The Partial Explanation

“The Partial Explanation” by Charles Simic appears in the collection Selected Early Poems, published in 1999 by George Braziller Publishers. The four stanzas of the narrative poem are written in unrhymed free verse. As in much of Simic’s work, there is an element of surrealism to the scene. The scene itself is that of a person sitting in an empty diner, perhaps in late afternoon, in winter. As the title suggests, the reader cannot expect the know the whole story. The chief impression is that of the speaker’s loneliness and desire to be in the company of other people. “The Partial Explanation” falls in approximately the middle of Simic’s prolific career, and shares many of the themes and qualities of Simic’s other work, including urban isolation, the use of ordinary objects and situations to convey larger ideas, and a dreamlike mood.

Poet Biography

Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, in what was at the time the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and is now Serbia. His childhood was dominated by the events of World War II, during which his family evacuated their home numerous times to escape bombings. After the war, his father left to work in Italy. The family tried and failed on several occasions to join him. At the age of 15, Simic and his mother and brother managed to travel to Paris and, after a year, to the United States, where they reunited with Simic’s father.

Simic went to high school in Chicago and started college at the University of Chicago. He published his first poems at age 21 in 1959, but his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the armed service in 1961. In 1966 he earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and in the following year published his first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says (1967).

Simic has since published over 60 books, including 20 volumes of poems. Honors include two Pulitzer Prize nominations in 1986 and 1987, and one win in 1990. Other awards include the PEN Translation Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Frost Medal, the Vilcek Prize in literature, and The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. In addition to being an esteemed poet, Simic is a noted essayist and translator. He is professor emeritus at University of New Hampshire, where he has taught English creative writing since 1973. Simic served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2007-2008.

Poem Text

Simic, Charles. “The Partial Explanation.” 1999. Library of Congress.

Summary

In Charles Simic’s “The Partial Explanation,” the reader meets the speaker as they sit in a “[g]rimy little luncheonette” (Line 3), waiting for a meal. It may be late fall or winter or early spring, but it is definitely cold, as there is “snow falling outside” (Line 4). The day “[s]eems like it has grown darker” (Line 5), and the speaker sees no passerby “on the street” (Line 9). The reader understands the speaker is alone, as their only dining companion is “a glass of ice-water” (Line 10). The speaker sits “[a]t this table [they] chose” (Line 13) for themself, and expresses an “[i]ncredible longing / To eavesdrop / On the conversation / Of cooks” (Lines 15-18). The impression is that of a lonely individual who craves human interaction as much, or more so, than the arrival of their food. The title tells the reader that they can only know so much about the scene and the circumstances that led to it from this one snapshot.