Thanks to all for your thoughts which I have read with ineterest.
In my email I did infer that I had forgotten to allow for the
layers and levels of meaning which exist in RKs work.
There seems ot be a search for a single explanation of the meaning
and/or motive for this and other related poems reflecting the events at the time but, as I said, feelings
can change and develop after the tumult has died and as time passes
it is possible that different emotions, the source of one's grief (sadness,
anger, guilt, self-doubt, denial), will rise to the surface and inevitably onto the page in
complex, mixed and disguised forms.
Was RK not just simply putting his feelings to paper at a given time in the only style he knew which combined personal
losses with the scarifices made by the many (not just his own) as he contemplated,
over the years,; what could I have done differently ?
Tony Hanley
|