Joyce Kilmer's "Apology," dedicated to Eleanor Rogers Cox, imagines a Heaven where the great dead poets are celebrating their defeats. The title doesn't mean "sorry." It is the older sense of an apology, a defense, and what Kilmer defends is the poet's life of longing, loss and unfinished business. His argument is that the poet's pain was never a mistake to be cured. It was the fuel.
The opening sentence shows how the poem works. Three "For" phrases pile up before we learn what they lead to: "For blows on the fort of evil / That never shows a breach," then a race "to a goal no foot can reach," then "reckless leaps into darkness / With hands outstretched to a star." Each image is a picture of failure, a wall that doesn't crack, a finish line that can't be crossed, a jump with no landing. Yet the delay makes them sound like achievements, and the payoff, "There is jubilation in Heaven," arrives like a trumpet. Kilmer lets the rhymes of "breach" and "reach" underline the point that the wall always wins and the runner never arrives.
The central image is hunger. "For nothing keeps a poet / In his high singing mood / Like unappeasable hunger / For unattainable food." The two long, heavy words, "unappeasable" and "unattainable," slow the lines down and make the hunger feel endless. A poet who was fed would stop singing. Kilmer then shifts from hunger to the forge. Poets' souls are steel "hammered" on "flinty sorrow / And failure and desire," until the blows "bring forth the lyric fire." Suffering is the hammer, and the song is the spark. Keats is "thankful for Fanny Brawne," a name that stands for the longing she caused him, and Drummond is grateful "for his king." Kilmer calls these poets "fools," and he means it fondly, because they are glad of the folly that made them "weep and sing."
Midway, the poem turns political. Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and the Irish names Plunkett, "McDonough" (usually spelled MacDonagh) and Pearse are said to "see now why their hatred of tyrants / Was so insistently fierce." The three Irishmen were poets executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, so the poem was presumably written after that, though the text itself gives no date. Here comes the poem's only real question: "Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp / To cheat a poet's eye?" Kilmer answers with an exclamation rather than an argument: "Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause / In which to sing and to die!" Whether freedom can ever be fully won matters less than the worth of chasing it. Knowing that Kilmer himself was killed in France in 1918, we may hear that last phrase with extra weight, though the poem never says he is speaking of himself.
The form suits the argument. The lines are short, with about three strong beats each, and they have a galloping, ballad-like lilt. Only the even-numbered lines rhyme ("vain" and "pain," "fire" and "desire," "eye" and "die"), which leaves the poem sounding plain-spoken rather than polished. The last stanza gathers everything up. The poets sing "not for the Rainbow taken / And the magical White Bird snared," the prizes of fairy tale, "But for their lifetime's passion, / The quest that was fruitless and long." The vocabulary turns to music, with "carols," "chorus," "thanksgiving," and finally "the thorn-crowned Master of Song." That title for Christ puts the poets' suffering beside his. Kilmer was a convert to Catholicism, and the poem gives artistic pain a religious meaning.
What keeps "Apology" worth reading is its stubborn optimism. It is not naive, because it admits the "lonely pain," the "vain" hopes and the fort that never breaks. Still, it offers young writers, and anyone chasing a goal they may never reach, a generous idea: the chase can be the reward.