Commentary on Joel M. Toledo’s poem “Thirty”

In the Philippine culture, every woman wants to share their vows with a partner before the clock strikes her thirty for the fear of ending up being an old maid. It has been a common joke that she must hurry up while she’s still in the calendar or she might lose the ride. Men on the other hand aren’t bothered too much ‘cause for them life really begins at forty. But who in the world is not afraid to grow old and live alone?

Written in the second person point of view, the poem gives an impression that anyone who reads it would feel the depressing feeling of being alone as time never failed to run. Being in such point of view, it gives me the idea that the poet wants the readers to empathize with the character in the poem by being ‘that character’. There is detachment from the poet as he made use of the personal pronoun ‘you’. Thus the persona here becomes the reader herself.

Reading it, it’s as if the readers were being dictated to feel what was being told in the poem which led me to some questions: What’s the purpose of telling the readers what to feel in a given situation? Is it really to empathize? To realize the value of time? Or to ‘trick’ the readers and just play with their emotions?

Consisting of nine lines, the first two lines of the first stanza gave a clear image—someone is walking out of the apartment on a midsummer day. The ‘midsummer’ is symbolical in nature. It is a parallelism of the persona’s state that she herself is in middle-age or as the title puts it, in her thirties. The succeeding lines were abstract pertaining to the ‘heavy’ emotions of that someone. On the sixth line, the reader would realize that ‘that someone the poet is talking about’ was none other than herself. The reader would shift from being just an ‘intruder’ to be the subject. Hence the reader would feel the ‘abandonment, the lost cause, the passing of love, the burning asphalt that she endures, the thirst for that strange human need.’ The first stanza was pertaining to that hunger—the need to be loved at an age when it seemed it is too late to quench that thirst.

The second stanza reached the persona’s realization that she is not getting any younger and yet it seemed that she is running out of time. She realized how fast the movement of time and it is uncontrollable.

So in the third stanza, the persona began to ‘question the point of movement’. She could no longer bring back the times she wasted. Thus she chose to acknowledge her fate (the standstill, the deadlock, the tie) of being alone.

However, I find the line Quiet and loud out of place. The preceding lines talked about the ‘ticking of the human clock’ and then suddenly, there was the insertion of these words which I find kind of beside the point. Furthermore, the last three lines (in the halfway of things,/ you drink deeply,/ from the very heart of time.) although pleasing to the ears, were kind of sentimental. I find these lines emotional that it leaves the reader in despair and hopelessness.