Roll of the Dice: My Lady

We’re going back a ways today.

I mean waaaaaayyyyyy  back.

All the way back to Bruce Springsteen’s short-lived college days at Ocean County College in Toms River, New Jersey.

Bruce lasted three semesters at OCC before dropping out in late 1969, but his time there was notable for producing his earliest published work: one poem and one prose piece that debuted in Seascape, the school’s literary journal.

Bruce’s pieces were published in the journal’s January 1969 issue,  only a few copies of which are known to still exist. A couple have been sold at auction over the years, and at least one copy resides in the care of the Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University.

We’ll take a look at the poem Bruce wrote later this year. Today, let’s take a look at his prose submission, a metaphorical ode entitled “My Lady.”

“My Lady” has a pretty clever conceit: it’s told from the perspective of a middle-aged man growing increasingly aware of his mortality and decreasingly fearful of it. It’s a short narrative, but Bruce still manages to hold the reveal until the end: the lady for whom he expresses his appreciation is Death herself.

Bruce’s narrator is just past the mid-point of his life–right around the time most of us become aware that our time on this earth is limited. We know this because Bruce is deliberate in establishing the time as 2pm, using the clock to divide a lifetime into 24 segments. Also, our narrator just lost his mother, and it’s often the death of a parent that shocks us into recognizing our own mortality.

But rather than rage against the dying of the light, Bruce’s narrator thinks gently toward Death. He’s seen the relief she granted to his ailing mother, and he no longer fears her as a threat but welcomes her as an agent of comfort.

As the poem ends, the day latens. Summer gives way to autumn, the sun begins to set. Our narrator patiently and calmly awaits the arrival of his lady. For an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old, this is a remarkably empathetic piece of writing.

However: if we’re to apply a reasonably critical lens, we have to admit that while Bruce had a clever idea, the execution could have been a bit stronger. He’s lazy with his use of time metaphors, switching from a-life-in-a-day to a more literal interpretation of the calendar and back again, his character’s voice veers between eloquence and churlishness, and his vocabulary is fairly pedestrian. (There are also a couple of typos (including the spelling of Bruce’s last name), but we can chalk that up to careless editing.)

If it seems like I’m being unfair to a college freshman, let’s remember that Bruce was already writing songs with considerably more technique, flair, and confidence than this literary journal submission. He was clearly capable of stronger writing even at the time, and I suspect that he treated this piece more like a class assignment than a passion project.

Still and all, we’re looking at a published piece written by a teenage Bruce Springsteen that shows a nascent appreciation for language, metaphor, and imagery that he was already honing into a lifelong talent for songwriting.

My Lady
Published: Seascape, January 1969