Baby Villon Essay

Upon my initial reading of “Baby Villon” by Philip Levine the meaning of the poem was completely lost on me. However, after reading it over very carefully, it slowly started to unravel and make more sense to me. I believe that this poem is about a lightweight boxer who is having a conversation with his cousin whom he has only met for the first time. While this is definitely a bit of a reach in terms of interpretation, I believe that I can solidly defend that idea with evidence from the poem. Not only is he a lightweight boxer, but he apparently is also multiracial which is what I believe the first stanza is referencing.

The first stanza is initially what threw me off. He’s “robbed” in Bangkok “because he’s white,” in London “because he’s black,” and in Barcelona and Paris for being a “Jew” and an “Arab.” Initially I had no idea how to interpret this unless the character being described really is all of those things at once (stranger things have happened), and I was also confused as to why he would be in all of those places. The first two lines of the next stanza began to clear that up for me though and are what led me to assuming that the character being described might very well be a lightweight boxer. The lines are “he holds up seven thick little fingers to show me he’s rated seventh in the world.” Now I understand that that could literally be referring to anything, but I really just can’t help making the connection. There’s so much referencing to fighting throughout the poem, including at the end of the first stanza where it’s describing how “everywhere and at all times” he’s facing discrimination, yet always “he fights back.”

The next stanza, which is the stanza in which we find out that the character being described and the speaker of the poem are related (cousins), is where I made my connection to perhaps he really could be representative of all of those different groups that were being discriminated against in the first stanza. The reason I made this connection is because the speaker says the character, who I believe to be Baby Villon (more on that later), “talks of the war in North Africa,” and through my own personal knowledge I am aware many different groups of people are represented in that area of Africa (Arabs, white, black, Jews, even small groups of black Jews) so it could very well be possible that this character being described is some strange cocktail of all of the people that are represented in that part of the continent. I don’t know though, I really could just be pulling at nothing.

The fifth stanza is where I really began to solidify my idea that this was indeed a fighter of some sort. Baby Villon tells the speaker he “should never disparage the stiff bristles that guard the head of the fighter. Then, in the sixth stanza, when the fighter is being described he is described as “five feet two” and “116 pounds,” which is tiny. This is what made me assume that he was the character Baby Villon, because he is kind of a small man and it could be an endearing nickname.

Overall, the poem seems to have a rather melancholy vibe to it. I get the impression that perhaps Baby Villon is some sort of tragic figure whose life, destroyed by fighting and war, is defined by fighting in multiple aspects. It definitely seems as if the speaker pities him in a sense for all the pain that he’s gone through, whether emotional or physical. The tone of the poem definitely leads me to thinking it is pity that leads the speaker’s opinion of his cousin.