Cold Within

Irish American poet, James Patrick Kinney uses his poetic parable, ‘The Cold Within’ to illustrate the folly of falling prey
to discrimination that shortchanges our own humanity.

Written in the 1960s- during the African American Civil Rights movement (1954-1968) , Kinney was outraged by
inhuman discriminatory attitudes at the time and wrote this poem to prompt some serious soul searching. How often
are we wise enough to rise above our egos? How foolish are we when we give in to our prejudices? Its message is
relevant even today, when we face divisive outlooks in the world that lead to hatred and violence. The poem is a
reminder to overcome our personal demons and be open to the wisdom of an egalitarian view – an attitude where
everyone is considered equal in worth.

The poem opens up to a bleak tableau. six persons are caught together in the grip of a severe winter. Each of them had
a single stick of wood.

Note the poet’s use of the word ‘humans’; he wants to draw attention to the gathering as specific individuals, rather
than as a collective group. They were ‘trapped by happenstance’ implying no escape from a situation created by
chance. The adjectives ‘dark’ and ‘bitter’ describing the cold add to the ominous feeling.

The second stanza cuts into a key character in this story — the dying fire. The group’s prospects do not look good. In the
heart of winter keeping warm is critical to survival. The fire offers a chance for salvation if each person would use their
respective logs to feed it. The dying fire is a silent appeal to the group to help themselves by helping each other.

The next verses reveal how the situation unfolds. We find that the first person withheld her log from the fire only
because it would benefit a black person. This is racism, where there is discrimination because of a person’s race. The
woman will not even warm herself if someone she looks down upon — simply because of skin color — will gain.

We move on. The second person looked across the fire and saw someone who he knew didn’t share his religious
ideology. And just because of that, he can’t bear to give up his log to the communal fire. This is bigotry, which speaks of
intolerance to a person because they do not share the same opinions or ideas.

The focus now shifts. Here is a person who seems poor. His tattered (old and torn) clothes in the cold weather hint at
poverty. He perhaps felt the cold more than the others as we notice that ‘he gave his coat a hitch’ —adjusting it closer
to his body to wry out some warmth from the inadequate clothing. But here too is a dead end. We see that he is a
victim of classism — or discrimination based on social or economic class — considering those favorably placed than
him to be ‘idle’. He is defensive and in his eyes, the rich do not deserve his meager ration and he will not part with his
stick.

At cross purposes, we find the next exhibit of apathy — the rich man. Caught up hoarding his riches in his head, he is
oblivious to reality. Greed blinds him as he selfishly connives to keep his wealth. He even miserly holds onto his stick,
keeping it from the poor whom he perceives as aimless and lazy.

Even the victim becomes an abuser here. We know the black person had experienced racism. Revenge for the atrocities
he had faced from the white people was the only thing on his mind. One wonders if he had already resigned himself to
dying — he saw ‘the fire pass from his sight’— he realized that the fire was fast getting spent. But the spark of human
kindness had died in him and literally too, he chose to let the group’s fire die. He would perish, but he would take the
others he hated down with him as well.
For the first time in the poem ‘The Cold Within’, the poet foreshadows the fate of the group by finally describing the
bunch as ‘forlorn’ or hopeless. Until then, the poet had reserved judgement, allowing the reader instead to examine
each individual in turn and derive his/her own conclusion.

Unfortunately, we find that the last person also perpetuates the vicious circle of inertia. The last man of this ‘forlorn
group‘ was a man who did nothing except for gain. He was a selfish and opportunistic man. He found that by sharing his
log with other people present there he won’t get anything in return. In giving just to get, the last person played a losing
move in the ‘game’ — a metaphor for the game of Life.

We witness the grim aftermath of the group’s rigidity of spirit. Death comes and it is personified here with stilled
hands. Each individual became their own agent of death — their hands frozen stiff with their refusal to act. The fact that
each of them still possessed their firewood when they died suggests the twisted motives in retaining their firewood —
proof enough of sin. The final lines abound with Irony. We realize it was not the cold weather outside that really killed
the group after all, it was the cold in their hearts, the lack of warm human spirits — the cold within.

The delivery too is straightforward — no fancy words or meandering metaphors. We see allegories in the wood logs
which can be seen to represent a person’s abilities and resources; while the fire itself symbolizes the common good.
Death is personified— by speaking of Death having cold hands.

The dying fire and logs of wood in the poem might be seen as symbolic and hence significant elements. The poet has
depicted the discrimination among people based on their caste, class, religion, colour, economic and social conditions.
This discrimination is described as the lack of warm human spirit — the cold within their hearts in the very last line of
the poem. 
 
So, it would be reasonable to say that the dying fire indicates decreasing human spirit in us. And the logs of wood may
symbolize “a man’s property or wealth” including his intellect and genius. People can help others with those physical
and intellectual capacity they have. But if they persist in discriminating on grounds of race, religion, caste, gender and
ethnicity, they are all lost.