A Life Analysis

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.

The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.


Submitted by Venus

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I DONT UNDERSTAND THIS POEM!
its really bothering me cause i have a presentation on it.
SENDING AN SOS!! PLEASE HELP WITH THIS POEM!!
REBEL MUCH?!
YUPP

| Posted on 2009-05-27 | by a guest

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holy crap this is so hard to analyze.
i have a 6th grade school assignment due and i cant decide wat to say about this poem cuz its so cofizling
ugghh

| Posted on 2009-04-09 | by a guest

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I think she is talking about her time in a mental institution following her first suicide attempt.

| Posted on 2009-03-23 | by a guest

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I personally believe that this poem speaks of WWII. the tapestry is the air view of London. the clear tear is London in blackout during the blitz. the Chinese chime describes the large radar facilities in china and made by china. The waves are the Atlantic fleet in formation sailing tightly packed in fear of bombers and subs. the lights may be searchlights in Berlin. the lady is Britain and lives quietly in the war to try to evade attention from the Germans main force. Britain is isolated from all other countries because it is water locked like a fetus in a bottle. the drowned man is most likely the United States of America after pearl harbor. foreseeing the cold war, they came to Britain`s aid. This is a very good poem.

| Posted on 2008-06-18 | by a guest

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i dont understand! help! this is so confusing and i have to do it for school. and it is due soon

| Posted on 2008-03-27 | by a guest

.: A Life :.

A Life is a bitter sweet poem. the words and the story it tells of a lady trying to commit suicide and not succeeding are harsh. when she goes to a hospital i believe she feels trapped inside the walls and it trying to escape within her mind

| Posted on 2008-03-27 | by a guest