Aubade

The speaker of Jackson’s “Aubade” employs an easy-going tone, a musical rhythm, and a regular rhyme scheme to exhort their lover to ignore their banal responsibilities in order to stay in bed and enjoy further sensual pleasure. The musical quality of Jackson’s “Aubade” enhances the persuasiveness of the speaker’s voice, who addresses an unnamed lover in an attempt to convince them to postpone the start of the day and linger together in bed.

Jackson toys with the traditional conventions of the aubade, putting a contemporary spin on a medieval poetic form that traditionally addresses the experience of lovers who must separate at dawn. Jackson does not attempt to universalize the experience of lovers at daybreak in this poem; rather, his lovers are firmly in the here and now, living their lives in contemporary America.

For example, when the speaker mentions the “New Americans” (Line 10) who presumably own the dry-cleaning shop the lover supports, they acknowledge the immigrant families in America who earn money running cleaning businesses. Other present-day issues like environmentalism and wellness also mark this poem as defiantly contemporary: The speaker praises the lover for being so responsible as to mow the lawn, thus “greening/up” (Lines 11-12), and tries to coax the lover into staying in bed with a wellness argument, claiming it is “healthier” (Line 12) to do so than to get up from bed. The mention of “e-mails” (Line 20) as a potential distraction for the beloved also firmly sets the poem in the present day.

“Aubade” is a seduction poem, and Jackson employs an old convention with which the speaker tries to persuade his beloved to stay in bed: the pressing concern of mortality. The speaker addresses the boring responsibilities of daily life in order to demonstrate how unworthy they are of his beloved’s time and attention, especially as death is inevitable. Though it is “nearly one o’clock” (Line 21), the speaker assures their beloved that they are much better off seizing the day together beneath the covers. Jackson’s light comic touch is evident in this mention of the time of day; though the aubade form traditionally celebrates the dawn, in “Aubade,” the day’s sunrise took place many hours earlier in the day, which suggests the lovers have already been celebrating their love for several hours.