Winter Field

Winter Field (p. 529)

The poem as a whole seems to describe the speaker's body and the events that surround it. The speaker first talks about a winter field and says that it is not a summer field in snow, and later mentions her body under layers of blankets. The use of two different states of a field gives two different views: the summer field is the view of the poem's audience, and the winter field is the poet's view of herself. The intended audience seems to have misinterpreted her responses, particularly in the second stanza, where they tried to awaken her despite that she did not give any sound or display of an awakened state. In the third stanza, the speaker compares herself to what seems to be a fish by the descriptions, and instead of packing the fish in ice, the speaker is packed under blankets, which may harm the fish more than ice (I think that when fish are frozen in ponds, they only hibernate, and later awaken when the pond thaws). Overall, the poem seems to describe the torture that the speaker faces after the audience find her.

This poem particularly felt like one of those poems where I felt immediately decapitated, when I read the last stanza, where the audience has tried on multiple occasions to resuscitate and comfort the speaker, but the speaker still does not show any love to the audience. I have felt the receiving end of what the speaker says in this poem through several people I've known, and it helps to remind me that nobody is ever one-sided, and that there is always more than one side to each person, despite their outer appearance.