In an interview featured in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Stanley Kunitz related that he didn’t have particular themes in mind when he wrote his poems. Instead, material for poems came to him through perceptions. These perceptions in turn, guided his composition. Kunitz further noted that when he reviewed his works, “I am astonished at all the secrets I find buried in the text.”

With the poet’s view of his writing process in mind, let’s look at the perceptions and secrets in “Passing Through.”

In the first stanza, the narrator explains to an unknown person, perhaps a spouse, that he did not grow up celebrating anything. Death has already marked his family as the narrator refers to his mother as “the widow.” And then:

my birthday went up in smoke

in a fire at City Hall that gutted

the Department of Vital Statistics.

The narrator goes on to note that if it weren’t for a census report taken when he was five, he would not officially exist. A reader could detect some ambiguity about the origins of the fire, whether it was an accident or deliberate; perhaps this is a secret the text is only partially revealing.

Thus the narrator is a person in a paradoxical position: he does and does not exist, is and is not alive (in the official, documented sense of life).

He confesses that when he was young, he cared when his friends had their birthday parties. But now he states with detached amusement that his spouse is overbearing and bullying in her attitude.

In the second stanza, the narrator’s amusement and his acknowledgement that his spouse says he has an “abstracted look” serves two purposes: it could be a way to distance himself from the caring he doesn’t want to feel and as a way to tease his spouse for her attitude about something out of his control. He explains to her:

Maybe I enjoy not-being as much

as being who I am.

In contrast to the date-keepers and birthday-markers, the narrator seems to relish the ambiguity and liminality of his situation. He sees getting older as something as person practices instead of a goal to be achieved.

The last part of the second stanza is both playful and metaphysical. He allows his spouse to have her opinions of him but they are just that, opinions. He understands, as mystics do:

Nothing is truly mine

except my name. I only

borrowed this dust.

The last word recalls the passage “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” from the sixteenth century Book of Common Prayer, recited at funerals and burials. The narrator is aware that physical life is about borrowing a form which will then fade through aging and death.

“Passing Through” reveals a narrator who has come to be at ease with his mortality and incomplete identity.