Personification is the Fine Print of Nye’s “Eye Test”

Eye Test by Naomi Shihab Nye

The D is desperate.
The B wants to take a vacation,
live on a billboard, be broad and brave.
The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.
The little c wants to be a big C if possible,
and the P pauses long between thoughts.
How much better to be a story, story.
Can you read me?
We have to live on this white board
together like a neighborhood.
We would rather be the tail of a cloud,
one letter becoming another,
or lost in a boy’s pocket
shapeless as lint
the same boy who squints to read us
believing we convey a secret message.
Be his friend
We are so tired of meaning nothing.

Personification is the Fine Print of Nye’s Eye Test

When visiting the optometrist’s office and reading down the eye chart, a patient is almost desperate to get it right. The doctor asks a patient to read what appears as mice-type, and it is nearly impossible. The patient wiggles in the chair and bears down, willing the letters to come into focus. Clarity fades, and with it, hope. Helpless tears make blurry vision no better, and desperation takes hold. What if those letters were desperately crying out to the patient as well? That is the personification Naomi Shahib Nye explores in her poem, “Eye Test.”

The desperate “D” begins Nye’s litany of individualized letters as she allows the patient and the eye chart to connect as one. “The P pauses long between thoughts,” as would a patient attempting to utter the correct letter aloud. The initial hope that the Eye Test will result in a score of 20/20 vision causes the patient to begin carefully and patiently, being “brave and bold” as the letter B.

The patient in this poem is a young boy, who has not gone to the eye doctor as a matter of course, as an adult would, but because he has been taken there. Perhaps his grades are slipping or perhaps he is not hitting the ball off the T as he used to do well. He has something to prove: that he can see. The brutal, teasing consequences of sporting glasses is not a future he envisions for himself, yet he “squints to read us.” The letters, too, ache to speak: “Can you read me?” they cry, begging for some kind of understanding. The boy wants to understand, believing, “we convey a secret message,” though the message is another language altogether from his – blurry and incomprehensible. The italicized plea, to “Be his friend,” is a piteous, mournful call that cannot be heard.

Nye further personifies helplessness and loneliness in the line, “We have to live on this white board together like a neighborhood.” Even early in the poem, Nye suggests that, “The B wants to take a vacation,” to no avail. Days pass, patients come and go, yet the letters feel they must dwell on their wall chart, the same proximity from their fellow letters as the day before. “Shapeless as lint,” the letters feel – alone and meaningless – the bits of what used to exist as a whole. The letters dwell in their neighborhood, perhaps like the dregs of their boy-patient’s pocket – once grand objects, now fragments, waiting in vain to be pieced back together.
The poet takes, perhaps, a jab at herself, or at her craft, in the lines, “How much better to be a story, story,” and, “We are so tired of meaning nothing.” An eye chart is merely a series of letters, or, as the poem itself puts it, “one letter after another.” So, too, are words and phrases that make up the written language – but letters put together for the purpose of an eye test, and letters put together to convey meaning are worlds apart. A poem does not wish to be a “story, story” such as an article, essay, or novel. A poem is the creative art that conveys its meaning in subtle and evocative ways. Perhaps Nye gives a nod to the truth that many believe poems mean nothing. The letters that make up the words of poems, then, are tired of trying to convey their meaning day after day, reader after reader, like an Eye Test patient.

Naomi Shahib Nye takes an unremarkable object like an eye chart on the wall and turns it into something beautiful and meaningful. The letters wish to “float like the tail of a cloud,” and in their searching to be understood, form the meanings of the words they try to convey. “Can you read me?” the letters ask? We can certainly try.