A wardrobe made from the dead sounds like the stuff of horror, yet Elise Cowan's untitled poem tells it in the bouncy voice of a nursery rhyme. That clash drives the whole piece. A speaker keeps helping herself to the remains of others, hoping to build something grander than herself, and each time the bargain turns against her.
The poem is a catalogue, and its order matters. The speaker takes skin, then hair, ears, eyes, "the sex of corpses," thoughts, and finally whole heads. The list moves from surface to interior, from things she wears to things she thinks with. The verbs slide too, from "took" and "cut" to "robbed" and finally the politer "borrowed," as though theft needs better manners the more it costs. Judging by the imagery, the corpses stand for anything already dead and secondhand, such as inherited ideas, other people's books and borrowed identities. That is an interpretation, but the later stanzas support it: she takes "the thoughts of corpses" to buy "daily needs," and reads by borrowed heads.
Every acquisition has a price, and the poem states it flatly. The hair sheath leaves her shivering "underneath." The hood, "warmer than forget-me-nots," costs her blood, and the flower's name quietly mocks her, since she is the one being forgotten. The stolen eyes are the cruellest swap: she wanted them "to face the sun," but the skies are cloudy and "I had lost my own." What she gained is useless, and what she gave up was hers.
The mirror image of this theft comes in the sixth and seventh stanzas, where the world shrinks to a reflection. "All the goods in all the stores / Were neatly labeled Me" turns shopping into a hall of mirrors, and "I found my name on every page / And every word a lie" does the same to reading. Borrowing from the dead has not widened her; it has trapped her inside herself. The word "neatly" is typical of the poem's deadpan.
That deadpan is the main source of its humour. The second stanza's parenthesis, "(I sat home in my jeans)," punctures the fantasy of wearing blue-dyed dreams "everywhere" with a dull domestic fact. The union suit stanza swells into comic grandeur, with "Esther, Solomon, God himself" made "humbler than my cook." The exact sense of that line is slippery, but the effect is clear: vanity inflated to absurdity.
The form helps. The quatrains have a ballad's loose, swinging beat, longer lines alternating with shorter ones, and the rhymes fall on the second and fourth lines. Some are clean (*by/lie*, *life/knife*), but many are slanted or near misses: *dreams/jeans*, *hood/blood*, *sun/own*, *jailed/bail*. A few barely rhyme at all, as with *needs/Me*. The sing-song promises order, and the imperfect rhymes keep slipping out of it, much as the speaker's borrowed selves never quite fit.
The last two stanzas change the setting. The speaker now meets "the spirits," whose "tappings" suggest a séance, and she is "jailed" in them. They treat her kindly, buying wine or lending a book, but "no one can make my bail." Kindness cannot free her from a prison built from other voices. Then comes the parenthesis that carries the poem's sharpest thought: to become a spirit she will "have to wait for life." She has never really lived, only dressed herself in the dead.
The ending completes a circle. After taking from corpses all through the poem, she offers her own "deadly body" to "the student doctor's knife." The adjective puns, meaning both mortal and lethal. The final act is the first honest exchange in the poem, since her body is truly hers to give, and for once she is the one who is taken from, not the one taking.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into thirty-six short lines. It treats the question of how to become yourself through a grisly fairy tale, and it never lets the tone settle into either comedy or despair. A self assembled from borrowed parts, however fine the fabric, leaves the wearer cold.