desire was yet uncomplicated for him. Hearing the blues of course coincides with other changes in the speaker’s life—getting older and becoming aware of his historical and cultural context.

While blues music gave him a unique mode of self-expression, he also became aware of possibilities like being “nothing but a song / in a busted speaker” (Lines 18-19), implying that the blues music he heard came from a rundown machine associated with poverty. These lines may also suggest that when he was growing up, white Americans limited Black people only to cultural forms they could appropriate, without trying to understand the struggles of Black people. One such struggle is reconciling poverty with chivalry: a Black man may wish to show his gratitude to his hardworking wife, mother, or any other “righteous woman” in his life (Line 20); the Bible-inspired phrase implies a hardworking Christian woman, but limited means keep him from making a grand gesture.

Only blues music with its rise and fall of tempo, its improvisations and riffs, can encompass the contradictions of such an existence. Only its “bloodshot octaves of / consequence” (Lines 23-24) can convey the weight of the speaker’s lived experience. Although the speaker is describing music—which transports and uplifts—he deliberately uses a heavy and intense phrase like “bloodshot octaves of / consequence” (Lines 23-24) to describe the reality of Black experience. Actions of Black Americans may have consequences of which white people are free, thus making each of their decisions measured and weighty. In another sense, the music suits the speaker’s personal, individual reality: that of a tortured, contradictory, and sensitive person. He likes the way blues music makes his emotions soar and crash, because he feels alive in extremes, being “ a little bit / high strung and a little bit gutted balloon” (Lines 26-27). The peaks and dips of the music are a metaphor for his excitable self, which rises like a kite and collapses like a deflated balloon.

As the poem nears its end, the speaker packs on metaphors to describe a state that is elusive and indescribable. Only someone who has known the speaker intimately—a lover—knows his contradictions. While the speaker loves saying no to protect his boundaries, he loves endangering himself emotionally and physically even more—the metaphor for this is someone who finds the idea of having sex in a house on fire romantic. Here, the speaker describes the tendency to romanticize danger or conflate sexual desire and thrill-seeking behavior. On another level, he explores the contradictory way society defines love: Contemporary definitions of love stress preserving healthy boundaries, yet traditional, romantic ideals mean giving up everything for love. The speaker lives this contradiction, enjoying the struggle between his prudent and romantic selves; more importantly, he defines his romantic self as excessive and imprudent. Because he experiences reality in this binary (prudence is important but boring, romance is excessive and self-destructive), he is bound to be blue. He is in love with loss, and that’s why he’s lonely and sad.

The ending lines therefore establish the poem as deeply personal and honest. Further, though the speaker has described his reality as a universal reality for people, and Black Americans, he also establishes his struggles in love are because of his unique temperament. The blues continue to be his metaphor for choice because they simultaneously encompass the universal and the unique, since improvisation is an essential part of blues and jazz music. Significantly, the speaker acknowledges that his experience is not as miserable as he may have earlier implied. He may be lonesome and blue, but he enjoys being in this state. He is in love with the idea of the end of love as much as with love itself.