Tapestry

"Tapestry" (p. 431-432)

This poem to me has amazing language because all of the scenes of the tapestry seem to have almost no connection with each other, but in a sense they are all connected in that they cover space.

The first stanza concentrates on things that seem pleasant to most people - trees, cities, rivers, and snow. Most of the subjects in this stanza appear natural to people and civilization. The second stanza, however, focuses specifically on moving objects and people who perform seemingly mischievious deeds. Not until the last line of the second stanza, however, is any mischief really happening. The fox carrying off the chicken is not necessarily going to kill and eat it, the naked couple on their wedding night may not necessarily engage in intercourse, a column of smoke might be rising from a fire to keep people warm. The woman spitting into the milk, however, intentionally wants to contaminate it. The third stanza consists of a "question-and-answer" section, and focuses mostly on the sleeping man who will eventually enter a barbershop to remove all of his hair from his head. That he is sleeping at the moment seems to show that all of the appealing objects in the first stanza and the supposed mischief in the second stanza are largely ignored or unseen by most of the people in the world, despite that all are somehow connected to each other through space. The last two lines of the poem sound anti-climactic and blunt. The single-syllable words that imply the areas where his hair will be shaved seem to reflect the barber's speed in removing the hair, as if the barber is accustomed to doing such an act of removing the man's specific facial identity as well as possibly making him seem androgynous. The removal of hair occurs at the end of the poem (but in the poem itself it will happen in the future), showing that at the end of the day (or our lives), all people end up as the same - humans who are connected to each other through proximity in "space" that the tapestry keeps together.

The third stanza, to me, is particularly striking because of the "question-and-answer" form - it seems somewhat more personal, as if the speaker tries to ask questions about the tapestry and where it is located. It begins ominously, as if to say that all people live on the same tapestry because behind it, there seems to be only empty space. Any person who might become disconnected from the social and natural interactions formed within the tapestry will become lost and may fall into the space behind, where they might experience a loss of identity as the sleeping man (who lost his identity due to either ignorance or lack of knowledge of the world).