Symbolism

To be honest symbolism is something I often hunt for when I’m reading literature. So often I try to find the significance of the text and sometimes I even feel as if I spend too much time on a particular section, word, or phrase of the text in order to draw some kind of meaning from what it is saying. I feel that many of the text we’ve read in class have such deeper meanings to them than what we give them credit for. Sometimes it’s hard to think that the basics that we discuss about a text is the overall meaning of what the author meant when he or she decided to write that material. In a poem like “The Traveling Onion,” it’s hard to conclude that all the poet is talking about is the literal onion that we so happen to forget about after we chop it up and throw it in our meals, it’s also hard to just take the text as it is after reading a line in the poem that says “I could kneel and praise all small forgotten miracles.” I honestly believe that this line in the poem goes far beyond the literal meaning. This poem “The Traveling Onion” I truly believe that the poet is using the onion to symbolize how we take things for granted, how we focus so much on the big things in our life and how we complain about how much problem we have or we just focus on the negatives of a every situation and we don’t take time to realize that without these small onions that we have in our lives that we would not have make it as far as we are today. Maybe sometimes I over think literature, but I think if you just focus on the big picture and don’t focus on these small pixels that make up this picture, then you can never fully appreciate that picture.

The Garden, "En robe de parade"

Of all the text we have read during this semester, one that stands out to me the most is the poem “The Garden, En robe de parade.” There are many reasons why I find this poem so intriguing and captivating, I am not sure if somehow deep down inside of me I’m able to relate to the intense agony of this poem, or is it the great deal of sympathy I feel for the women described in the poem. However, I just feel like I’m able to understand this poem in more than just a sophistication level, but I feel I’m able to connect with author in such of a way that I’m able to visualize every word in the poem in some kind of way, shape, or form.
For a person just glancing at this poem, it will be very difficult to comprehend the actual significance or imagery of the poem. Honestly, I probably read this poem between 10 to 15 times and I still don’t think I have a complete understanding of what the original meanings of this poem are, I can only go by my opinions of what I believe this poem is talking about. This poem can be easily misunderstood if you don’t take time to do a research on some of the things that is talked about. The first stanza of the poem says “Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall she walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, and she is dying piecemeal of a sort of emotional anemia.” This stanza of the poem have such great imagery, you can almost imagine the skein of loose silk blown against a wall. However, the first couple of times I read this stanza I had no idea of what the meanings of it was, so I took time to read it over and then took some time to actually research some of the words I was having trouble with. Kensington Gardens troubled me; I had no idea of where it was at or any kind of background on this place. After some research I discovered that it was actually once a private garden, it was considered one of the Royal Parks of London, and this is a very big place, it covers around 275 acres. You’re probably wondering why I needed to know the information about Kensington Gardens. Well, I strongly feel that when you have an idea of what a story or a poem is talking about, then you are most likely to get a better understanding of what the significance of the text is. My understanding of just the first two lines of the poem indicates to me that this lady that is described to be “like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall” is a person of higher class and the fact that she is walking in a path in Kensington Gardens automatically gave me this image of a wealthy women.
The poem then goes on to say, “she is dying piecemeal of a sort of emotional anemia.” After reading this line of the stanza many times, I started to get this vivid picture of the poet observing this women and I could almost imagine the look on his face or the pain inside of him at that moment when he sees this lady in such distress. “Emotional anemia” is used to describe the emotions of this lady. After reading this line I took some time to reflect on what it really means to have that type of emotional pain. This line of the poem troubled me a lot, I just could not begin to understand how much a person had to be going through that could cause them to be in that stage.
The next stanza states that “ roundabout there is a rabble of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth.” I had the hardest time with this stanza of all the rest of the poem. What threw me off the most is that these stanzas, for the most part, just don’t seem to have any kind of connection with the first one, it just don’t seem like it was suppose to be there. However, I concluded that maybe this line is basically the author expressing his anger about a these kids that he sees around him, running around or maybe he had a bad experience with a group of kids and he wants to express how mad he is that these same kids that are filthy and sturdy are the same ones who will one day inherit the earth, so I believe the author is just expressing his anger of the matter.
The final stanza of the poem says “In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like someone to speak to her, and is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.” Though the most depressing part of the poem, I also find this stanza to be the most interesting part of the poem as a whole. The imagery in this section is incredible. The author of the poem is able to view this lady and I’m not sure if they knew each other before this, but the author is able to see that this lady is going through a hard time just by the way she looks. My interpretation of this stanza is that I strongly believe that this lady is very suicidal, I believe that she is going through some kind of emotional decay at home and she is not sure of how to deal with it. The line that speaks of her boredom and how exquisite and excessive it is, push me to think that whatever the conflict that is going on in her life it is something that has been going on for a while, so long that she is bored of it and she is simply tired of it. I feel that the author really want to approach this lady and tell her that everything will be ok, however he is not sure of how to approach her and let her know that everything will be ok. Sometime in life I think we get to these intersections and we have no idea of where we are going and we just want someone to direct us to the right path and we sometime fail to realize that the right path is through God.