Thursday, April 12, 2012

Silence

I don't know if I've mentioned it already this semester, but I really struggle with poetry. I'm a prose girl. I like paragraphs and linear thoughts clearly spelled out. That being said, it is no wonder that when I came to "Silence" and thought I finally understood one of the poems (kind of), I was actually wrong. I first read "Silence" online without any annotations. When I read it at first I believed that the speaker's father was talking negatively of the "superior people" he mentions (2). Firstly, it seemed a little like mocking to use the term "superior people" instead of upper class, gentry, or something similar. Secondly, the image of these people as a cat preying on a mouse seemed rather sinister to me. Then I read the version of the poem in the anthology as well as the annotation that comes with it. The annotation shows that this phrase was borrowed from Moore's father and that he was referring to himself when he spoke of these "superior people." So it seems he was not be negative after all, but is the speaker, the one remembering her father, being negative? Is she mocking him or being ironic? Seriously, I don't know, so if anyone has any insight please let me know. I tend to be very literal and it is highly likely that I've taken this in the wrong direction altogether.

2 comments:

  1. Marie, I hope you don't get too discouraged by poetry. I know it can be so frustrating, I used to really get annoyed by it. I think I finally broke through when I stopped trying to figure out exactly what the author was saying and instead let the ideas seep out of the writing. Wow, that just sounded really condescending. I didn't mean it to!

    I really like that you at first thought he was being mocking but then the footnote explained he was actually referring to himself. For me, this seems to denote a sense of mocking, but it comes from Moore herself, possibly mocking her father/superior people referring to themselves as such?

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  2. Hm...I interpreted this poem differently. But isn't that the beauty of poetry? I looked at this poem as if the speaker of the poem is reminiscing about what her father used to stay to him/her. Now that the speaker has grown and is able to make his/her father's house his/her inn, do you think the speaker has become a "superior person?" Or, is it just a matter of growing up and being more independent? Because of the last line in particular, I thought it plausible to assume that this father/child relationship has weakened, and now the child has become the type of person his/her father previously warned him/her about.

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