Toy Boat

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Elegy

An elegy is a poem of mourning written on the occasion of a death, and traditional English elegies tended to focus on a single, specific death. “Toy Boat” is in many ways an elegy written “For Tamir Rice” after Rice was shot and killed by a police officer.

More so than most other types of poems, elegies imitate, reference, and relate to other elegies. As a result, to understand the literary context of Vuong’s poem, it is helpful to understand a little bit about the English elegiac tradition. Elegies changed radically in the 20th century. While older, traditional elegies tend to be elaborate, 20th century elegies tend to be comparatively spare. A traditional English elegy would likely include most—or all—of the following elements:

a repeated elegiac refrain; a description of the “laureate hearse” decked out in floral finery; an interrogation of the muses who fell asleep during their watch over the (now, unfortunately, dead) subject of the elegy; an enumeration and description of the procession of mourners; and nature’s horrified reaction to the death. . . . Ultimately, the longed-for consolation is often achieved through the apotheosis and objectification of the mourned, frequently through stellification (Connolly, Sally. Grief and Meter. University of Virginia Press, 2016, pp. 7-8).

A 20th or 21st century elegy, however, would likely not include many of these traditional elements. Instead, modern elegies are typically bare-bones examples of the genre. Moreover, modern and contemporary poets have done away with the single most important element of a traditional elegy: consolation.

“Toy Boat” fits in with this stripped-down and anti-consolatory modern version of elegy. The poem doesn’t include many of the tropes of traditional elegy—for example, the poem doesn’t include a laureate hearse, an interrogation of the muses, or a procession of mourners. The poem also doesn’t offer readers an apotheosis of the dead—we never get a glimpse of Rice in heaven, or in a “better place,” or even returned to the earth and a part of the larger cycle of life. Instead of a traditional apotheosis of the dead, “Toy Boat” ends with an image of sparrows taking to air, assumedly startled by the shot that killed Rice (Lines 23-28).

To someone only familiar with the English elegy prior to 1900, Vuong’s poem is almost unrecognizable as an elegy. “Toy Boat” is sparer, simpler, and less comforting than traditional elegies. In this way, it is a prototypical modern elegy.

#BlackLivesMatter

In the summer of 2014, just a few months before Rice was killed by a Cleveland police officer, a series of police killings of Black men ignited the Black Lives Matter Movement.

On July 17, 2014, an unarmed Black man named Eric Garner was standing on a Staten Island sidewalk when two New York Police Department (NYPD) officers approached him and accused him of selling individual cigarettes without charging taxes. One of the officers, Daniel Pantaleo, wrapped his arm around Garner’s neck, placing Garner in a chokehold, a move that was against NYPD rules. Pantaleo squeezed the life out of Garner while Garner repeatedly pleaded for breath. Standing nearby, a friend of Garner’s recorded the killing on his cell phone and shared the video. Garner’s last words—“I can’t breathe”—quickly became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Weeks after Garner was choked to death by a member of the NYPD, John Crawford was shot and killed by a police officer inside a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. Crawford was examining a BB gun that was for sale in the store. Officers claimed he was pointing the gun at people, but security footage revealed this wasn’t. Days after Crawford was killed, Michael Brown was also shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Like Garner and Crawford, Brown was Black and he was killed by a white police officer. Unlike Garner and Crawford, Brown was only a teenager. The deaths of Garner, Crawford, and Brown were protested by a then relatively new movement that used Twitter to empower supporters, mobilize protestors, and garner national attention: #BlackLivesMatter. Approximately three months after Brown was shot and killed, Tamir Rice was shot and killed. While Brown was 18 when he died, Rice was only 12.

While Vuong’s “Toy Boat” is written for Rice, the deaths of Garner, Crawford, and Brown have also been mourned in poems. “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay mourns the death of Eric Garner. “Testimony (for Michael Brown, 1996-2014)” by Hafizah Geter, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” by Danez Smith, and “Nightstick [a Mural for Michael Brown]” by Kevin Young all mourn the death of Brown. “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown mourns the deaths of Garner, Crawford, and Brown and ends with this devastating closing couplet:

Where the world ends, everything cut down

John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown. (Brown, Jericho. “The Tradition.” Poets.org, 7 August 2015. Lines 13-14).

Police officers have continued to kill unarmed Black people in the United States and these deaths have continued to be protested by the Black Lives Matter Movement and mourned in poems. In July of 2015, a state trooper pulled over Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman who was about to start a new job at her alma mater. She was stopped for failing to use a turn signal and in a short video Bland captured on her cell phone the officer who pulled her over threatens to shoot her with a stun gun. This traffic stop led to Bland being booked and a few days later she was found hanging in her jail cell. Local authorities ruled her death a suicide, but her friends and family dispute this assessment. Also, her family brought and won a $1.9 million wrongful-death settlement against the jail where Bland was held and the Texas Department of Public. Patricia Smith wrote about Bland’s death, as well as other deaths of Black people at the hands of the police, in Incendiary Art and Jericho Brown also wrote about Bland and others in his poem “Bullet Points.”

On March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers barged into the home of Breonna Taylor and shot her several times. Fury over this killing sparked a new wave of #BlackLivesMatter protests and poet W.J. Lofton created a visual poem for Taylor titled “Would You Kill God Too?”

Then on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Concerned and outraged bystanders filmed Floyd’s murder on their cell phones and, following Floyd’s death, video and still images of the event circulated on social media and on news sites. Floyd’s killing and these images intensified #BlackLivesMatter protests in the summer of 2020. Poems were also written in response to this killing, including “Why I don’t write about George Floyd” by Toi Derricotte. Additionally, Patricia Smith’s “Salutations in Search Of” mourns the loss of Floyd, Taylor, Garner, Rice, and others.

“Toy Boat” is in conversation with all these poems, as well as many more written for Black people killed by the police.

Ekphrasis

An ekphrastic poem is a poem that describes and meditates on a non-verbal work of art, typically a painting or a sculpture. “Toy Boat” describes and meditates on the titular toy boat, making it a work of pop culture ekphrasis, since the plastic toy at the center of the poem is mass-produced.

An ekphrastic poem can be written about a real work of art—for example, W.H. Auden wrote “Musée des Beaux Arts” about a painting titled “The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Brueghel—but it doesn’t have to be. An ekphrastic poem can also be written about an imaginary work of art—for example, the urn described and addressed in John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” doesn’t exist in real life, rather it is a composite of multiple ancient Greek artifacts and also includes Keats’ imaginary embellishments. When the subject of a work of ekphrasis is imaginary, the resulting poem is labeled a work of “notional ekphrasis.” Though there are many toy boats in the world, it is likely that the one described in “Toy Boat” is a product of Vuong’s imagination, making the poem a work of notional ekphrasis.