"Women Like You" p. 92-94
I heard the class went over p. 92-94 “Women Like You” in class when I was absent, so I thought I should probably add some comments about what I discovered when I was rereading the poem. For me, as I am sure for many others as well, it is difficult to analyze poetry. Mainly because every line seems to have a hidden meaning behind, hidden meanings that I often miss . I was, however, able to catch some interesting meanings in this poem that hopefully make sense.
The first thing I noticed about this poem was its organization. I know when reading Szymborska we often looked at how some of her poems were organized and how that added to the message she wanted to portray through the poems. When looking at this poem, I noticed how unorganized and all over the place it looked, kind of like the different versus were taken by different people and glued on the page with some lines on the left hand side of the page and others on the right. The way this poem is set up it relates to the novel as a whole in the way that Ondaatje, when trying to find truth of his past, receives bunches of stories from different points of view. All these stories, b/c they are from different people, have different sides to them and Ondaatje has to sift through these stories (as we have mentioned in class) to try to find out knowledge about his past and where he comes from. When reading this poem it is the same thing. It looks kind of jumbled but when you read through it, though it seems confusing, you can figure out what the author is trying to tell you.
Another part of the poem I noticed was when, the author writes: “who came here / out of the bleached land / climbed this fortress / to adore the rock / and with the solitude of the air / behind them / carved an alphabet / whose motive was desire” (Ondaatje 93). → Right when I saw “bleached land” I thought of the white man and that diction that the author used helped me to understand that verse a lot better. It talks about how the white men came to what seemed like just enjoy the sights and people of the land but instead they had their own corrupt goals. In result they molded the place to feed their own greed which we've seen in many books we have read in the syllabus: HoD, the government in The Poisonwood Bible, etc.
Another verse I saw that I thought related very closely to the novel as a whole was: “Hundreds of small verses / by different hands / became one / habit of unrequited” (Ondaatje 93) → Like I talked about with the organization of this poem, this whole novel is based on many story from different points of view that has to be sifted through in order to get the knowledge and truths behind it. The part of this verse I don’t understand though is when he writes “became one / habit of unrequited”