Interpretation of "Group Portrait with Ukuleles"

Keith Ratzlaff’s “Group Portrait with Ukuleles” looks into the past and then compares it to the present reality.  The poem’s speaker is a boy who was once in “a classroom / of boys learning to play / the ukulele” (lines 3-5).  As he gazes into a photo of his class, he remembers moments and people from his childhood and what his peers have done in the years since their music lessons.  “Group Portrait with Ukuleles” recalls the bittersweet moments of childhood and recognizes the realities of aging.

The form of “Group Portrait” is tied to the simplicity of the ukulele that the speaker learned to play as a boy.  “In the end,” the speaker recalls, “even / the stumpfingered / learned three chord: / G, C, D7” (lines 4-9).  Inspired by the three-chord cycle, the poem is divided into three line stanzas.  This strict form, however, does not limit the speaker.  Just as in American Folk Music, where many well-loved songs can be played using only three chords, the speaker’s memories flow unimpeded through the three-stanza form.  Later, the speaker says that a three chord progression is “knowable and sequential,” but also as “beautiful as gears shifting” (lines 39-40).  Likewise, the poem’s simple style is ordinary but graceful.
   
Even though some moments were awkward or embarrassing, the speaker looks back fondly on his music lessons.  This was a simpler time, when the hardest thing he and his peers had to do was force their unwilling hands into a few chord formations.  The American Folk Revival also had a nostalgic quality.  The movement, at least as it trickled down to schoolboys, was very concerned with remembering a simpler time.  The boys learn to play old songs, like “I Gave My Love A Cherry” or “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”  Singing old tunes like this was a way to remember and preserve the past, but also a way to momentarily forget present problems.  The speaker does remember that their strings were “whiny” and voices rose and fell like elevators, but it all seems to amuse rather than bother him (lines 8, 14-15).
   
But along with the speaker’s fairly pleasant memories of childhood comes the knowledge of what has happened to his peers since they were in school together.  Most of them got normal jobs like welders, Navy officers, farmers, or used car salesmen (lines 27-30).  Others came to a worse end: one boy died and another was “convicted / of exporting / Nazi literature to Germany” (lines 26, 31-33).  The speaker says that he does not remember any of his companions as “mortal / or talented or cruel” as children (lines 34-36).  He implies that now he knows better.  He is aware that he and his peers will someday die.  He also knows that some of them have talent, while others have the capacity for cruelty and criminal behavior.  Looking at the photograph is especially moving for the speaker because he remembers what happened in the distant past and what has transpired since.
   
At the end of the poem, the speaker questions the significance of his and his peers’ experiences with ukulele music.  “[T]here wasn’t any Mozart / for the ukulele,” he says.  “That would have been wrong / and we knew it – some of us.  Or none / of us. Either way” (lines 46-51).  Stylistically, this passage is clipped and sudden.  It deviates from the speaker’s easily flowing memories earlier in the poem.  It is as if the speaker is trying to come to terms with the meaning of his childhood experiences and what has happened since.  He cannot seem to find a definite conclusion or find a clear moral in his memories.  Either way, he seems to say, what happened has happened, and he cannot do anything to change it now.
   
Ratzlaff’s “Group Portrait with Ukuleles” looks fondly back at a group of boys growing up and then compares that vision to their current, complicated lives.  It is not meant to criticize the boys’ actions, either as children or adults, but rather to present a memory as it is.  The speaker does not overtly try to stuff the story into a moral box, but through his memory, presents how youthful naïveté can give way to almost anything in adult life.
Ben Noll & Ben Jacobs
benjaminmngoshen.edu & benjaminmjgoshen.edu


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