Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Black Valentne and Red Poppy
These two poems are written with a sense of nostalgia. In the poem Black Valentine she describes him ( her husband) as he s dying and although sad she still sounds hopeful while remembering their love for one another. When we get to Red Poppy, she describes him with a more definitive tone. While she is sitting with him on his hospital bed each breath he takes signifies all that they have gone through all the memories as they slowly turn into something more permanent which is death.
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Yes, you're generally on the right track, here. Explore some of the particular images in the poems to get at the complexity of the experience, its various qualities of fear, danger, the need to nurture/protect; need and desire for the other; the sense of death as journey, but also someting dark and visionless; the endurance of human love, in the moment, even in the face of collapse of belief in any sort of mythologized "after life" (ie. references to the "soul"). It would be interesting, for eg., in considering some of the above, to trace image patterns that run through both poems--such as the image of the tent/shelter, which occurs in both... as well as of course the color symbolism and the images involved with this, as they mix life/death, passion & fear, etc.--both in the one--Bernice's hair spread across the expansive darkness of the cosmos, the blackness at the center of the red poppy, etc.
ReplyDeleteMargarita, I did not consider the implication of time so much, now i see it... I did however feel the tone was different these poems, yet I could not quite verbally interpret the nuance i felt. Thank you for interpreting it!!
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