"Departures" by Donald Justice

I would say that the strongest recurring element in the poems of Departures is that of insignificance and worthlessness. The speakers’ tones are consistently detached, exasperated, and sometimes quite cynical. “Prescenes,” the last poem, provides a great look at the tone that many of the speakers take.

Everyone, everyone went away today.

They left without a word, and I think

I did not hear a single goodbye today.

And all that I saw was someone’s hand, I think,

Thrown up out there like the hand of someone drowning,

But far away, too far to be sure what it was or meant.

No, but I saw how everything had changed

Later, just as the light had; and night

I saw that from dream to dream everything changed.

And those who might have come to me in the night,

The ones who did come back but without a word,

All those I remembered passed through my hands like clouds—

Clouds out of the south, familiar clouds—

But I could not hold onto them, they were drifing away,

Everything going away in the night again and again.

Diction like “drowning,” “far away,” “everything changed,” “passed through,” “drifting away,” “going away” creates a helpless tone, as if the speaker is being left behind by both people and changing objects that were once familiar (dreams, clouds, “everything”). The fact that he is being left behind appropriately forms a feeling of worthlessness for the speaker as if he is a piece of trash being tossed aside.

One thing that greatly intrigued me was the fact that, in his notes at the end of the book, Justice says,

"The Confession, The Success, The Assassination, 'Clock' (from 'Things'), and the sonatinas come, in part, from chance methods."

I think the fact that he used “chance methods” in some of his poems can tell us a great deal about the poem and his views on poetry as a whole. My guess as to what “chance methods” are is that he probably randomly selected certain words.

Going by what he said, 6/29 poems (or 21%) used some amount of randomness in their writing. This is a relatively large proportion and it deserves much attention.

By using chance, I think that Justice is tying the idea of chance itself into our own lives and reinforcing the depressed tones in Departures. It’s a depressing thought that there may be things that are out of our control and are governed by chance. One could argue that a person is cynical if he truly believes that we don’t really have control over our lives, that they are guided mostly by the forces of probability. Huh, this is an interesting proposition…let’s look for solid proof that Justice intends for this.