Hans Ostrom’s “V for Surrender” quietly dismantles our usual ideas about ownership and control. The speaker insists that we never truly have hold of anything; our hands are “empty often” and possession is “nine tenths of illusion.” Human striving, careers, and will are treated with gentle irony—useful only sometimes, but often as out of place as an anvil in a sunroom. Against that, the poem sets animals, who live fully “even at rest” and without ambition. The speaker’s answer is to watch the autumn geese and read their V not as victory but as surrender: not grasping, but knowing how to fly together and move on. The mood is reflective, wry, and a little melancholy, yet calmed by the image of geese overhead and the release that comes from letting go.
V for Surrender — Summary
It’s not a question of letting go but of never having had hold. It’s not a question.
Our hands are empty often and at best only transfer, never own. Possession is
nine tenths of illusion. Hands operate as points lines use to reach points-next.
We might say all lives are way-stations to nowhere: The I passes through the Me,
connecting points to point of ceasing-to-be. In a related story, animals
demonstrate how to live fully engaged even at rest and without ambition, careers
being a quaint human invention. Will is quite the contraption, too—the right tool for a few
jobs but misapplied in most— an anvil in a solarium. And so again this Fall
I'll read the geese. I will be thinking V as they are knowing fly. I'll “let them go.”