Maxwell Bodenheim’s compact lyric “The Interne” opens with an outburst that sets its paradox in motion: “O the agony of having too much power!” The exclamation sounds almost like a prayer or lament, yet its subject is not weakness but overwhelming control. The speaker, a hospital interne, holds “hundreds of lives” in a hand he calls “passive.” That word matters: the power does not feel like active strength or ambition. It simply rests there, unwanted, and the speaker experiences it as a kind of wound.
The poem turns that wound into alchemy. The lives in his palm “drain my blood,” as though the patients are made vital at his expense. What remains is not flesh but metal: “My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass.” The line moves with an incantatory rhythm, each organ paired with a different metal. These are not the precious transformations of fairy-tale alchemy so much as industrial and anatomical hardening. An iron heart suggests both emotional endurance and loss of softness. A copper brain hints at nerves and conduction, but also a body becoming machinery. Silver eyes may see clearly, or coldly; brass lips may speak, but with a metallic, impersonal ring. He is being turned into an instrument of the hospital even as he uses his body to save others.
Then the speaker’s language becomes disturbingly casual: “Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me.” The verb “twirl” is almost playful, as if he were spinning thread or sending tops across a floor. The “supple finger” is the one remaining point of human ease in a body otherwise described as metal. The lives he twirls are “Strong-winged or fluttering and broken,” a line that sets soaring recovery beside damaged, failing flight. He does not say he cures or kills; he twirls, and some fly and some break. That mixture of godlike detachment and intimate consequence is the poem’s uneasy centre.
Bodenheim pushes the contradiction further with “They are my children: I am their mother and father.” The image is tender and arrogant at once. A parent gives life, protects it, and can also fail it; a doctor-in-training stands in the same relation, but multiplied by hundreds. Calling himself both mother and father erases fixed roles and suggests a total, overwhelming responsibility. Yet the final line is flat, almost exhausted: “I watch them live and die.” After the opening cry of agony and the vivid metallic imagery, this quiet close feels like emotional aftermath. Watching is his role, but it is also his burden—he is close enough to care, yet far enough only to observe.
What makes “The Interne” significant is its refusal to moralize about medical power. It does not praise the doctor’s skill or condemn his detachment. Instead, it holds two truths together: the healer is drained by those he heals, and the healer also holds an almost arbitrary power over their fates. The poem’s free verse follows the shape of that tension, beginning with a cry, tightening into a chant of transformation, then loosening into a weary final statement. Its language is plain, but its images—palm, blood, metal, wings—carry the weight of a profession that turns people into both patients and children, and turns the healer into something harder than flesh.