Most poems about growing up lean on nostalgia or triumph. "Dirge" does neither. A dirge is a song for the dead, and Thomas McAfee gives that title to a poem about a boy going through puberty, as if the thing being buried were childhood itself. What survives the funeral is an awkward, embarrassed body that the speaker cannot yet make sense of.
The opening sets the tone with a startling comparison. The speaker is "Confused as Abelard, / Castrated and in love," a reference to the medieval philosopher who was mutilated and separated from the woman he loved. It is a grand, almost comic way to describe teenage frustration, and the grandness is the point. To the boy, desire without any way to act on it feels like a catastrophe on a historical scale. Then he lies "cross-shape" on the lawn, an image that borrows the language of crucifixion for a kid drinking Cokes and hunting for "girly shots in magazines." The poem keeps setting the sacred against the shabby, and the clash is both funny and painful.
Time is the poem's most inventive subject. "It always took the sun a year to make its arc," the speaker says, and then, in a lovely paradox, "Summer moved / Slower than winter, winter than summer." Adolescence has stalled the calendar. The closing lines return to this with "the summer clock stopped," and the boy moves "Dead-slow to the sound of dying." Yet the poem's second stanza also notes that the world outside is wilting, "Verbena turned anemic, ferns fell flat," so the boy's inner state seems to leak into the garden. Nature here does not comfort him; it mirrors his sense that everything is draining away.
The irony is that while he feels he is dying, his body is doing the opposite. "Everything seemed to be dying / While hair grew on my body." Growth and decay are tangled together. His voice belongs to "an alien," his legs ache, his flesh is "Ugly-smelling of growth." The word "growth" is made to sound like a smell of rot, which captures how the changing body can feel like a betrayal rather than a gift. Even his dreams are "ones I couldn't repeat," private and half-shameful, yet "well worth dreaming," a rare moment of defiance.
The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhyme and lines of uneven length. That looseness suits a speaker whose body no longer fits him. Some lines are blunt and short ("The too-long arms / I tried to hide"), the way embarrassment itself makes us clipped and tight. Others stretch out slowly, mimicking the drag of those endless days. The repeated word "vaguely" in the fourth stanza is telling. He is "Vaguely a hero," and "Vaguely I watched them crucify my weeping father." Nothing is sharply focused; he fantasizes about being a bronzed football star while a larger human drama, his father's suffering, passes in the background. The poem does not explain what that crucifixion means, and the text alone does not let us say. It reads as a hint that the boy is too wrapped up in himself to understand what is happening to the adults around him. That self-absorption is named honestly: "Narcissistic, nude... Emotionless as an animal."
The ending is the gentlest moment. Though he feels "gross and dying," the grass "would cling to my shirt / (And I could not be chooser)." The parenthesis is a small, almost whispered admission: he has no control over what the world gives him, and sometimes it gives him something tender anyway. Lying belly-down, he moves "to the sound of lava," a final image of slow, hidden heat beneath a still surface.
What makes "Dirge" memorable is its refusal to tidy up adolescence. It lets the boy be ridiculous, self-obsessed and suffering all at once, and it trusts that the reader will recognize the feeling of being trapped in a body that is changing faster than the mind can follow.