After a single reading, Lisel Mueller's "The Exhibit" seems to contest, out of its own apparent simplicity, any real need for comment. What useful remark can be made about a straight-forward account of a poet's memory of a small disagreement with her uncle, or about the portrait of an old man whose war experience has made him either unable or unwilling to recognize the difference between an extinct animal and a mythological one? Even Mueller's language in "The Exhibit" is economical, or written in what American poet and critic Alice Fulton, in review of Mueller's Second Language, calls "the plain style"—a language nearly lacking in the musical devices that make most poetry full and sensual and audacious enough to bind. Yet one of "The Exhibits'" glories is that it only seems simple. Fulton says:

... reading Lisel Mueller ... is a bit like gazing at a lake or a tree. At first you think nothing new here: another wave, another leaf. But if you bring your full attention to bear, you're amazed at the implication and activity of an apparently simple surface.

All literature, because it exists both in the moment the reader encounters it and in another one the writer recalls, imagines, pretends, or craves, commits a miracle: a semantic violation of the laws governing the nature of time. But many lyric poems, because they forsake the world's abundance by narrowing their focus into a single instance or theme, are especially able to heighten or enrich our perceptions of even the simplest of experiences. Many lyric poems can be likened to still-life paintings: because there's no competing landscape in a painting of a bowl of apples (let's say), we are often able to see the fruit better—to witness it glisten and shine or resemble a bruise or a face. Mueller's talent and proclivity for the lyric has made her a master of this sort of poetic still-life. Second Language, the book from which we take "The Exhibit," is full of poems much like it—poems in which small memories and observations become more conceptional meditations on topics as wide-ranging as the experience of exile, the cost and weight of experience, and the imagination's power to redeem and even heal us.

On the most basic level, "The Exhibit" describes the speaker's memory of a conversation with her uncle. The speaker, her uncle, and an unnamed companion are in East Germany looking at a painting of a unicorn that is hanging in what we assume, because of the poem's title, to be an art museum. The poem's tension is revealed when the speaker tells us that her uncle says the unicorn in the painting is "now extinct." Although the speaker tells her uncle that "such a creature never existed," she says she knows "he does not believe [her]." The poem advances on the axis of this conflict between what the speaker knows to be true and what her uncle thinks ought to be true, which in turn leads the speaker to realize that her uncle "needs to believe in something / that could not be captured except by love." The poem's poignancy comes from the speaker's empathy, which rises out of her recognition that her uncle, "a prisoner of war / even after the war was over," chooses to believe that the unicorn in the painting is real because he needs to believe that "this world, / this terrible world we live in, / is not the only possible one." Thus the poem's most basic argument— that there is, at least in the mind of an old man, more than one world—reinforces...

For individuals who have never been directly touched by war or by any other catastrophic event, the idea of "historical determinism" may seem far-fetched. Many of us want to believe that we have complete control over who we are and why we have certain feelings or behave in particular ways. But there are those whose lives have been greatly altered by experiences with the horrors of war, especially the world wars that affected millions of human beings all over the globe during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Germany in 1924, Lisel Mueller was an eyewitness to the atrocities of political tyranny and the persecution of select groups of people. She would physically escape the Second World War at the age of fifteen when she and her family fled to the United States. She would never, however, be emotionally free from the suffering she left behind and the loved ones who stayed to endure it.

"The Exhibit" explores the effects that war— and that being a prisoner of war—has had on the mind and spirit of an elderly man, identified in the poem as Mueller's uncle who lives in East Germany. The setting for the poem is an art museum, and, specifically, it takes place in front of a painting of a unicorn. This serene, pleasant, and most likely quiet atmosphere is in sharp contrast to the environment revealed later in the poem through the use of metaphor and allusion. Mueller presents a striking juxtaposition of emotions by taking us into the mind of the uncle who may appear to be on a casual outing with family members, but who is still haunted by the grief and pain of events that took place many decades earlier.

The poem begins innocently enough, with the uncle explaining to his listeners that the unicorn "is now extinct." When he is told that unicorns cannot be extinct because they never lived in the first place, he does not argue the point, but neither does he believe it. In this opening third of "The Exhibit" we may assume the uncle is simply naive in thinking that the mythological creature—typically presented as a white horse with a long white mane and a white spiral horn protruding from the front of its forehead—actually roamed the earth at one time. As the poem develops, however, we learn that his belief in a being that represents both "power and gentleness" is actually a kind of protection against having to accept the world as it really is. More importantly, his imagination is a shield against the memories of war and of being a prisoner of war. Mueller expresses the lingering pain of the uncle's experience in describing him as "A prisoner of war / even after the war was over."

What life was like for the uncle prior to the conflict we don't know. He was presumably a young man when it started, and Mueller focuses her poem on how the later decades of his life were shaped by the war years. He probably did not believe in unicorns when he was younger, and, of course, the irony here is that childish naivete would not have been uncommon for him then. But the experience of world war caused his emotions to do an about-face, so to speak, luring him into the comfort of fantasy and make-believe as he grew older. A very revealing point in the poem is in lines 11 and 12, which tell us that the uncle "... needs to believe in something / that could not be captured except by love." The key word here is "needs." It's not that the war veteran simply believes in something or necessarily wants to, but that he essentially requires it. He must believe in a world other than the real one in order not to be swallowed up by the memories of how horrible it all can be.

This poem speaks very strongly on the terrible human cost of war. Mueller doesn't address the number of actual deaths that occurred during the world wars, but, instead, focuses on the toll they took on the mind. This is a common theme in her poetry, and it often pairs with the corresponding idea of historical determinism. What an individual witnesses or experiences on a grand scale has a direct impact on the smaller, personal scale. This poet's own frame of reference stems from WWII in particular, but the sentiments she presents in poetic form would apply to all national or global conflicts. When she was interviewed by author and professor Nancy Bunge in 1985, Mueller commented on her belief in the vital role that history plays in our lives, stating that "what has gone on in the past is very important to one's view of the world." She also stated that during the Vietnam War, she felt personally the "shame and guilt and wrongness" of America in that conflict. Although she had been a naturalized citizen of the United States for over twenty years at that point, she still attributed some of her outrage to having the "history of Nazi Germany in the back of my mind."

That same history, of course, is what is on the uncle's mind in "The Exhibit." It has caused him to turn to a belief in the unicorn because the legends surrounding this gallant mythological creature portray it as both strong and gentle, much unlike the human leaders that the uncle suffered under who were strong and tyrannical. When he was captured during the war (we don't know exactly by whom), he had yet another burden to bear and was unfortunate enough to see war from a different cruel perspective—that of a prisoner. The unicorn became an appealing "hero" to the uncle because it could not be captured except by the tender touch of a virgin woman, or, in other words, by love. This he sees as a "good" kind of captivity, directly opposed to being taken by an enemy. Lines 13-16 of the poem rely on allusion to the typical characteristics of the unicorn and on the metaphor in reference to the real world as a "murderous forest" and as "foul water." Legend tells us that the unicorn could be a vicious fighter, but it was supposedly a "just" fighter, and its enemies were truly evil. Therefore, its "single luminous horn / redeemed the murderous forest / and, dipped into foul water, / would turn it pure." During the Nazi years in Germany, the atmosphere was surely "murderous" and "foul," and the uncle needed to believe in something that could bring about redemption and purity for the human race.

In the next-to-last line of "The Exhibit," we learn that the uncle is eighty years old. While we may have assumed he was an elderly man, it is important to know just how elderly because it helps to amplify the long-term effects of history. We are not told the year in which his captors actually released him, but for decades he has been a "psychological" prisoner of war. He is apparently still prone to tears of grief since Mueller describes his eyes as "dry wells that fill so easily now." But this sentimentality cannot be dismissed as the emotional tendencies of the aged because it is derived from a very real and a very distressing source.

Perhaps the most provocative question that remains at the end of the poem is whether the uncle really believes that unicorns once existed and that their ability to be both powerful and gentle was true. There is evidence for both a yes and a no answer, though each is subtle and ultimately inconclusive. The fact that the uncle brings up the subject in the first place indicates that he does believe in the creatures. If he realized his feelings were based solely on imagination and that revealing them would only bring teasing from his family, if not ridicule, it seems unlikely that he would confess to his fantasy world while touring a museum. The sixth line supports the notion that his belief in unicorns is real because the speaker acknowledges that "he does not believe us"—this in regard to his being told the creatures never existed. But one word near the end of the poem throws this hypothesis into doubt.

In line 19, the word "insist" implies a forced argument, one that is built on a desperate attempt to deny what one simply does not want to accept. In this case, the uncle cannot accept that "this terrible world we live in" is the "only possible one." The last four lines of the poem paint a picture of the old man that is very vivid. He stands in front of a painting that contains an image he has come to consider sacred—that of the beloved unicorn. While pondering the rejection of its existence by his family members and remembering the atrocities of the "terrible world," he begins to cry, or, at least, his eyes fill with tears. Set within this emotional scene, the uncle is like a child who is old enough to know there is no Santa Claus, but who is not ready to accept the loss of the comfort of believing in him. "Insist" here connotes urgency and need, but not necessarily honest conviction. The impression is that the overwhelming realization that the real world— the terrible one—truly is the only possible one is more than the uncle can take. His response is simply to insist, silently, that it isn't true.

Much of this poem's strength lies in its portrayal of complex human emotions and catastrophic events in simple, easy-to-understand language. Often, the most horrific subjects are only cheapened by an attempt to dramatize or elaborate on their shocking aspects. As in "The Exhibit," however, a matter-of-fact, unadorned manner of relating a story can produce an even more chilling impression than if the "blood and guts" were spelled out in gruesome detail. The uncle does not scream his suffering throughout the galleries of the museum, and it is safe to assume that he has kept his pain to himself for his entire adult life. In the same way, the poem does not shriek its purpose or themes at the reader. Instead, it quietly and methodically takes us into the weary mind of a war veteran who did indeed survive the Holocaust, but who will always be its victim.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2000.
Pamela Steed Hill has had poems published in close to a hundred journals and is the author of In Praise of Motels, a collection of poems published by Blair Mountain Press. She is an associate editor for University Communications at The Ohio State University.