A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
My swirling wants.
Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations. They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds. I want you to see this before I leave: the experience of repetition as death the failure of criticism to locate the pain the poster in the bus that said: my bleeding is under control A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths. A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor. These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight. When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time. When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. I could say: those mountains have a meaning but further than that I could not say. To do something very common, in my own way. |
Is she talking about wanting a woman?
Whose lips? The words of others, attacked her as a human. What is duress? Emptiness of her husband possibly. The drug was the healing of people that surrounded her. After the death of her husband she came back to continuing writing her poems and enforcing feminism. It then led her to live her own life afterwards. She wants you to feel her fearlessness. What does the red plant signify? The last attempt = the last chance to give to her husband. These certain characteristics define a women, in their different looks. What kind of time? It is time for women to start living for themselves, because she focuses on how she was limited towards not living her own life. This trip means leaving her husband, not necessarily for someone else but to experience life in a different way. She sees herself in an uncommon way because not every women has the opportunity to write about their life experiences and their feelings. |
Throughout the poem, she writes in fragments. The grammar in the second stanza that she is referring to is her husband. There is no flow within the poem, which gives it a weird use of diction. It is very choppy. She uses metaphors such as "those mountains have a meaning but further than that I could not say." She compares herself to the mountains. She uses imagery in stanza nine to express the language of women. Not every women has the opportunity to express themselves the she does in her poems, and she wants to open that light to women to express how their experiences and feelings.