Kenneth Fearing's «American Rhapsody (3)» begins like a love poem and quickly confesses that it is nothing of the kind. Two people plan to meet at eight o'clock, kiss, "exclaim," and arrange another meeting "as though there were love." The whole first half is built on that phrase "as though." They laugh "as though there could be laughter," they nourish hope while knowing the hope is staged. The speaker's sharpest question is whether they can keep up the act even when alone, "pretending, what is the truth, that we ourselves are fooled." Here the lie is no longer aimed at an audience; it is a mutual agreement to deceive oneself.
Over everything hangs a deadline. The opening lines list what will vanish: "warmth and sight and sound," the evening lights, the sky, the clouds, even the "slow, still shadows" on the hills. The repeated "before... before... before" works like a countdown, and the odd detail that the lights will come on "but not for you and not for me" makes death a plain fact rather than a poetic abstraction. The urgency explains the pretending. If time is short, performing affection may seem better than admitting its absence.
The second stanza turns the idea of performance into a game, and the game turns dark. "You can be a princess and I'll be the beggar; no, you can be the beggar, and I'll be king" sounds like children assigning parts, but the roles keep sliding into one another. The beggar becomes a mother begging for food, the merchant becomes a jobless clerk dead in Potter's field, the clerk becomes a priest, the priest a lady in jail, the lady a banker. The chain is dizzying on purpose. Rich and poor, holy and criminal, victim and exploiter are treated as costumes anyone might wear, and the poem suggests that the roles matter less than the fact that all of them end in the same place. Fearing's phrase "the red squad copper" adds a sour social detail, a police officer assigned to hunt political radicals, who here is imagined as "a patron of the arts." Even the cruelest figures get a flattering part to play.
The form fits this slippery content. The poem is written in long, free-flowing lines with no rhyme and no steady meter, closer to speech or a breathless list than to song. The indented lines pile clause on clause, and the semicolons keep the transformations rolling, so the reader barely has time to object before the next role arrives. The title's word "rhapsody" usually suggests rapture, an outpouring of feeling, and the irony is that this outpouring is cold and numb. "American" points the irony outward: the poem seems to be about a whole culture of performed feeling, where every relationship and every social position is a part to be played, not only about one couple.
The ending is where the poem shows its teeth. "You be a rat; I'll be the trap; or we both can be maggots in the long black box" drops the last pretense, since the game now includes the grave. Then come the final claims: "murder can be comic and hunger can be kind." These are the logical conclusion of a world where everything is interchangeable. If any role can be swapped for any other, then moral meaning drains out of events, and suffering can be relabeled as a joke or a mercy. The line is chilling because it sounds so calm, delivered in the same light, accommodating tone as the opening suggestion to meet at eight.
What makes the poem significant is how it joins private and public emptiness in a single gesture. A date and a social order are shown to run on the same mechanism, agreed-upon make-believe, and the poem refuses to offer a way out. Its comfort, if it has one, is its honesty: the speaker at least admits the pretending, which may be the only genuine thing left between the two people.