The Great Blue Heron

“The Great Blue Heron” is a stanza free verse poem written in memory of Kizer’s mother, Mabel Ashley Kizer. It depicts a young child seeing a tattered looking heron on the beach when she is young, and seeing it again when spreading her mother’s ashes on the beach fifteen years later. The heron’s tattered appearance is described using simile and metaphor. Kizer uses detailed imagery and connotative language. The tone of the poem is mournful and nostalgic. Enjambment is used throughout the poem and creates a unique flow to the poem. Kizer uses foreshadowing in the poem to help create structure in the poem. When the narrator shows her mother she realizes, “My mother knew what he was.” This foreshadows the future death of the mother. Herons are symbols of life prosperity, so Kizer’s use of it as a harbinger of death is paradoxical. The theme of this poem is to describe death and its effect it has on memories. The poem is mostly spent in reminiscence of the past as the narrator remembers standing on the beach “fifteen summers ago.” It is shown the beach was a place of many happy memories in the lines, “So many rockets ago/So many smokes and fires/And beach-lights and water-glow.” But the happy memories serve only as time passed between the appearances of the heron. Most of the poem is spent describing the heron. It is the narrator’s awareness of the possibility of her mother’s death. As time passes, its physical form becomes more substantial. At the start of the poem the heron is, “Shadow without a shadow,” but at the end of the poem when the narrator is spreading her mother’s ashes, the heron is “Denser than my repose.” The heron is a “Superimposed on a poster/Of a summer by the strand.” The memories of summers on the beach are blocked by the heron that foreshadowed her mother’s death. “The Great Blue Heron” showed mourning and how it can alter and overshadow memories using vivid imagery, foreshadowing, and enjambment.