Chapter 12: Sound and Sense

In Sylvia Plath's poem "Old Ladies Home" she uses a omnipresent speaker to portray death through a journey in the home of  elderly women.  The poem slowly leads up to the concept of death. In the first stanza, the speaker observes what the surroundings. Most of the words she uses to describe the house relate to nature like "beetles," "earthenware," "sun," "rocks," and "heat." I think this is to show how connected to the earth the elderly women are. In a really dark way....they will soon be in the earth, but on a lighter note they are so old and distracted by so little. Plath even writes that the pictures of their grandchildren are distant, showing they dont care so much about things anymore.Also, the pieces of nature she chooses to describe seem to be very frail like the breath and the beetles. If someone just steps on a beetle it will die and that echoes the condition the women could be in.  Next, the speaker observes what they are doing like knitting and the different sounds of their voices. I think this is a retirement home where maybe a funeral is taking place. She uses the word black a lot and writes about bonneted ladies, which makes me picture a funeral. One of the questions pointed me to the last line of the poem in which there are only 6 syllables in the last line. Throughout the poem each stanza is 7 lines with 7 syllables in each line, except for the last line of the last stanza. This represents death. It is all of a sudden and goes along with a line that talks about a shortening of breath. I really liked how Plath did this because it made me appreciate how rythm and meter can do more than just make the poem sound pleasing to the ear, but they can really have a deep meaning.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Third Resignation

After reading some of Marquez's work it became clear to me he has a fascination with death. I still don't know much about his personal background, but if I had to guess he must have had a very interesting life. Maybe a conflict with religion or maybe many family members dead. In the Eyes of a Blue Dog, the story begins with the description of a man struggling to move. He writes how he wants to squeeze his temples and how he wishes he could catch a cat. The language is very descriptive and vivid. It was kind of hard to decipher that the person being described was dead for a while. At first, it is clear there is some sort of paralysis holding the person back but its not that clear whether it is physical or mental. While the narrator of the story is seemingly dead, he seems to have a grip on everything going around him. He mentions the stench of the rotting corpse and the sounds of the dishwasher. The boys mother orders him an extra large coffin for him to "grow" into. I don't know if maybe this is a cultural or a religious tradition, but I found this part hard to understand. I took it literally at first thinking maybe the boy was on some sort of life support and wasn't actually dead, then i thought that maybe he is dead and his mother bought a large coffin to take away the pain of  small boy dying...Not really sure. Then, the last paragraph of the story changed everything for me. I thought that maybe the narrator was someone looking at a coffin realizing that could be them. The story was complicated and hold deep meaning. I believe that after more research on Marquez and applying his life to this story will make it easier to understand and help me derive more meaning from it.

Chapter 10 Sound and Sense

The poem For a Lamb by Richard Eberhart has a very dark and vivid tone at the start. The poem gives a vivid image of a dead and mangled lamb lying atop daisies. Daisies are a white flower and white things often represent purity. At first I thought that maybe the lamb was tarnishing the purity and innocence, but a lamb is white also. The figure tarnishing the purity and innocence is whoever hurt the poor, sweet lamb. Eberhart notes that "the guts were out for the crows to eat" creating another disturbing image of an animal being eaten. The author tries to cover these descriptions up with the fact that the sheep is asleep. Erberhart says, "the sleep looked deep" implying that while it may sound painful, the lamb is asleep so it doesnt matter. This image immediately made me think of an image of Jesus Christ when he is on the cross. Jesus is presented with a crown of thorns around his head, like the lamb has daisies. While daisies and thorns are slightly different, I believe the image of jesus is still prevelant. The second stanza of this poem is much more ambiguous than the first. In the first stanza the reader knows exactly whats happening, but as it progresses, the lamb seems to lose its clarity. The first few words are "Where's the lamb" maybe implying that however this lamb died, it may still have an owner still looking for it. The lamb is "in the wind" showing that the owner or whoever proposed the first question could not handle hearing that it had died. The author again changes the reality of the gruesomeness by saying "there's a lamb in the daisies" in the last line.