Sue,

Oh heck, here was me thinking that I was going to try not to explain my subs
afterwards, as I've found myself explaining one or two recently - not that I
mind and I wish that people explained poetry more often to me  - it's just
the suspicion that if you have to explain a poem it isn't doing the job on
it's own. Anyway it's part of an attempt to put more than one axis into a
poem and so the last stanza relates to more than one part of what proceeds.
The explicit content of the last stanza comes in two parts. The fist half
simply shows that this couple do not consider themselves defined by their
current living standards, even if they are prepared to use living standards
as a bench mark. They do not consider themselves to be "peasants". They also
have an awareness that people elsewhere have higher living standards, as
lived by the narrator. The second half reveals what has happened to the
daughter. They have sent their daughter overseas to study in France "for a
better life" or a gold-plated degree at least and the process has left them
with hardly any money to live on at all. This is not fleshed out in the
poem, for the purposes of brevity but is based on knowledge of common
practice. It relates to earlier references to the daughter and references to
"poverty". It also relates to the first stanza where the narrator is again
seen as an arrival from a "rich" place. It also relates to the peanuts and
the discussion of a fantasy house. Overall the intended impression is one of
somewhere else being richer and hence better (part fantasy). However the
narrator has come from that other "place" and sees things differently.
Richer doesn't necessarily mean better. The Uncle and aunt don't recognise
or understand this point of view. Their bewilderment is expressed by the
Uncle in the last stanza and this relates to other clues  about the
narrator, for instance in his or her response to the tourist trap in S1 and
to his or her sensitivity to the "human richness" that exists in this
household, revealed at various parts of the poem. You could imagine the
narrator in turn being bewildered or perhaps intrigued by the Uncle's
sentiments in the final stanza. It would follow that the narrator would feel
alienated (in a nice way) by this culture, foreign in more ways than one,
given what is gradually divulged about him/her. But that's just what I
intended when I wrote it. Poems have a way of not following an author's
bidding, falling short of even low expectations, but allowing other
possibilities instead.


BW

Colin


----- Original Message -----
From: "Sue Scalf" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, July 17, 2004 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: newsub/Xmas


> I love this glimpse into another world.  I don't, however, understand the
> last stanza at all.  Could you enlighten me?