Lot's Wife

The speaker in “Lot’s Wife” recalls childhood experiences with a nostalgic, sentimental tone. The first two lines emphasize childhood encounters as “simple” (Lines 1, 2) yet “exquisite” (Line 2). Lines 3-5 use a metaphor to describe a spiderweb as not only “iridescent” but a “labyrinth” (Line 3). Iridescent means illuminated, luminous, or even transitive in appearance based on the angle in which one views something. Labyrinths are complicated mazes that feature in literature as symbols of trials, journeys, and rites-of-passage. When placed together, these terms explain a spiderweb from childhood as an illuminating, complicated maze. The spiderweb here is an example of synecdoche, or a part that represents a whole: The spiderweb stands in for both memory and childhood. It suggests memory is sticky and can entangle; memory complicates things as much as it illuminates them. The spiderweb also suggests that childhood, especially in retrospect, is a creation of memories and events “spun” by the simple act of living.

The spiderweb’s description also underscores the speaker’s use of adjectives that sometimes seem in opposition to one another: “simple” (Lines 1, 2) yet “exquisite” (Line 2); “iridescent” (Line 3) yet mazelike; rain, a liquid, described as a “veil” made of “graphite” (Line 7), which is a solid, crystalline form of carbon. These descriptions suggest that language, like memory, can be sticky, and the terms one uses to describe something or someone, such as calling Lot’s wife a sinner or materialist for looking back while fleeing the destruction of Sodom, might not adequately consider the complexity and nuance of a moment. If rain can be a liquid and solid at the same time, and if a maze can be illuminating and confusing at the same time, Lot’s wife can be right and wrong at the same time. She can be true to her own self while simultaneously ignoring God’s command.

“Lot’s Wife” also makes use of the senses to further define what it means to be human and how memory affects humankind. The speaker says that “infinite pleasure” derives from “[m]erely observing” (Line 6), indicating sight. Rain is a powerful sound, as it falls like a “graphite veil” (Line 7) and renders “the world a steel engraving” (Line 8). The “brown […] brain / Of a walnut” (Lines 11-12) recalls the taste of walnuts, and the speaker follows this with smell and touch: “[t]he smell of wax” and “[t]he feel / Of sugar” (Lines 12-13). The senses, including the five major senses listed here, help humans make sense of the world by providing the brain with needed information. This also suggests that Lot’s wife’s decision to look back might be rooted in a desire to understand the nature of destruction (and the nature of God, by proxy) befalling her hometown and the people she once called friends, neighbors, and family. The penultimate line, which calls the speaker’s list of memories “postage-stamp details” (Line 15), also references mail and the function of delivering/receiving information. The poem says that Proust, a writer of detailed work on searching for lost time or the past, would readily identify with the search for meaning in the poem’s “simple […] pleasures” (Line 1).

Another interpretation of the poem is that the speaker’s tone is sarcastic or even didactic. The speaker names the poem after someone who presumably died after sinning by ignoring God’s command to look back. The speaker then proceeds to list childhood moments that are bright and shiny and happy, only to end the poem with a rhetorical question that now seems taunting: Who can resist the joys of retrospection? This subtle yet critical tone suggests that the speaker knows readers also can’t resist looking back. From a didactic standpoint, the poem warns readers against looking back and getting too caught up in reverie. The tone is even deeper, darker when one considers that the speaker doesn’t even reveal that readers are in fact looking back until the last line, meaning that the speaker has just forced readers to engage in the act of looking back by reading the poem. Lot’s wife received a warning before looking back, while the warning to readers comes only after they engage in the act of looking back. The speaker therefore places readers in the same position as Lot's wife, which forces readers to think about the nuances of morality and previously held assumptions.