“If there were a place that we didn’t know of”

The poem beginning “If there were a place that we didn’t know of” is recalled as the lovers-on-the-carpet poem that Henry recites to Clare during her labor. Its images of lovers leaning on one another and of happiness kept hidden give the hospital scene a language for their shared vulnerability: at Clare’s request, Henry speaks the poem beside her belly, addressing her and their unborn daughter, Alba, as the room settles into calm.

Identity and Literary Image

The passage is a poem by Rilke, identified in the scene as the poem about lovers on the carpet. Its opening imagines an unknown place where lovers might display, before the dead who silently watch them, what they could never master in ordinary life. The poem’s central image is not a secure platform but lovers’ towers of pleasure and ladders standing without ground, leaning on one another and trembling. Happiness appears as something precarious, accumulated and concealed rather than effortlessly possessed.

The poem then imagines whether those lovers might cast down their hidden, saved-up coins of happiness before a smiling pair on a carpet. Its movement from uncertainty toward the possibility of shared joy gives the image a distinctive tenderness: love is neither mastery nor escape from fragility, but an intimacy made visible in the presence of others. In the labor scene, that meaning resonates without the passage having to explain it. Clare and Henry are themselves a pair at a threshold, relying on one another while awaiting the arrival of their child.

Recitation During Labor

The poem enters the scene at Clare’s request. As the pain and tension of labor begin to ease, she looks toward Henry and asks him to say the poem about the lovers on the carpet. Henry blanks at first; then he remembers, self-conscious about reciting Rilke in front of the people in the room. His initial hesitation makes the recitation an act he must choose, rather than a prepared performance.

Clare interrupts his attempt to begin in German and asks him to say the poem in English. Henry changes position, sitting beside her belly with his back to Charisse, the nurse, and the doctor. He slides a hand beneath Clare’s button-strained shirt and feels Alba’s outline through her skin. That physical contact anchors the poem’s imagined lovers in the immediate facts of the scene: Clare’s laboring body, Henry’s hand, and the child they are waiting to meet.

Before continuing, Henry calls Clare “Angel!”—the poem’s own first word—as though they were in their own bed and had been awake through an ordinary night together. The comparison briefly brings the private language of their relationship into a hospital room shared with medical staff. He then recites the poem in English, from its unknown place and unsayable carpet through the lovers’ trembling, their hidden happiness, and the final image of the smiling pair.

Meaning and Effect in the Scene

The poem’s contrast between lovers’ high-flying hearts and the absence of solid ground suits a scene in which intimacy does not eliminate danger or uncertainty. Its lovers can stand only by leaning on one another; Henry, in turn, positions himself close to Clare and touches the outline of their child while he speaks. The recitation makes support physical as well as verbal. Rather than offering an explanation of labor, it gives Henry a way to remain with Clare through it.

The poem also changes register as Henry speaks. He is embarrassed to recite in front of an audience, yet his shift in posture and his affectionate address make the performance feel directed principally to Clare. The surrounding medical personnel remain present, but he turns his back to them and invokes the ease of their shared bed. This gesture does not remove the hospital from the scene; it briefly establishes a private space within it, where a poem they know can carry their attention toward each other and toward Alba.

The passage ends in a quiet measure of effect. Dr. Montague switches off the fetal monitor and says that everyone is serene; she leaves with the nurse. The poem has been recited while Clare’s face has relaxed and her eyes have remained fixed on the doctor, and its last image of a genuinely smiling pair gives the scene a shape of hoped-for happiness. The poem does not promise that love can master every difficulty. Its trembling ladders and hidden coins instead make happiness precious precisely because it is fragile, shared, and momentarily present.