16 pages • 32 minutes read
Mary RuefleThe Hand
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Hands
As the title indicates, hands are key to the text, symbolizing choice and connecting the student to life, truth, and knowledge. At the beginning of the poem, the student uses a hand to resist the teacher’s directive. Rather than signaling that they can respond to the teacher’s question—to which the student knows the answer—the student refuses. “You don’t raise your hand” repeats in Lines 7 and 11. Instead, the student uses their hand to withdraw from the room: “You raise the top of your desk / and take out an apple” (Lines 8-9). The desk top obscures the teacher from the student’s view, and vice versa. The apple offers knowledge that is unrelated to what the class is studying.
After this, the hand provides a locus of concentration and minute observation for the student desperate to escape their boring lesson. Unlike in typical days, when the student would fidget their hand on the desktop and possibly be reprimanded for it, now, their fingers “aren’t even drumming, but lie / flat and peaceful” (Lines 13-14). The student uses their stillness to stare at the “essential beauty in your fingers” (Line 12). The hand and its digits are a source of immediate knowledge and power—they connect the student to the robin and the tree outside, linking to something greater, more truthful, more important.
The Apple
In Western culture, the apple has long been a symbol of potentially destructive nad forbidden knowledge. In the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, after God forbids Adam and Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the serpent tempts Eve into taking a bite and Adam then follows suit. They immediately gain new knowledge, but with that come loss of innocence and the new emotion of shame. As punishment for their disobedience, the pair is exiled from Paradise—the original sin that in Christianity was redeemed by Jesus’s crucifixion. In visual art, the fruit that Adam and Eve consume is usually portrayed as an apple.
Within the poem, the student has an apple in their desk, taking it out instead of raising a hand to answer the teacher’s question. However, the poem does not explicitly specify whether the student eats the tempting fruit. Even reaching for it—a gesture that involves raising the top of the desk and thus blocking out the sight of the teacher—is already rebellious. Without necessarily consuming the apple, the student feels nascent self-knowledge, exactly the kind of thing that Adam and Eve absorbed from the fruit: “the person / in question is yourself, and on that / you are the greatest living authority” (Lines 4-6).
The Robin
Nesting seasons for robins typically begin in early March, which is why they’re known as harbingers of spring. Because of this association, robins are seen as symbols of renewal, rebirth, and new growth. The student, bored inside the deadened space of the classroom where nothing the teacher is saying is new or interesting, instead focuses on what is going on “Outside the window, on an overhanging branch, / a robin is ruffling its feathers / and spring is in the air” (Lines 16-18). Unlike the student, the robin is free to pursue its whims and instincts, preening itself before finding a mate. For the student, the sight of the robin brings hope: The liberation accompanying spring, when the natural world awakens from the dreariness of winter, will soon also free the student.
