The Angel with the Broken Wing - Blog Post #2

Dana gioia

The Angel with the Broken Wing

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.


The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.


Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.


I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.


I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once—almost apologetically.


For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.


There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.




The speaker in this persona poem is the Angel statue itself and it explains how it came to be in the museum it is in.  The first impression that I get from this poem is that the statue is greatly designed, it is made by a great artist and that it symbolizes a lot of great things - coming from the word "ardor".  But I also sense that the Angel is angry at many things.  "they shut Faith's ardor in this air-conditioned tomb," lets me know that the Angel does not want to be locked up in that room.  "The perfect emblem of futility," makes me think that the Angel thinks itself is useless and unimportant.  The Angel is the only one who remembers its maker's name.  The Angel is mad that it lost its wing during some revolution (in which I don't know the time of) and that it needs to tell God something but it's stuck on Earth in a museum.  It's helpless.  It reminds me of a sad caged animal in a zoo and the feelings that animal has of wanting to be set free.  Who wouldn't want to be free?  Humans get to be.  Other animals and statues such as this don't and they are rightfully angry.  One last thing I want to talk about is the 5th and 6th paragraphs where the Angel loses its wing and describe the troops reaction, "They hit me once—almost apologetically, For even the godless feel something in a church,  A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?  A trembling unaccounted by their laws,  An ancient memory they can’t dismiss."  This feeling that the church puts on people when they do sin even when they aren't religious somehow appears and is very true.  I've noticed that crime happens everywhere else but the church.  There's a protective feeling about a church and when someone breaks that protection, you just feel that it will be extremely bad for them.