Poem: Kaddish

Overview
Allen Ginsberg’s "Kaddish" (1961) is a long elegy for his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, that fuses Jewish mourning ritual with a sprawling American memoir. Taking its title and cadence from the Jewish prayer for the dead, the poem tracks grief as it shuttles between memory, dream, denunciation, and blessing. Ginsberg addresses Naomi directly, summoning her presence in the streets of New York and in the chambers of his mind, and builds an intimate portrait of a brilliant, troubled woman whose life was consumed by mental illness. The poem becomes a reckoning with family history, religious inheritance, and the limits of language before the fact of death.

Narrative arc
The poem opens with the poet walking through Greenwich Village after Naomi’s death, speaking to her in second person. He catalogs her body and habits with tender specificity, then unfurls a torrent of recollections: immigrant kitchens and tenements, Paterson childhood scenes, political meetings, arguments, lullabies, and the sudden ruptures of paranoia. The recollections darken as Naomi’s schizophrenia intensifies, doctors, sedatives, commitment papers, state hospital corridors, and the stricken knowledge of a son forced to become a guardian. Ginsberg remembers accompanying her to institutions, visiting wards, reading her letters, and the irrevocable moment of consenting to surgical intervention. He threads these facts with visionary episodes in which Naomi appears as a radiant, suffering figure, at once particular and mythic, a mother who becomes a muse and a ghost.

Midway, the poem dilates into dream records and prophetic chant. Memory fractures into lists of places, newspaper flashes, street signs, and Hebrew phrases, as if the city itself were a shofar sounding grief. The poet tries on the Kaddish’s praise, a prayer that never names death, only magnifies the Divine, as a structure to hold what cannot be ordered. He wavers between rage at medicine and government and a yearning to sanctify what remains of love. At the graveside and in nocturnal visions, he imagines speaking with Naomi, asking forgiveness and granting it, rehearsing the facts of her life as a talisman against oblivion.

Themes
At its heart the poem is a study of filial devotion tested by madness. Ginsberg wrestles with guilt and helplessness, the burden of decision and the ache of survival. The Jewish frame is central: he is both inside and outside the tradition, repurposing the Kaddish as art while measuring himself against ancestral faith. The poem also registers a midcentury American atmosphere, cold institutional medicine, political fear, and the loneliness of city modernity. Naomi’s radical idealism and terror of persecution echo through the text, linking private illness to public dread. Throughout, Ginsberg seeks a language expansive enough to hold contradiction: anger and gratitude, body and spirit, memory’s detail and history’s sweep.

Form and style
"Kaddish" uses the long-breathed line Ginsberg made famous, indebted to Whitman and synagogue chant. Its syntax surges in accretive waves, then breaks into clipped fragments or incantatory repetition. The voice is intimate, accusatory, comic, and prophetic by turns. Catalogs of places and things build a democratic tapestry of American life, while Hebrew cadences and invocations lend ritual gravity. The poem’s montage structure, shifting rapidly among anecdote, dream, prayer, and polemic, enacts the mind in mourning, where time collapses and the dead return in flashes.

Resolution
By the end, the poem does not solve grief so much as consecrate it. Ginsberg affirms Naomi’s humanity beyond diagnosis, granting her a place in the poem’s everlasting present. The Kaddish’s praise becomes a hard-won discipline: to bless the name that presides over loss, to keep speaking when language falters, and to bind a private sorrow to the shared music of ritual and art.