The Blue Bowl

Kenyon examines the human need for ritual, or a series of solemn, prescribed actions, while also highlighting its inadequacies in processing grief. In the first lines of the poem, the speaker and her partner enact a burial ritual, and the titular blue bowl becomes an object infused with meaning. The inclusion of a beloved or much-used object in the grave, a ritual common to many ancient and modern civilizations, suggests a belief or a faith that the deceased might need or find comfort in the object in the afterlife. The speaker, in a self-effacing move, calls herself primitive in these actions, suggesting that she does not fully buy into the concept of an afterlife, but her actions belie a certain degree of hope, if not in the afterlife itself, then in the possibility for the ritual to imbue meaning. This particular ritual gives the speaker a concrete thing to do during a time in which she feels overwhelmed by sadness. Though the speaker is unable to fully find comfort in the ritual, she still has the urge to participate in it.

The speaker and her partner enact ritual later in the poem when, post-burial, they “worked, ate, stared, and slept” (Lines 11-12).