Thematic Analysis of Two Poems Essay Example

are rich in imagery and association. The idea which Pastan forwards regarding metaphor is that "the primary function of the metaphor is to order the world through language. Its function on philosophical terms is to link disparate entities and compare unlike things, even if this has to be done in an intellectually or emotionally violent way (Jackson 161).

In "Notes From the Delivery Room" just such a technique is used to create penetrating and surprising lines such as: "Strapped down victim in an old comic book, I have been here before, this place where pain winces off the walls like too bright light" (Pastan). Even an alert reader would be surprised by the juxtaposition of comic-books and w woman giving birth, or pain with light -- but the unlikely comparisons, true to Pastan's stated aesthetic, allow her theme to begin to thread itself beyond the violent images, to grow out of it.

The friction between the imagery and metaphor and the slowly emerging theme of organic wholeness create tension in the poem and tension in the reader and this tension is an aesthetic representation of the birth process or even "birth-struggle. " Slowly, the perceptive reader begins to first suspect, then totally understand, that the poem's theme is birth and not any specific birth, but the universal experience of birth. The need for the universality of the poem's conversational language and "mundane" imagery suddenly becomes clear: the poem's theme of birth could apply to a baby, a poem, a universe.

It is a microcosmic "creation myth" couched in womens' experience, but made universal through language and metaphor. In a similar vein, Song

also "uses familiar words so that they are no longer strictly defined by previous use" (Wallace) and this subtle re-ordering of language is a window through which theme can be expressed. One startling example of Song's capacity to surprise with language appears in the following lines from "The Hand That Feeds.

The use of alliteration between the words "Pinned" and "platypus" implies a connection between the primordial, deep past and the breast-feeding of a child. The word "Pinned" suggests not only the oppression of biology, but the oppression of human history and the description of a woman's breast-nipple as a "little piece of meat" (Song) is as bold as it is memorable. Again, the idea of the shock-imagery and language is to open the reader to the poem's theme. So, like Pastan, Song uses somewhat conversational diction and -- obviously -- like Pastan, Song grounds her poem in a "domestic" setting, one which might be considered mundane.

However, unlike Pastan, Song uses language to surprise adn shock in order to violently interject, rather than subtly weave, her themes. One aspect of Song's aesthetic is to ground not only poetic themes but the art of poetry itself in a domestic sphere: "the making of poetry is not innately superior to other activities," (Wallace) and so this grounding provides a form of universality for a poem like "The Hand That Feeds" despite its somewhat jarring diction.

Both poets are concerned with representing womens' experience as universal experience. Along with doing this, the poets necessarily upturn a few conventional ideas about gender along the way. In "The Hand That Feeds" Song blatantly "explores the formation

and re-invention of gender identity" and this radical reinvention is evidenced in lines such as: "I'm a new magician. Who can't produce the rabbit  from my swollen hat which, despite the seeming platitude of the images, disguises a deep and profound inversion of conventional feminine identity. The line is basically a satirical take on what a woman knows the rest of the world expects of her, but what she must find all alone in herself and the capacity to give birth, as in the Pastan poem, is viewed as both universal and subjective simultaneously.

Of interest is the fact that Song is regarded by critics as a poet for whom "place is conceived as history because the microcosm of birth and biological determinism which she explores in "The Hand That Feeds" suggests a sort of archetypal and eternal quality about the act of breast-feeding; with the poem ending on what could be termed a "cosmic" or universally expressed positivism: "to the rhythm of the absolute. " (Song). Like Pastan, Song finds the birth paradigm to express and essentially positive and universal capacity that flows through ordinary human lives.