Yusef Komunyakaa examines and dramatizes the character flaw called "pride" by personifying the deadly sin, making it a character of uncommon odiousness.
First Stanza: “Crowned with a feathered helmet”
In the first stanza of Komunyakaa’s “Pride,” the speaker describes a character who looks as if he gave birth to himself by “swallowing” his own “tail.” The character wears a helmet of feathers, but not for any legitimate or natural use such as “disguise” or “courtship,” which would imply, because of the title of the poem, that the character is wearing the helmet in order to boast and regale himself.
Second Stanza: “Woven from a selfish design”
The second stanza actually continues describing the character’s tail, which looks as if it were “Woven from a selfish design / & guesswork.” A “selfish design,” no doubt, refers to the notion of pride again; selfishness and pride are usually linked in their odiousness.
But the speaker adds a little jab that the design also looks like “guesswork,” making it appear less deserving of respect than the character would believe himself worthy.
The character also sports a “see-through caul / From breast to hipbone,” whose description bleeds into the next stanza.
Third Stanza: “His cold breath silvers”
Again, description runs from the preceding stanza, and now in the third stanza, the reader learns that it is the character’s breath that is seemingly masked by the caul, and the breath is so cold that it “silvers / Panes of his hilltop house / Into a double reflection.”
The character makes mirrors of his windows in the house on the hilltop merely by breathing on them, and the mirrors offer “a double reflection.” Such mirrors would, of course, be useless, but at the same time understandable because of the nature of pride.
The last line of this stanza, “Silhouetted almost into a woman,” sounds impossible and meaningless, but the reader must wait to see if it offers any useful information; again the idea/image is bleeding into the next stanza.
Fourth Stanza: “He can beg forgiveness now“
What now is different that allows this character to “beg forgiveness,” whereas he could not beg forgiveness before? According to the claim, it is because he is “Silhouetted almost into a woman.” Does this imply that women can ask forgiveness but men cannot?
The character is leaning against a window that overlooks a pond like the one Narcissus looked into and fell in love with his own reflection, but the character is “choked with the memory of lilies.” It could be the pond that is “choked” with the lilies’ memory, but that seems unlikely.
Perhaps the prideful character simply remembers lilies as flower of purity; he is choked by their memory because he has become a boasting buffoon, a Narcissus whose character is the opposite of the humble flower.
Commentary
This poem appears in Yusef Komunyakaa’s book Talking Dirty to the Gods. As critic Matthew Flamm said of Komunyakaa’s poems in a review in the New York Times, “sometimes their obscurity seems no more than hip poetic posturing.”
