Kay Ryan (John Lamparski / WireImage)

Richard Pederson, Ryan’s father, was an oil driller. Raised in the desert region of Southern California, Ryan graduated in 1963 from Antelope Valley High School in Lancaster, California. She went on to the University of California at Los Angeles, receiving a B. A. in 1967 and an M. A. in 1968, both in English literature. Ryan self-published her first collection of poems, Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends, in 1983, a work that was financed largely through the efforts of Ryan’s longtime partner, Carol Adair. In 1985, the small press Copper Beech published Ryan’s next volume, Strangely Marked Metal, but the publication of the work went unnoticed by critics. However, Ryan began publishing poems in major American literary journals following the publication of Strangely Marked Metal, and by the time her next collection, Flamingo Watching, was published in 1994, Ryan had established a critical reputation that earned the volume prominent and favorable reviews. Elephant Rocks, the volume that contains the poem ‘‘All Shall Be Restored,’’ was published in 1996. Several other volumes followed, along with such awards as the

National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2004, and four Pushcart Prizes. Her works have been widely anthologized. In 2008 and in 2009, Ryan was asked by the Library of Congress to serve as the poet laureate. In 2010, she released the collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, published by Grove Press. Ryan lives in Marin County, California. Until her appointment as poet laureate, Ryan worked as an instructor of remedial English at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California, a position she held for over thirty years.

POEM TEXT

The grains shall be collected

From the thousand shores

To which they found their way,

And the boulder restored,

And the boulder itself replaced

In the cliff, and likewise

The cliff shall rise

Or subside until the plate of earth

Is without fissure. Restoration

Knowsnohalf-measure. Itwill 10

Not stop when the treasured and lost

Bronze horse remounts the steps.

Even this horse will founder backward

To coin, cannon, and domestic pots,

Which themselves shall bubble and

Drain back to green veins in stone.

And every word written shall lift off

Letter by letter, the backward text

Read ever briefer, ever more antic

In its efforttoinsist that nothing

Shall be lost.

POEM SUMMARY

Lines 1–3

‘‘All Shall Be Restored’’ is a twenty-one line poem with no stanzaic divisions. (A stanza is a unit of poetry that structurally divides the poem the way a paragraph divides prose.) In this poem, Ryan grounds her ideas in images and moves from one image to the next as she develops her themes. The first image is explored in the first three lines of the poem. She opens with the idea of grains, presumably of sand, that shall find their way together again from numerous shores. The movement this image conveys is one of backward progression, as if the countless grains are almost magnetically drawn back to some original source.

Lines 4–10

In the next several lines, Ryan links a number of related images together. She speaks of the boulders rejoining with cliffs, and cliffs shifting until the earth’s surface is no longer fractured. Her tone reflects the idea conveyed in the title of the poem, suggesting that the world is being mended, or restored through natural means. In lines 9 and 10, the poet asserts that this process of repair can only be achieved if it is thorough and all-encompassing. Once started, it will be taken to its extreme end, for true restoration can only be achieved if the task is completed fully, Ryan asserts in these lines.

Lines 11–16

Ryan moves from the idea of the natural world’s restoration to exploring the fate of humanity in this process. To do so, in lines 11–16, Ryan employs the image of the bronze horse, a type of sculpture typically associated with ancient Greece and Rome, as well as with the Renaissance period of art in Europe during the fifteenth century. She speaks specifically of a bronze horse, once lost, mounting steps, presumably of where it had been displayed, once again. This bronze horse, like all the others, Ryan says, will be melted down. Her notion of a backward progression of time is once again invoked, as she speaks of the melted bronze being cast into useful things, such as coins and pots, and these being melted as well until they are once again simply veins of metal in the earth’s rock. Through this series of images, Ryan seems to be suggesting that the efforts of humans, artistic and otherwise, will be erased in this process of restoration. The earth will be returned to an original state in which there is no evidence of the presence of humanity.

Lines 17–21

This idea of the absence of human life is reaffirmed in the final lines of the poem. The image Ryan now studies is that of the printed word on the page—her own artistic medium. She describes the backward march of time once again, how letter by letter the words will disappear in reverse order from the page, from last to first. Ryan’s concise imagery conveys the notion that the message on the written page will become shorter and shorter, until all disappears, despite the insistence of the text itself that it—and nothing—will be lost. This last series of images suggests that artists strive to attain something permanent with their creations. However, Ryan insists that nothing is permanent, despite one’s efforts to create something lasting, like sculpture or poetry. The vision or message of the artist is as lost in this process of the restoration of the earth as anything else that has damaged, over time, the physical unity of the earth. Humanity’s place in Earth’s history, Ryan’s poem suggests, is ephemeral. The poem’s title indicates that everything will be restored, and Ryan’s language and imagery at the onset of the poem describes the events that will bring about this restoration almost as a healing process. Yet, this process also involves the destruction or erasure of the mark of humanity upon the earth. All may be restored in one sense, but all is lost in human terms as well.

• Catherine Dominic

Dominic is a novelist, freelance writer, and editor. In the following essay, she studies the language, imagery, and tone of Ryan’s ‘‘All Shall Be Restored,’’ demonstrating the ways in which the poem’s uplifting title contrasts sharply with its apocalyptic content. In

• Critical attention to Ryan’s work was slow in coming

She built up a small following for her poetry as it began being accepted in literary journals. After the publication of two volumes of poetry, one which was self-published and one which was published by a small press, and neither

• The place of humanity in the world is a subject of contemplation in «All Shall Be Restored»

The natural world the poet describes, and Ryan’s vision for the fate of the world, is interjected with a human element aboutathirdofthe waythrough the poem. From details concerned with grains of sand and boulders and cliffs, Ryan turns to man-made

• In ‘‘All Shall Be Restored,’’ Ryan explores the world’s natural cycle of self-regeneration

She describes epic shifts in the earth’s natural features, envisioning the world reforming itself over time and returning to an early, primitive, whole state. In an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan (commissioned to set to music poems by

• Lyric Poetry

A lyric poem is a brief work in which the poet expresses personal feelings or emotional responses to a situation or an event. As such an expression, a lyric poem is not the kind of poem that tells a story.