The Leap 11/19

"The Leap" by James Dickey

James Dickey was born in 1923. He fought in the second World War and later graduated from Vanderbilt University. He was an American poet and Novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1966 and also recieved the Order of the South Award. He died in 1997.

The only thing I have of Jane MacNaughton                                 

Is one instant of a dancing-class dance.                                

She was the fastest runner in the seventh grade,                                       

My scrapbook says, even when boys were beginning

To be as big as the girls.                                                                     

But I do not have her running in my mind,

Though Frances Lane is there, Agnes Fraser,

Fat Betty Lou Black in the boys-against-girls

Relays we ran at recess:  she must have run                                

Like the other girls, with her skirts tucked up                                               

So they would be like bloomers,

But I cannot tell; that part of her is gone.

What I do have is when she came,

With the hem of skirt where it should be

For a young lady, into the annual dance                                                        

Of the dancing class we all hated, and with a light

Grave leap, jumped up and touched the end

Of one of the paper-ring decorations

To see if she could reach it.  She could,

And reached me now as well, hanging in my mind                           

From a brown chain of brittle paper, thin

And muscular, wide-mouthed, eager to prove

Whatever it proves when you leap

In a new dress, a new womanhood, among the boys

Whom you easily left in the dust                                                       

Of the passionless playground.  If I said I saw

In the paper where Jane MacNaughton Hill,

Mother of four, leapt to her death from a window

Of a downtown hotel, and that her body crushed in

The top of a parked taxi, and that I held                                                       

Without trembling a picture of her lying cradled

In that papery steel as though lying in the grass,

One shoe idly off, arms folded across her breast,

I would not believe myself.  I would say

The convenient thing, that it was a bad dream                                              

Of Maturity, to see that eternal process

Most obsessively wrong with the world

Come out of her light, earth-spurning feet

Grown heavy:  would say that in the dusty heels                        

Of the playground some boy who did not depend                                       

On speed of foot, caught and betrayed her.

Jane, stay where you are in my first mind:

It was odd in that school, at that dance,

I and the other slow-footed yokels sat in corners

Cutting rings out of drawing paper                                                   

Before you leapt in your new dress

And touched the end of something I began,

Above the couples struggling on the floor,

New men and women clutching at each other

And prancing foolishly as bears:  hold on                                         

To that ring I made for you, Jane --

My feet are nailed to the ground

By dust I swallowed thirty years ago --

While I examine my hands.

“The Leap” begins with the narrator describing Jane MacNaughton, a spunky girl he knew as a young boy. He reminisces on Jane but details one specific memory that he describes as “the only thing” he has from her. During a dancing class she jumped as high as she could to prove that she could touch one of the paper-chain decorations he was making. To the narrator this leap symbolizes the moment he was personally touched by Jane. Additionally the paper-chain signifies what held Jane in the narrator’s mind for all these years. He even recalls that when she touched the chain during her first leap, she “touched the end of something he began.”

To him this leap was daring, courageous, bold, and mature and he greatly admired her for that. The Jane in that moment was the Jane that stayed suspended in his memory until he read the paper many years later and saw she had leapt to her death from a hotel window. These two leaps are so symbolic because the first one was a leap of courage. It was an aspiring leap, jumping to touch something just to prove she could. The second leap was a leap of despair and sorrow. She gave up on the one thing she would always have: life. Jane’s two symbolic leaps contrast so significantly because one was up, springing towards the sky and stretching her body while the other was down, limply falling to what she knew would be her death and finally laying crumpled on the top of a parked taxi. That news breaks the ongoing dream the narrator had of Jane in his mind and reminds him of the reality of life.