Liz wrote:
>the metaphor just doesn't work for me - whoever _loved_ anything with
>flowers birds and hearts embroidered on it? The description encapsulates
>the bottom drawer of a 1950's bride-to-be (radiant and blissfully happy!)
> Is a description that can in any way match or describe an appropriate
>attitude to the earth we stand on, the water we drink, the air we breath?
My 11-year-old daughter does, and fair enough for her - have to agree on
the prissy femininity there, Liz, though I'm beginning to feel a bit
sorry for this poem, which is a pretty little thing which can scarcely
bear such scrutiny - perhaps such things should be left with the
loveheart hankies in a discreet bottom drawer. I've read many worse
poems in my time, and ones which merit more Mark's comment that they are
"beneath contempt", but you know, I find it hard to _hate_ it, and feel a
bit puzzled that anyone should feel so strongly about it either way (I'm
ignoring the context here, perhaps wrongly).
I suppose the main reason why it doesn't interest me much is that it's a
one-metaphor poem, ironed out as neatly as its images. Even in the
Belitt translation (I wish I could read the Spanish properly) Neruda's
sweeps beautifully and lightly from transformation to transformation -
one of his lesser poems, for sure, but still leaping from the Poem to
humble domestic tasks to the existential making of each day as a
necessity of the spirit, each as a facet of the task of human living: a
kind of democracy of vision which I particularly love in Neruda's work.
Best
Alison
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