After the Dinner Party (1985). Content and Description

“After the Dinner Party” first appeared in New and Selected Poems: 1923-1985 (1985). The poem consists of seven four-line stanzas (quatrains), with an abab rhyme scheme. In the first line the speaker addresses the two party hosts directly, referring to them as “You two.” In the silence following the party’s conclusion the hosts sit and remember; the poem’s speaker describes the two from an objective perspective and lets us know what thoughts and images run through their minds.

As with the fugitive gatherings Warren attended in his youth, the guests have shared “food, wine, laughter, and philosophy,” a communion that is physical and spiritual. But rather than focus solely on the party guests, “After the Dinner Party” dwells with the two hosts and describes, through the construction of a story line (a “narrative”) and through poignant images, the way they relate to each other. In this sense, “After the Dinner Party” is a love poem, one that enshrines an aging couple as they sit, think, ascend the stairs to bed, and hold each other’s hands.

“After the Dinner Party” also contains many of the themes for which Warren is known: the relationships among memory, death, language, and the passage of time. While the hosts’ thoughts turn to past parties whose guests have passed away, we see how these former guests live on in the words and minds of those who remain. The image of a group of smiling, laughing friends dramatically changes as one of the hosts imagines their deceased friend’s corpse, a horrifying image that, with the poem’s other death imagery, conjures both a feeling of nostalgia for things already gone and a premonition of things that will soon fade away.

With its images of mortality and of social and physical intimacy, the poem laments loss: of friends, community, youth, and conversation. In its silence the poem speaks of fullness, the sense of fulfillment that past experiences have given and present memory now gives. On one level, the poem, written near the end of Warren’s life, reflects on his career as a scholar, writer, teacher, father, and husband.

But, on another level “After the Dinner Party” dwells on a universal feeling of nostalgia, the bittersweet taste of fulfillment we know in memory that generates both life and death, pleasure and pain, words and silence, causing us to savor the present while also making us yearn for the past.

On this level the poem asserts that no matter how much we fear loss, yearn for those who have passed, and fail to capture our feelings and thoughts in language, we still must love. Even though the two hosts venture together toward a sleep that eerily resembles death, “one hand gropes out for another, again”; they seek solace in each other’s embrace, the tenuous feeling of community possible in a transient world, a world of feasting and of fasting, a world of plentitude and emptiness.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Compare the relationship the two hosts share in “After the Dinner Party” with the connection the two lovers share in John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” How are both relationships symbolic? How can both writers be said to be “metaphysical” poets?

2. First locate metaphors and images that relate to death in the poem and then compare and contrast how aging and death are portrayed in this poem with the way they are presented in Warren’s “Acquaintance with Time in Early Autumn.” How does that poem’s metaphorical description of life in the latter as the “payment” given by the “heart,” a “dime-thin, thumb-worn, two-sided, two-faced coin,” relate to the hosts’ view of death in “After the Dinner Party”?