Nobody in Jennie E Owen's «Falling» ever lands. The burning child is caught in one endless moment of descent, and the poem's real subject is as much the people watching him as his suffering. Its central idea is an uncomfortable one: looking at pain is not the same as doing something about it, and witnessing can slide into mere spectatorship. The poem never names a particular event, which widens its reach. The child could be any child whose agony has been turned into an image.
Language is the first casualty. "There are no songs" for him, the poem begins, and the second line shows why with its stuttering "falls and falls and falls." The rhythm cannot settle; it tumbles. Even speech is poisoned, since any "spiel" either chokes the throat or arrives "set adrift from a paper face." "Spiel" is a sharp choice, because it means glib, salesman-like patter, exactly the smooth commentary that would be obscene here. The "paper face" and the "charcoal curls" that "spin and float" work in two directions at once. One is a printed picture of a face. The other is a sheet of burning paper curling into ash. The child is photograph and fire together.
The second stanza turns on the viewers. He is "impossible to catch or save," and the near-matching "stopped or stalled" gives the fall the feeling of a machine that cannot be switched off. Then comes the poem's most striking line: he "burns the voyeurs' retinas to black suns." "Voyeurs" is an accusation. "Black suns" is an oxymoron that recalls the dark blotch left on your vision after staring at something too bright. Judging by the imagery, the point is that our injury is only an afterimage, brief and harmless beside his. "He labours in negative" suggests the photographic negative from which a picture is printed, and "labours" suggests exhausting work. The child seems to be put to work by being looked at.
The short third stanza, only two lines, is the oddest. "He takes and takes, and burns and burns, / that child, all those he touches as he falls." The grammar makes the victim the actor, as if the child were the one doing the taking. This is unsettling, and perhaps deliberately so. It may suggest that suffering spreads to everyone who sees it, or that we are tempted to blame the person in the picture for disturbing us.
The final stanza offers the viewers their choices. We may "remain at finger stretch," close enough to reach out, though the phrase could also hint at a finger on a button. We may "elect to turn our backs," and "elect" makes looking away a decision rather than an accident. "Kneed our eye-sockets red" is an odd verb, a blend of kneading and kneeing, which suggests grief or refusal that turns violent. Then the sentence breaks off at "Whilst some," and the white space of the stanza break becomes the pause. The last line is set apart: "pause only to adjust the shutter speed." After so much fire, the ending is cold and technical, and "only" is its cruellest word.
There is no regular rhyme or metre. The poem relies on repetition and sound instead. Soft, liquid sounds run through "falls," "curls" and "stalled," while harder sounds snag in "choke," "catch" and "black." The syntax slackens and tightens as if the poem were itself falling and being caught.
The poem matters because it will not let its reader stay comfortable. Each option it lists, reaching out, turning away or recording, leaves the child still burning. The reader of the poem is also looking at a suffering child from a safe distance, turned into words on a page. By ending on the photographer's small adjustment rather than a moral, the poem leaves us to ask which of those people we would be.