Ever since I noticed today’s poem would begin with the final word of ‘Morning Song,’ I’ve been eager to get to it. With this connection in mind, it’s no surprise that ‘Balloons’ is bursting (pun intended) with childhood themes and imagery, presenting a view of life from a child’s eyes

The small, simple lines

Your small

Brother is making His balloon squeak like a cat.

One way this poem leans into the imagined perspective of a child is through breaks that shrink the line at critical moments, conveying size through structure. Scattered throughout this poem are some particularly simple lines, often broken after just a few words, and forming sentences that are very simple in diction and structure. The example given above shows this nicely. The image itself is of a childish one, and the words “small” and “like a cat” ground this image in simplicity. The enjambment occurring after “small” makes for a two word line, resulting in almost no possible stress play going on. Yet, the same stanza that contains the lonely line “He bites,” contains a fifteen-syllable, thirteen-word line: “A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it.” The result is a feeling of instability, not anxious but playful and child-like.

These lines aren’t concerned with the structure of consistent meter. However, this isn’t to say it doesn’t play with sound and rhythm at all. We see in stanza three a very smooth rhythm, for example lines 12-15, where the sound creates steady anchor points (“and these travell-ing / globes of thin air, red, green, Delight-ing”); or where careful caesuric placement allows the reader to completely control the reading pace, and, by extension, the readers feelings while exploring this scene. The words “thin”, “air”, “red”, and “green” have nearly identical stress when pronounced in this line, meaning after each word we have no choice but to slow. There is no bouncy melodic line to speed things along. In this sense the poem plays with meter only through defiantly refusing to follow its expected patterns.

Burst bubble

The final stanza creates a powerful closure. Its two sentences employ assonance to bring cohesion, and the technique of equal stress returns again, through lines that refuse to have any major weak stresses. Marking the stresses overall (bold for particularly strong stresses) might look like this:

THEN SITS BACK | FAT JUG cont em PLAT | ing a WORLD | as CLEAR | as WAT er | A RED SHRED in his | LIT-tle | FIST.

The result of this peculiar rhythm is a slow, confused reflection, contrasting with the vibrant energy of much of the rest of the poem.

The Balloon’s Inner World

This poem is punctuated with questions and images related to the inside of the balloon. The speaker seems to know early on that the balloon contains only air, and the balloon is not trying to hide this, leading to the descriptions “guileless and clear”, and “globes of thin air”. Later, we see the child try to uncover the secrets of the balloon, “Seeming to see / A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,” just before the air of the balloon is again described, this time as “a world as clear as water.” So altogether, the child wrongly expects to find a rich and complex “world” inside the lively balloon, and instead finds precisely nothing. As an isolated statement about childhood, and how the world of possibility shrinks with age (think of the fig tree from The Bell Jar) this would be quite depressing. However, this statement is placed in an interesting context.

Un-actualised Vessels of Creativity

If a crucial feature of the balloons’ description is their liveliness, a parallel for the small brother of the poem might be his lack of naivety and lack of knowledge. He, through the speaker, thinks of a cat as “squeaking,” a word usually reserved for mice. The child plays with his balloon, looks into it expectantly, bites it, and then holds the consequences in his hands.

The metaphor of a “fat jug” is super interesting. “Fat” gets us thinking of affluence and comfort, and jugs are containers, vessels, often containing water. It is as though the massive world of possibility that the child was expecting to find in his balloon actually lives in his own mind. Thus, his “fist” is little, and yet he is well fed on ideas and questions and wonder.