Aubade with Burning City

The title of the poem, “Aubade with Burning City,” does little to establish the date and location of the poem. If the reader encounters this poem outside of the context of the collection, the phrase “burning city” establishes a vibrant yet unspecific image. The epigraph, dense with facts and figures, does the work of rooting the reader in the poem. Note how the month, date, year, and country all appear in quick sequence at the beginning of the epigraph. The name of the composer, the song, and the code name for the evacuation operation are all also included. This level of specificity is contrasted by the poem itself, which avoids naming any of its characters or even using the name of the city. By frontloading all of this information, Vuong frees the poem itself from the burden of exposition. “Aubade with Burning City” crafts a scene based on all of the facts presented in the epigraph, illustrating a strange, terrifying, wonderous mood that gives emotional weight to the historical event.

Without the epigraph, the poem would still be legible to a certain audience. Milkflower petals, “White Christmas” lyrics, the soldier’s reference to a war, and tanks and shell blasts are all telling clues. If the reader were familiar with the Fall of Saigon, they could glean the basic facts of the epigraph from the text. With the epigraph, the poem becomes understandable to a much wider audience, and it serves the more familiar reader by alleviating the detective work required to unearth these facts from the poem itself.

An aubade is a song or poem greeting the dawn, particularly in the context of lovers leaving one another at dawn. An aubade typically has a bittersweet mood—there’s anguish in the lovers’ parting, but there’s so much joy from having been in one another’s presence. A burning city, in contrast, is categorically terrifying, disastrous, and far from intimate.

Taken in isolation, the lyrics from “White Christmas” quoted in the poem are bittersweet and reflective: “May your days be merry and bright…” (Line 3); “May all / your Christmases be white” (Lines 9-10); “The treetops glisten and children listen” (Line 26); “I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming… / to hear sleigh bells in the snow…” (Lines 49-50). The speaker in the "White Christmas" song is unconcerned with the present and disconnected from his body, absorbed in the world of happy memories. The disconnect borders on delusional in the context of a city siege. At the same time, there’s something understandable about this impulse in this moment. The soldier in the hotel room uses similar mental gymnastics when he encourages his love to worry only about tomorrow. Again, disconnecting from the present moment when the ground is shaking underneath one’s feet seems foolish, but choosing to have an optimistic disposition does have its own benefits.