Bertolt Brecht's "A Bed for the Night"

Thoughts on criticism and compassion.

A Bed for the Night

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by

It won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Don't put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.


from Poems, 1913-1956, edited/translated by Erich Fried, John Willett, Ralph Manheim (Routledge, 1998)

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I remember first coming across this poem when friend and fellow poet Nicodemus Nicoludis posted it somewhere online. I took a screenshot. I tucked it away. Later, I bought Brecht’s Selected Poems. I read “A Worker Reads History,” which ends:

Each page a victory,
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

I read, too, his poem “To Posterity,” which contains this stanza toward its end:

For we knew only too well:
Even the hatred of squalor
Makes the brow grow stern.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.

I encountered in Brecht’s work a wellspring of sympathy — that wildly hard work of holding one’s criticism of the world alongside a criticism of the self and still (at the same time!) extending compassion to both the world and the self. It’s there in that gentle Alas in the poem above. There’s a tired sigh in the heart of such a word. It’s a sigh that’s borne from love at the same time as it is borne from exhaustion. This duality of love and exhaustion is the result of a care that is extended toward so much. Such care — for literally anyone — is there, too, in the entirety of Brecht’s short poem, “The Mask of Evil”:

On my wall hangs a Japanese carving,
The mask of an evil demon, decorated with gold lacquer.
Sympathetically I observe
The swollen veins of the forehead, indicating
What a strain it is to be evil.

Through all of these encounters with Brecht’s work, I have returned, again and again, to today’s poem. I have returned to the expansiveness of its compassion. I have returned to the bare simplicity of what it gestures toward. I have returned to its relentless acknowledgement of what won’t happen — “It won’t change the world” — which occurs at the same time as all that does happen: the lone man working, the beds offered, the image of the snow falling on the roadway instead of upon the heads of those left out in the cold.

The poem begins in conversation with us as readers:

I hear that in New York
At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway
A man stands every evening during the winter months
And gets beds for the homeless there
By appealing to passers-by

I love the intimacy of that opening line: I hear that in New York. It is as if we’ve stumbled into this poem, or that Brecht has stumbled into us. And then each line — quite simply — offers us something more specific. First, the location. Then, the subject — a man who stands every evening. Then, the action — the getting of beds. Then, the how of the action, this constant appealing. This arrangement is so striking in how its simplicity becomes cinematic. Immediately after reading this, I wanted to know the corner — to see it laid out for me. I went on OldNYC, a website I adore, and found this photo of the corner in question, taken by an uncredited photographer from the Works Progress Administration.

Brecht places us here. And it’s no surprise, then, that the opening of the poem is the poem’s most specific moment. From that opening stanza, Brecht moves to the political, to the universal. But always there is that man standing on the corner, not just any corner, but the corner of 26th and Broadway, a real place, a place of constant presentness, where the snow is falling and the air is cold.

The final two large stanzas of this poem are exercises in politics and form. They involve Brecht employing something almost out of a villanelle, using the same six lines twice, but rearranging them to assert different meanings. In the first iteration of the stanza, Brecht writes:

It won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation
But a few men have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Here, the man’s actions are viewed with a kind of deep generosity. Brecht acknowledges the criticism that is still so rampant today in the face of any individual action that seeks to provide some kind of positive outcome despite systemic challenges — the criticism that such small actions are worthless in the face of massive structural inequality. Such a critical view reminds me of something I recently read in Jenny Odell’s Saving Time, where Odell discusses the dangers of “declinism” — “the belief that a once-stable society is headed for inevitable doom.” Odell writes:

[D]eclinism is probably one of the more dangerous forms of linear, deterministic time reckoning there is…In failing to recognize the agency of both human and nonhuman actors, such a view makes struggle and contingency invisible and produces nihilism, nostalgia, and ultimately paralysis.

Later, Odell writes: “Grief on this scale can kill the lone mourner,” a line I triple-circled in my copy of her book. It’s true. The grief of living in the midst of what feels individually or collectively apocalyptic, and feeling that one has to perform such living alone — that is a grief that cuts so deep it harms the very nature of life. But hope, I believe, exists when one’s criticism and one’s compassion are exercises of expansion rather than reduction. And Brecht, in this one compassionate stanza, acknowledges the reality of such a truth, trying to honestly depict the day-by-day struggle of those marginalized by society, and the gentle hope of a night when the wind is kept from them.

In the second iteration of the stanza, however, Brecht acknowledges that systemic inequity:

A few people have a bed for the night
For a night the wind is kept from them
The snow meant for them falls on the roadway
But it won't change the world
It won't improve relations among men
It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

Here, Brecht almost inverts the stanza above, and, in a powerful display of the power of both language and poetry, offers a different meaning to the same lines, a meaning that exists at the same time as the meaning of the stanza above. In this stanza, Brecht acknowledges the power of individual acts of compassion in the face of systemic inequity, but then ultimately names their futility within a system of “exploitation.” Such a moment reminds me of a realization toward the end of Nanni Balestrini’s novel We Want Everything, when the ever-the-more radicalized narrator, burdened and angered by the difficulty and brutality of wage work, states:

So now we say it’s time to end it, because they don’t know what to do with all this enormous wealth that we produce in the world other than waste it and destroy it. They waste it making thousands of atomic bombs or going to the moon. They destroy fruit peaches and pears by the ton, because there’s too much and it isn’t worth anything. Because for them everything must have a price, it’s the only thing they care about, products without value can’t exist as far as they’re concerned. It can’t just be for people who don’t have food, according to them. But with all the wealth that exists people don’t need to die of hunger any more, they don’t have to work any more. So we’ll take the wealth, we’ll take everything.

Brecht would almost certainly sympathize with this moment in Balestrini’s novel, with the way in which a society focused on profit more than anything would ignore any notion of value that doesn’t have to do with money, and would render nearly any individual act of compassion as just a small dent in the huge, forceful shield of capital.

But the beauty, too, of Brecht, is that he holds both of these moments at once. He holds his compassion at the same time as he holds his criticism. He values both the individual moment of providing beds for those who needs them just as he values the knowledge of structural inequity. This must be why both renditions of the same stanza occur in the same poem, and why each points to its own meaning. In this choice, Brecht demonstrates one value of poetry — how it can point toward different values and different imagined worlds, each at the same time. How this act of multiplicity is, in and of itself, a demonstration of an expansive imagination. Brecht reminds me that my criticism does not have to lead to declinism. He reminds me, too, that any act of my compassion can still be followed by a wider understanding of the structures such an act of compassion exists within.

But what I want to say, too, is that as I have read and re-read this poem, it’s been hard for me to think of any line of poetry I appreciate as much as this one:

Don't put down the book on reading this, man.

I remember reading this the first time and saying damn. Literally. Out loud. I said damn. I said wow. I shook my head. I found this line — sitting all alone in between two stanzas that do wonders in their arrangement and re-arrangement — to be so striking. It is a poet’s line and a person’s line. You feel Brecht shedding the veil of poetry and reaching through the page and wrapping his hand lightly around your wrist. Believe me, this line says. Keep reading, this line says. Don’t stop here, this line says. This isn’t some bullshit, this line says. This is real, this line says. This line — Don’t put down the book on reading this, man — says so bluntly what I need sometimes to be so reminded of. Don’t look away. Keep looking. Don’t put down the book.

I’ve been trying to find the specific translator of this poem within this edition of Brecht’s poetry, not just because I want to make sure I credit the right person, but also because this translation feels so stunning in the way it melds historical worlds. That final word of this line — “man” — set off as it is by a comma, feels almost contemporary in its casual delivery, so much so that it stuns me. It makes the poem feel transformative, of multiple present-tenses. It makes the poem resonate through the decades.

Don’t put down the book on reading this, man. Even now, reading this line for the hundredth time, it brings a tightness to my chest. It stirs me. It calls out to me. Don’t put down the book. It is a better phrase, I think, than something like don’t give up. It is less about progress than it is about attention. It is less about relentless pursuit than it is about acknowledgment. Don’t put down the book. I don’t ever want to be someone who puts down the book. I don’t ever want to be someone who denies someone’s truth. I don’t ever want to say that something is too hokey or too sentimental or too whatever-the-fuck. I want to believe the feeling the first time it is uttered. I want to be kind. I want to acknowledge. I want to witness. I want to keep reading.

That reminder — sitting as it does on its own, lonely line — is a reminder worth repeating everyday. It is something I know I can say to myself the moment I leave my apartment each morning. Don’t put down the book, Devin. The other morning, walking to the subway, I saw an ad at a bus station that reminded passersby that not all homeless people are jobless. I understood the point of the ad, how it meant to reframe some conception that people have of homeless people as lazy or careless. But then I wondered: why does it take a job to make someone worth our consideration? I wondered: what of the homeless person who does not have a job? Or the hundred thousand students in New York City who are homeless? What of them? In whose eyes are they now worthy of respect? Or care? Or love? I wondered about Jordan Neely, murdered just over a month ago on the subway, in a city where, up until 2020, inmates from Riker’s Island buried the city’s unclaimed dead in a potter’s field located on an up-till-now inaccessible island. Our compassion must meet our criticism, and together, the two must open the door to the expansive. The book is here. It lives in the everyday. Don’t put down the book. The book reminds us to look at the world again.

I’m thinking of all of this — compassion, generosity, more — because a few days ago, I prepped a final lecture for my AP class. Last year, teaching many of the same students, I gave a “Last Lecture” on the final day of class, on a topic of my choosing. And this year, many of those same students requested something similar. And so I prepped a lecture on generalization, generosity, and limitation. You can see the slides (which might not make sense without context) here.

I told my students — many of whom are about to graduate and many of whom I have known for all four years of their time in high school — that I wanted to speak on a topic I have come to care about in the time they’ve known me. And so I landed on what I landed on. I talked about the danger of generalization, the way generosity is a kind of salve to such generalization, a way of honoring the complexity of others and living life with a sense of allowance, and I ended by talking about the importance of respecting one’s own (and the world’s) fragility and limitation — something I’ve felt and experienced deeply over these past years, whether through surgery or hospitalization or sickness or more.

It was beautiful and lovely and funny, giving the lecture. Afterwards, I answered questions, and many of my students asked wonderful questions I didn’t have an answer to. How much generosity is too much? What if it’s what we want that’s bad, not the system itself? When does giving too much become sacrifice? I didn’t know the answers to so many of these questions, but I tried to honor the questions themselves. In doing so, I was reminded of that wide-eyed moment of wonder, when what you are curious about is the same thing as what you are critical of, when you want to know more simply because it is interesting to know, and when you are trying to figure out what it means to live a life, and maybe a good one. Sometimes I associate that kind of wide-eyed moment with children, but that is far too general an assumption. The truth is that I am still that self, and that I want to be that self forever, trying to figure it out, never putting down the book. I’m grateful for what reminds me to keep the book in my hands, and to keep it open.

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Some Notes:

1. I had a poem published in Had, a journal I love, the other week — it is part of a manuscript centered around light. Here is the link. Thank you for reading!

2. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.