Rob S. Friedman
November 2025
Ode to Faulkner’s Addie Bundren
Addie, are you William Faulkner’s Hester Prynne
or Anne Carson’s Emily Brontë, who
“spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet …
It gave her peace.”
“Sad stunted life,
Uninteresting, unremarkable, wracked by disappointment
And despair.”
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
“Why cast away the world away.
For someone hooked up to Thou,
The world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence.”
I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say.
“On herself she had no pity.”
“Anger travels through me, pushes aside everything else in my heart,
pouring up the vents.”
My daily life is an acknowledgment and expiation of my sin. I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.
I asked Anse to promise to take me back to Jefferson when I died, because I knew that father had been right, even when he could not have known he was right any more than I could have known I was wrong.
*A messenger of Hope, comes every night to me
And offers, for short life, eternal Liberty.*
Quotations Anne Carson, from “The Glass Essay”
Regular font William Faulkner, from As I Lay Dying
Asterisks Emily Brontë, from “The Prisoner”
Rob S. Friedman 