In the midst of all the hostility, the poem she posted on Sunday morning seems tame, a short tidbit without the usual bunch in the face that more recent poems possessed.
This is an illusion. This is not a happy poem, filled with a
sense of skepticism readers of The New York Times might have felt when they
read, “God is dead.”
Possibly inspired by the view from her kitchen window, the
poem comes with two primary sounds, the chiming of church bells and the wafting
of human voices over the roof tops, the high and low, the ethereal godliness
and the base sound of common people.
It is a Sunday morning, the start of church service in the
city.
The poem seems to question faith, or at least, that
manifestations of God on earth are manmade. Someone is pulling the cord to make
the bells sound, not God. If God was making the bells ring, there would be no
uneasy rhythm, it would be perfect.
You can almost envision the hands pulling the cord, perhaps
the same calloused hands that build the town she and the church overlook from
their high perch.
God didn’t build these towns, hard working people did, as
shown by their calloused hands.
Callous has other meanings which contribute to the dark tone
of the poem, insensitive, rude, common, base, unrefined, ordinary.
The poem contrasts the two sounds, the elevated God-like
sound of bells, and the wafting voices of ordinary people, somehow defining the
boundaries of our existence on that Sunday in that particular place.
But the poem challenges these distinctions, people are
responsible for both, pulling the cords that make the bells ring, and the
voices wafting over those cities ordinary men built with their hands.
The poem defines the boundaries of mankind by these two
sounds, only they are created by the same ordinary people. This gives a sad
tone to the poem, a vision of a hard, difficult world, a struggle, and maybe
the illusion of faith in things beyond the ordinary.
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