And, at the end the tone shifts into frustrated as the speaker like someone who gives up to deliver her message, to be someone who is heard. It is such a bold statement to those willing to hear it.
Reference to the meeting house, made of trees, and then it is being abandoned and someone wanting to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. These are shown in,. As there are words like revolutionary and sell, so I think it may also related to war, industrialization, and capitalism. These are shown in, near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted line 3 who disappeared into those shadows. Bagikan ini: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Follow Following.
Clevaster Join 72 other followers. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments Email Required Name Required Website. Yet as the speaker perceives the light she evades the trap, and the allegorical nature of her surroundings becomes more clear. I felt a sense of fatalism and dejection at the beginning of her trip, but her words are now leaden with conviction. Posing a rhetorical question more to herself than her audience, the speaker realizes the ultimate futility of her cause.
But rather than recede into the shadows, the speaker resolves to speak. She personifies a force of finality, amplifying not only her voice but also of those who have been sidelined. It was dismaying to see the striking parallels between the cultural inequity in and the sharp reckoning of power disparities dividing our nation in Her work speaks to the fundamental need for a change in the collective consciousness.
The "conversation about trees" that Brecht refers to in this poem from the s has often been associated with poets who were then writing about nature rather than about the "atrocities" taking place even before the Second World War began. In this entirely justified reading, Brecht is setting up an apparently exclusive alternative: write about nature, or write about politics.
Because you still listen, because in times like these. Brecht addresses "those born later"; in contrast, Rich addresses her contemporaries: those readers or listeners who "still listen. In a reading of these lines in terms of the reading of Brecht sketched above, a "conversation about trees" becomes a way for a poet to trick someone into thinking about "atrocities" rather than a way of avoiding doing so.
Writing poetry about nature, here, does not exclude writing poetry about politics; in fact, "in times like these," only poetry about nature can engage the listener in such a way as to get poetry about politics heard at all. Unlike Brecht, who mentions trees only once, and only indirectly "a conversation about trees" and not the trees themselves , Rich actually does write about trees. In keeping with the poem's conclusion, the first stanza already makes a move from trees to politics:.
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill. Rather than politics in general, this is a history of a "revolutionary" politics engaged in by "the persecuted. The obstacles to revolution include the atrocities referred to by Brecht. The " disappearance " of South American leftists during the s and s may only hover in the shadows of Rich's first stanza, but the idea of someone "being disappeared" by the authorities appears explicitly at the end of her second stanza:.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled. The reference to a "Russian poem" comes quite unexpectedly; is it the "mushrooms" or "the edge of dread" that is supposed to make it necessary to insist that we "not be fooled"?
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