18 pages • 36 minutes read
And the People Stayed Home
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Background
Literary Context
Literary responses to epidemic diseases have a long history. The bubonic plague, which intermittently distraught Europe for centuries, inspired such literary classics as Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (14th-century Italy), Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (18th-century work about the historical 1665 outbreak in England), and Albert Camus’s The Plague (20th-century French novel about a fictional outbreak in Algeria). In all these texts, and many others, writing about a deadly infectious disease is an occasion to explore both fragility and resilience as key components of the human condition. In the face of a biological force that makes individual human existence and agency appear puny and feeble, the human species nonetheless find ways to fight back and overcome the challenge.
The literature of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS)—a very different but equally deadly pandemic—is another example of artistic response to a global calamity caused by an infectious disease. Numerous works of fiction, drama, and poetry describe the loss, fear, and despair brought on by AIDS, as well as the solidarity, courage, perseverance, survival, commemoration, and transformation that ensued.
“And the People Stayed Home” belongs to this tradition of disease-inspired literature. Many other poets felt the urge to promptly react to COVID-19, which is amply illustrated in a collection of such poems, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (edited by Alice Quinn). The content of the book, comprising over 100 poems, was finalized by May 2020—less than six months after the virus was discovered. The poems are diverse in tone and emphasis, but the collection as a whole is a testimony to the human need to use poetry as a way to make sense of an unexpected and unprecedented situation, to share a wide range of feelings, and to express faith in recovery and renewal. (For examples of poems from this collection, see Further Resources.)
Rhetorical Context
One reason why “And the People Stayed Home” so powerfully resonates with readers raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition is what they might identify as the poem’s vaguely Biblical tone. More specifically, O’Meara employs certain rhetorical devices prominently featured in both the Old and the New Testaments, especially anaphora (repetition of words at the beginning of adjacent sentences or stanzas) and polysyndeton (repetition of the word “and” in quick succession). (For a more detailed discussion of both, see Literary Devices.)
Here is a well-known example:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing (1 Corinthians 13:1-3; emphasis added).
This passage combines anaphora and polysyndeton to create a sense of urgency and intensification leading to an inevitable conclusion: Without love, man is nothing. O’Meara’s poem builds a similar effect: One change leads to another and then another and another, each more substantial than the one before, until finally the whole earth is healed, and humanity transformed.
This rhetorical strategy most frequently appears in the context of prophecy. Ancient Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ often speak that way in the Bible. Here are the words of Jesus in response to his followers’ question about the future:
And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:7-8; emphasis added).
In this case, the use of polysyndeton contributes to the authoritative tone of the prophecy. The listing of the places where Christ’s apostles will spread his word conveys a sense of certainty verging on utopian, which also permeates O’Meara’s poem. These rhetorical devices give “And the People Stayed Home” the feeling of a prophecy: It presents a vision of the future with great confidence, even though that vision may appear cryptic or implausible. After all, the purpose of a prophecy is less to predict the future than to give hope and urge a change in behavior. In that sense, as well, O’Meara’s poem is true to its Biblical roots.
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