The poem again depicts two separate characters, the speaker who is clearly bitter about the kind of advice those close to her have been giving her and expresses a distinct skepticism about what a person can actually attain through concepts such as hard work and facing down one’s fears.
The poem has two parts, the first stanza repeating the advice she has had to tolerate over the years, from people who are so-called wise, a series of cliches that are supposed to help put a person’s feet firmly on the road to success.
The second stanza challenges those presumptions and paints her world and how it defies those old maxims.
The first part are the typical lectures people get, a peptalk, someone preaching about life, and how she ought to challenge herself, face her fears, and step out from her safe place – needing to take chances in order to advance. After all, the best things, this know-it-all claims, come as a result of struggle.
And she is clearly struggling, even further from that safe place she lingered in during her poem on lulls.
Other people tell her that in order to get ahead, she has to take risks, can’t hide in a bubble, when she is telling them back, no place is safe, and every bit of her life is a struggle to survive. She cannot step out her comfort zone because that place doesn’t exist for her.
Every breath she takes is a challenge.
There is a link between this poem and her last poem about the illusiveness of success, as well as the poem about The Times, which seems hopeful on the surface, but is also full of angst, though told in a voice that is more remote in diction than these later poems are, almost reverent as she goes into that distant holy place where the saints “the great and near great” hang on the gilt walls in gilt frames.
She may have had another reason for using a remote voice in the Times poem, creating distance between her as a writer and the person who must find a way to sell herself, the gilt implying the word “guilt “in this house of the holy, and the ticker tape description that ends with the word “crashed” as if reflecting her crashed career in our office, needing to convince herself that she actually belongs there among the greats.
But this poem and the one about the petulant boy are more direct, the first talking about how illusive success is, something that is taunting and deceptive, while this poem is full of bitterness, about how hard she had worked to get something, and no peptalk no matter how well-intentioned, can make it better, and these people, whomever they are advising her, haven’t a cluse as to what she is going through.
Oddly enough, this poem plays off her one-time familiar advice about living “moment to moment,” only here she is saying each moment is hell.
Facing her fears doesn’t dispel them. She is clearly terrified, unable to breath, in a life and death struggle, and good, bad or best, all she gets from her hard-fought struggle is more grief, or as she put it in an earlier poem, watching what she clawed her way to get escape her grasp.
In a life like this, there is no such thing as a safe place, and her fear echoes previous poems about “locking and unlocking.” She is always looking over her shoulder, waiting for the tap.
This is not a poem aimed at anyone as many of her earlier poems over the summer were. This is a poem about life and reality, and the inability of other people to full grasp the struggle she is undergoing, and how every day is a tussle just to remain alive.
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