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havensaregnaPart 1:
Lorna Crozier uses packing for a long journey as an extended metaphor in her poem “Packing for the Future”. The word choices in the first stanza remind you of going on a literal journey: she uses words like walk, water, stones, high places, and earth, as a metaphor for the figurative journey of life. The title “Packing for the Future” is referring to gathering together what is important, and making the separation between what is worth carrying around and what can be left behind. These can be abstract such as “that small thing you cannot leave” or literal objects such as “the photograph that keeps you sane”. The line “[t]ake the thickest socks wherever you’re going you'll have to walk” implies that a self reliance will be necessary for the journey that you may have to walk alone, so be prepared by “[taking] the thickest socks” and stay grounded with “the way they hold you to the earth”. The sixth stanza that begins with “There may be doors nailed shut” is a metaphor for the challenges and rejection that accompany growing up, and “Take the dream you've been having since you were a child,” is the hope and innocence that if kept intact gives us the resiliency to keep going. And finally “Always travel lighter than the heart” means to not weigh ourselves down with the excess emotional baggage that will negatively weigh heavy on our mind and heart.
Richard Wilbur uses two extended metaphor’s for growing up in his poem “The Writer”: at first his daughter who is “the writer” is the metaphorical ships captain who is embarking on a new passage of life, and secondly she is the starling who must escape from that very room no matter how difficult. The tool for achieving this escape is through her writing. The author uses words like prow, gunwhale, and cargo to describe the ship that is her room, her life, and her writing when he says “In her room at the prow of the house”,“the stuff of her life is a great cargo”, and “from her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale”. The second metaphor is that of a starling “Which was trapped in that very room” just as his daughter is trapped until she grows up or gains freedom through her writing. As the starling “batter[s]” against the window while trying to escape, finally “clearing the sill of the world” this is the author’s hope for his daughter that she will not have to struggle as the starling did.
Both Crozier and Wilbur use extended metaphor to describe the nature of growing up, whether it compares to a long journey or a starling that is looking for freedom. The metaphors within the poems are an effective way to offer advice for how to approach life. Crozier speaks to a more general audience and to life’s journey in general, and Wilbur specifies his advice to his own daughter while being more specific to the process of growing up. The use of metaphor however generalizes both poems to some extent as the variation of images allow for creativity in the interpretation.
Part 2:
There are a few areas of overlap in Sylvia Plath’s biography and her poem titled “Daddy”. She says in her poem, “I was ten when they buried you” and she was in fact ten years old when her father died from complications with diabetes. She attempted suicide with the aid of sleeping pills when she was twenty years old as said in the next line, “At twenty I tried to die”. When she says, “I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look…And I said I do, I do.” She may be referring to when she met Ted Hughes, who could have reminded her of her father and married him.
I do not believe that there is much accuracy in the details. Two very prominent issues that come with the accuracy of a biography, be it self written as poetry or an outside biography, are subjectivity and a selective memory. We interpret the world through our own lenses of our experience and can never be truly objective. Having access to the journals and poetry of Sylvia Plath can illuminate and back up pieces of the biographical information and vice versa. I do not think that she chose to write her life in this way for any purpose, I think that she was simply writing what was her internal experience. In my opinion an autobiography can be “art and lies”. It is not uncommon for people to recount the memory of a shared experience in entirely different ways. The art that is poetry and the lies that are our emotional experience is what I think Plath would consider her autobiography.
Lorna Crozier uses packing for a long journey as an extended metaphor in her poem “Packing for the Future”. The word choices in the first stanza remind you of going on a literal journey: she uses words like walk, water, stones, high places, and earth, as a metaphor for the figurative journey of life. The title “Packing for the Future” is referring to gathering together what is important, and making the separation between what is worth carrying around and what can be left behind. These can be abstract such as “that small thing you cannot leave” or literal objects such as “the photograph that keeps you sane”. The line “[t]ake the thickest socks wherever you’re going you'll have to walk” implies that a self reliance will be necessary for the journey that you may have to walk alone, so be prepared by “[taking] the thickest socks” and stay grounded with “the way they hold you to the earth”. The sixth stanza that begins with “There may be doors nailed shut” is a metaphor for the challenges and rejection that accompany growing up, and “Take the dream you've been having since you were a child,” is the hope and innocence that if kept intact gives us the resiliency to keep going. And finally “Always travel lighter than the heart” means to not weigh ourselves down with the excess emotional baggage that will negatively weigh heavy on our mind and heart.
Richard Wilbur uses two extended metaphor’s for growing up in his poem “The Writer”: at first his daughter who is “the writer” is the metaphorical ships captain who is embarking on a new passage of life, and secondly she is the starling who must escape from that very room no matter how difficult. The tool for achieving this escape is through her writing. The author uses words like prow, gunwhale, and cargo to describe the ship that is her room, her life, and her writing when he says “In her room at the prow of the house”,“the stuff of her life is a great cargo”, and “from her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys like a chain hauled over a gunwale”. The second metaphor is that of a starling “Which was trapped in that very room” just as his daughter is trapped until she grows up or gains freedom through her writing. As the starling “batter[s]” against the window while trying to escape, finally “clearing the sill of the world” this is the author’s hope for his daughter that she will not have to struggle as the starling did.
Both Crozier and Wilbur use extended metaphor to describe the nature of growing up, whether it compares to a long journey or a starling that is looking for freedom. The metaphors within the poems are an effective way to offer advice for how to approach life. Crozier speaks to a more general audience and to life’s journey in general, and Wilbur specifies his advice to his own daughter while being more specific to the process of growing up. The use of metaphor however generalizes both poems to some extent as the variation of images allow for creativity in the interpretation.
Part 2:
There are a few areas of overlap in Sylvia Plath’s biography and her poem titled “Daddy”. She says in her poem, “I was ten when they buried you” and she was in fact ten years old when her father died from complications with diabetes. She attempted suicide with the aid of sleeping pills when she was twenty years old as said in the next line, “At twenty I tried to die”. When she says, “I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look…And I said I do, I do.” She may be referring to when she met Ted Hughes, who could have reminded her of her father and married him.
I do not believe that there is much accuracy in the details. Two very prominent issues that come with the accuracy of a biography, be it self written as poetry or an outside biography, are subjectivity and a selective memory. We interpret the world through our own lenses of our experience and can never be truly objective. Having access to the journals and poetry of Sylvia Plath can illuminate and back up pieces of the biographical information and vice versa. I do not think that she chose to write her life in this way for any purpose, I think that she was simply writing what was her internal experience. In my opinion an autobiography can be “art and lies”. It is not uncommon for people to recount the memory of a shared experience in entirely different ways. The art that is poetry and the lies that are our emotional experience is what I think Plath would consider her autobiography.
