Interpretation of Grace Chua's (a love song, with two goldfish)

[JBI]

I don't really think there is enough supporting evidence to say the fish were in separate bowls. Did anyone else consider that maybe the "life beyond the bowl" had to do with escaping small town life? Maybe I'm too American, but that was a thought. I gave more interpretations, but that struck me as possible. Rutherford, I disagree with you. I loved this poem, enough to print a copy once I got home. Simple is not always bad. At least IB provides interesting works (the prose this year was good too). Take an AP Lit or Lang exam, and you'll regret your statement. Oh, and JBI, if you didn't know, all IB students take their examines at more or less the same day and time. So no one would have been able to copy your answer. Not that I would have anyway. I mean, it takes a certain amount of hubris to think someone will just take one random poster's interpretation just because.

I don't know - I am in Canada and not in IB - but I have had my posts unfootnoted in a presentation in front of my class the next day, to which I responded by asking a question that obviously would make them look awful.

[Sbrosszell]

My initial reaction to the poem is that it's really similar to a young love story. Teens or even pre-teens. The feelings of isolation are something everybody goes through at that age and the desire to explore the world, as well as interest in each other which I interpreted as innocent in nature, are also attributes of young teens. Them both being in a fishbowl could be that they're self-absorbed and the centres of their own world, also something teenagers tend to be. Finally the boy and girls' means of interacting with each other seems tentative and the love collapses in the end, which is also typical of that age. Make sense?

Also I think the poem was selected because it's pretty simple and takes little abstract connections; it only uses a few literary devices common to poetry and repeats those a lot.

[MrMatias97]

(love song, with two goldfish)


(He's a drifter, always
floating around her, has
nowhere else to go. He wishes
she would sing, not much, just the scales;
or take some notice,
give him the fish eye.)

(Bounded by round walls
she makes fish eyes
and kissy lips at him, darts
behind pebbles, swallows
his charms hook, line and sinker)

(He's bowled over. He would
take her to the ocean, they could
count the waves. There,
in the submarine silence, they would share
their deepest secrets. Dive for pearls
like stars.)

(But her love's since
gone belly-up. His heart sinks
like a fish. He drinks
like a stone. Drowns those sorrows,
stares emptily through glass.)

(the reason, she said
she wanted)
(and he could not give)
a life
beyond the
(bowl)


By Grace Chua



It seems that it is just me, but I feel as if the goldfish within the poem are PHYSICALLY separated and in different bowls.... Does this seem to be too far of a stretch? He is described to "stares emptily through glass". But, many others felt thet were within the same bowl... Is there room for interpretation of both sides or am I just wrong?

Although it is not far fetched, the second line of the first stanza states that the male is always "floating around her" which would indicate that they are in the same bowl.