Analysis of "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

 Poem found here:  "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

A story before the "analysis."  I read this poem and I thought it'd be a good idea to share with someone who was going through a rough divorce.  At first the person I shared the poem with was grateful, but then he told me he read it again and ripped up the poem.  I apologized not knowing how deeply the poem affected him.

That event happened seven years ago.  

Now on to the "analysis."  The comparative metaphor in the beginning tries to reconfigure a familiar trope, "Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew."  I think most people would remember the myth of him falling when getting too close to the sun; and, the speaker doesn't shy away from that failure in the next couple of lines: 

It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. 

The comparison of flying yet failing and a relationship just not working when everyone around them said it wouldn't work feels to me that the speaker is trying to believe the positive, but can only remember the warnings.  Even with, "But anything / worth doing is worth doing badly" sounds more like an idiom to get by than somethin actually believed.

Memories are worth believing.  The poem continues with a simile comparing something done badly to this narrative experience:

Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.

Although I can go in depth of how the images of summer having to turn into fall and winter, and how the placement of the island being on the other side adds to this separation, the images aren't what makes these lines.  There's this continuous acknowledgment of being judged by someone as a failure even as the speaker desperately tries not to think about the relationship feel like a failure.  "Ever morning she was asleep in my bed" is a line and memory to grasp onto.

And the the simile becomes even more extended.  Remember the main comparison at this point is, "But anything / worth doing is worth doing badly"

like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming
the sea light behind her and the hug sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her 
while we ate lunch.  How can they say
The marriage failed? [...]

Again, the meaning behind the images don't matter so much, but how the speaker remembers such vivid details about the experience, about the times that seemed successful -- note not happy -- but a strong relationship.  The line, "I watched her coming back" is a stronger line in this situation than the images because even though the images are vivid, it doesn't matter.  At the end of this sequence what matters is, "Listened to her / while we ate lunch." The connection.  Even so brief how can that be considered a failure?  Failure is never flying, and never even being there for the fall.

"Like the people who / came back from Provence (when it was Provence) / and said it was pretty but the food was greasy."  This is when the images matter in this poem.  The previous lines were set up to have such a vivid pleasant memory compared to how other people see place and think "the food was greasy."  What of the ocean?  What of swimming and the sun?  Nothing, but just food being greasy as a memory.  No connection.  Not even a lift off.

"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph."  The last couplet here tries to redirect the definition of failing into something with less meaning than failing and more focused on the triumph.  There were good times in the marriage, there was a connection, but sometimes they don't last.  Can we just enjoy the image of the sun before we crash?