By Adrian Vale

Literary Criticism | Culture Magazine 

Between silence and meaning, literature begins. 

The Poem

Anchoritism in view…

Lack of energy…

Emotional exhaustion…

Spiritual fatigue…

And I retire into private life breeding

With the illusion of anchoritism…

I can live without glamour!

Type of resignation?

Symbolic death?

or rather "hypernation"

in the high summer

for recheck,

food in emotion…

and rehearsal for new roles?

The way to happiness – success

Is not layered with rose petals

But with countless "no"

                                        Vasiliki V. Pappa

                                        Kalamaria 13.07.2017

Literary Reading

Vasiliki V. Pappa's "Anchoritism in view…" is a compact poem that transforms exhaustion into a question about withdrawal, identity, and renewal. Its brevity is deceptive: beneath its apparently simple vocabulary lies a carefully constructed movement from physical and emotional depletion towards reassessment and the possibility of assuming "new roles". Rather than presenting withdrawal as defeat, the poem gradually redefines it as an interval of preparation.

The title immediately establishes the poem's conceptual territory. "Anchoritism", historically associated with religious withdrawal from the world, is transferred here into a contemporary and metaphorical context. The title does not announce a definitive retreat; the phrase "in view" suggests something contemplated, considered, perhaps even provisionally adopted. The three dots at the end reinforce this openness. Nothing has yet been concluded.

The opening sequence is deliberately fragmented:

Lack of energy…"
"Emotional exhaustion…"
"Spiritual fatigue…"

These three phrases form a progression. The first concerns energy, the second emotion, and the third spirit. The movement is therefore from the bodily towards the psychological and finally the spiritual. The poem establishes not an isolated moment of tiredness but a condition of total depletion.

The syntax is equally important. There are no complete explanatory sentences. Instead, the poem offers fragments, as though recording successive diagnoses or notes in an internal ledger. The ellipses create pauses that are not merely grammatical; they become expressive spaces. Silence is incorporated into the poem's structure.

This is significant because silence and withdrawal are recurring concerns in Pappa's poetic corpus. Her poem "Click in Silence", for instance, explicitly treats silence as an active space and explores the tension between presence, absence, responsibility, and response. In "Anchoritism in view…", however, silence takes another form: it becomes retreat from external activity.

The next movement introduces precisely this retreat:

"And I retire into private life breeding
With the illusion of anchoritism…"

The verb "retire" carries a productive ambiguity. It means to withdraw, but it also evokes departure from active public or professional life. "Private life" therefore becomes the opposite of visibility, social participation, and external performance.

Yet the poem immediately undermines any literal interpretation through the word "illusion". The poetic subject does not claim to become an anchorite. It experiences, or entertains, the illusion of anchoritism. The retreat is therefore self-conscious and provisional.

This ambiguity becomes sharper in:

"I can live without glamour!"

"Glamour" may be understood literally as external brilliance, but its semantic possibilities are broader: visibility, recognition, social validation, performance, attractiveness, perhaps even the expectation that life should remain permanently impressive. The exclamation mark gives the line an unusual firmness. For a brief moment, the poem moves from uncertainty to assertion.

That certainty does not last.

"Type of resignation?"
"Symbolic death?"

The two questions introduce the poem's central interpretive tension. What appears to be withdrawal might be resignation. It might also be a symbolic death: not the death of the person, but the ending of a former identity, a former configuration of life, or a former set of expectations.

The poem then refuses both possibilities—or at least refuses to settle for either of them:

"or rather 'hypernation'"

The quotation marks are crucial. "Hypernation" is presented as a deliberately marked, invented expression. Its phonetic proximity to hibernation is evident, but the prefix hyper- destabilizes the ordinary meaning. The word suggests not merely hibernation but an intensified or transformed form of suspension.

The next phrase creates the poem's most striking paradox:

"in the high summer"

Hibernation belongs to winter; "high summer" represents precisely the opposite condition. Summer signifies fullness, activity, outwardness, growth, exposure, and vitality. The speaker's withdrawal therefore takes place not during a naturally dormant season, but at the very moment when life is supposedly at its most expansive.

This paradox gives "hypernation" its poetic force.

It is not simply inactivity.

It is chosen suspension in the midst of external intensity.

The poem itself then proposes possible purposes for this unusual state:

"for recheck,
food in emotion…
and rehearsal for new roles?"

The word "recheck" introduces reassessment. Something must be looked at again. "Food in emotion" suggests emotional nourishment, while "rehearsal for new roles" introduces a theatrical metaphor that becomes crucial to the poem's architecture.

The imagery of roles changes the meaning of withdrawal completely.

If life is a stage, withdrawal is not necessarily an exit from the performance. It may be a movement backstage.

The word "rehearsal" implies preparation rather than termination. The new roles have not yet been assumed; they are being tested. Identity, therefore, is not represented as fixed. It can be revised, performed differently, reconsidered, and reconfigured.

This is one of the poem's most distinctly modern features. The poetic subject does not ask simply, "Who am I?" It asks, implicitly, "Which role comes next?"

The poem's form reinforces this process. Its short fragments, questions, ellipses, quotation marks, and abrupt conceptual shifts create the impression of thought in motion. The poem does not present a completed philosophical system. It records a consciousness testing possibilities.

This technique brings the poem into conversation with strands of modern and contemporary poetry in which thought itself becomes poetic material. There is a distant affinity with T. S. Eliot in the use of fragmentation and spiritual vocabulary, while the compressed syntax and productive silences may recall Emily Dickinson. The final movement toward a distilled statement also has something of the aphoristic existential clarity associated with C. P. Cavafy.

These should be understood as poetic affinities, not claims of influence. The poem's particular combination of conceptual language, fragmentation, English expression, and lexical invention remains distinctly its own.

The final three lines provide the poem with its strongest structural reversal:

"The way to happiness – success
Is not layered with rose petals
But with countless 'no'"

The metaphor of rose petals invokes the conventional romantic image of an easy, beautiful, rewarding path. The poem deliberately rejects that idealized image. The path towards happiness and success is not soft or decorative. It is constituted by repeated acts of refusal.

The word "no" is therefore transformed.

At the beginning of the poem, the poetic subject is defined by lack:

lack of energy, emotional exhaustion, spiritual fatigue.

At the end, the subject is defined by an act:

"no".

The movement is therefore from depletion towards agency.

The "no" is not necessarily nihilistic. On the contrary, it may be the condition for selection and self-definition. To say no is to establish a boundary, to reject what no longer belongs, and to make space for something else. In relation to the earlier "new roles", the final "no" becomes almost structural: before a new role can be rehearsed, something from the previous configuration may need to be refused.

The poem thus constructs a subtle sequence:

exhaustion → withdrawal → doubt → suspension → reassessment → emotional nourishment → rehearsal → refusal → possibility of renewal.

Its central metaphor is consequently not death but interval.

The "anchorite" is not necessarily someone who abandons the world. The "hypernation" is not ordinary sleep. The withdrawal is a pause between two configurations of existence.

And the title's "in view…" becomes particularly meaningful in retrospect. The poem does not claim to have arrived at a final destination. It keeps the possibility open. Anchoritism is merely "in view"; the new roles are still being rehearsed; the questions remain questions.

That openness is essential to the poem's strength.

"Anchoritism in view…" ultimately presents withdrawal not as an ending but as a productive suspension. It explores the possibility that one sometimes needs to step away from the visible structures of life in order to examine them again. The poem does not romanticize exhaustion, nor does it celebrate isolation for its own sake. Instead, it transforms retreat into a space of reconsideration.

Its final wisdom is therefore not that happiness is achieved by refusing life, but that a meaningful return to life may require the courage to refuse certain versions of it first.

The poem begins with silence, exhaustion and uncertainty.

It ends with a word of extraordinary simplicity:

"no".

Between those two points, poetry becomes an act of rechecking, rehearsing, and imagining what might come next.