Common Magic Analysis

Poem Analysis for “Common Magic” Written by Bronwen Wallace

By David Gauthier


First off.  Bronwen Wallace is a Canadian poet born in Kingston, Ontario in 1945. In 1970, she founded a bookstore and became an activist for the working class. She helped in a women’s shelter and I think that the experiences she heard about in the women’s shelter may have a factor in the poem “Common Magic” which was written in 1985. The title “Common Magic” says that the poem is not about rich people carrying Chihuahua around and eating at fancy Diners, but about the average person who works to put food onto their table so that their family can eat, but then have friends who get to have the chance of the good life and don’t turn back.
“Where she swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.”- metaphor
“He is singing to her and his voice is a small bowing turning somersaults in the green country of his blood.”-personification
“while adolescents seethe in their glassy atmospheres of anger.”
Seethe- to be in a state of agitation or excitement
“The children are alien life-forms”-metaphor
“the mailman stares at numbers from the haze of a distant summer.”-rhyme
“You gulp thin air of this planet as if it were the only one you knew.”
“The hidden lives, like sudden miracles, that breathe there.”- simile

1. Your best friend falls in love and her brain turns to water.
2. You can watch her lips move, making the customary sounds,
3. But you can see they’re merely words, flimsy as bubbles rising from some golden sea where she swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid.
4. It’s always like that.
5. You stop for lunch in a crowded restaurant and the waitress floats toward you.
6. You can tell she doesn’t care whether you have the baked or french-fried
7. And you wonder if your voice comes in bubbles too.
8. It’s not just women either. Or love for that matter.
9. The old man across from you on the bus holds a young child on his knee;
10. He is singing to her and his voice is a small boy turning somersaults in the green country of his blood.
11. It’s only when the driver calls his stop that he emerges into this puzzle of brick and tiny hedges.
12. Only then you notice his shaking hands, his need of the child to guide him home.
13. All over the city you move in your own season through the seasons of others:
14. Old women, faces clawed by weather you can’t feel
15. Clack dry tongues at passersby while adolescents seethe in their glassy atmospheres of anger.
16. In parks, children are alien life-forms,
17. Rooted in the galaxies they’ve grown through to get here.
18. Their games weave the interface and their laughter tickles that part of your brain where smells are hidden and the nuzzling textures of things.
19. It’s a wonder that anything gets done at all;
20. A mechanic flails at the muffler of your car
21. Through whatever storm he’s trapped inside
22. And the mailman stares at numbers from the haze of a distant summer.
23. Yet somehow letters arrive and buses remember their routes.
24. Banks balance. Mangoes ripen on the supermarket shelves.
25. Everyone manages. You gulp the thin air of this planet as if it were the only one you knew.
26. Even the earth you’re standing on seems solid enough.
27. It’s always the chance word, unthinking gesture that unlocks the face before you.
28. Reveals the intricate countries deep within the eyes.
29. The hidden lives, like sudden miracles, that breathe there.


“Only then you notice his shaking hands, his need of the child to guide him home.” This maybe alluding to the fact that people have started to lose our independence and that we start to require those who are younger than us to help us do things, not you perhaps, but grandparents, or senior citizens, they require younger people to help them out.
But this poem is really about how life normally is. But the thought of normal life just being a cut and dry experience is not that appealing, so people who are just the average, who are the working class need to use a little bit of “common magic” that we have and change the world around us.