Saturday, September 20, 2008

My Mother at Sixty-six by Kamala Das

My Mother at Sixty-six
by
Kamala Das
Driving from my parent's
home to Cochin last Friday
morning, I saw my mother,
beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face
ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with
pain
that she thought away, and
looked but soon
put that thought away, and
looked out at young
trees sprinting, the merry children spilling
out of their homes, but after the airport's
security check, standing a few yards
away, I looked again at her, wan,
pale
as a late winter's moon and felt that
old
familiar ache, my childhood's fear,
but all I said was, see you soon,
Amma,
all I did was smile and smile and
smile

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

In this poem, Kamala Das explores the theme of ageing and death and isolation through a narration involving her mother.

While driving from her parent’s home to Cochin, she notices her mother sitting beside her dozing, her face pale like a dead body and her thoughts far away. This reminds her painfully that her mother is old and could pass away leaving her alone.

Putting that thought aside she looked out at the young trees speeding by and children running out of their homes happily to play. These remind her probably of youth and life, her own younger days and her mother when she was young.

But after the security check at the airport, looking back at her mother standing a few yards away, she finds her looking pale like the winter moon. She feels that familiar pain and childhood fear of the thought of losing her mother and of being lonely just as she had been when she was young because she was different from other children. She could only keep smiling and tell her ‘see you soon’ knowing full well that she might not see her.



Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers by Adrienne Rich


Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Adrienne Rich

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

Adrienne Rich's "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers", depicts a woman trapped within the cultural constraints and responsibilities of married life.

In the first stanza, Aunt Jennifer’s situation and character is contrasted with her artistic creation that portrays her aspiration. The tapestry on which she has knitted tigers are very symbolic of what she wants to be in life - fearless, assertive, noble and powerful like the tiger as expressed in the words "They pace in sleek chivalric certainty". The word 'certainty' could portray the self-assuredness of the tiger or the confident bearing of the tiger as it is fearless of life.The tigers depicted as prancing across the screen bring to mind a being that is confident, self-assured and happy; all things that Aunt Jennifer is not. The use of colours implies that Aunt Jennifer's tigers and their land are more vital and enjoy a sense of freedom far greater than her. Yellow (bright topaz) connotes the sun and fierce energy, while green reminds one of spring and rebirth.

In the second stanza, Aunt Jennifer's present state is depicted. Her fingers are "fluttering through her wool" showing both physical and mental weakness. She finds it difficult to pull the needle. "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand" reminds us that her marriage responsibilities weigh her down which makes her unable to realize her full potential as a woman in a male-dominated society. She escapes from her difficult situation through art i.e. through knitting.

The final stanza contains imagery that reflects back on the first two stanzas. The reference of the hands symbolizes Aunt Jennifer as a whole. Though her death would free her from her present miserable state, her hands will remain terrified with the wedding ring which binds her to her ordeals that took complete control of her. The only sign of her freedom from her present life is the art work which she escapes into by depicting the prancing, proud and unafraid tigers which is what she really wants to be and which she attains through her imagination.




.

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A Roadside Stand by Robert Frost


A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

In this poem, the poet contrasts the lives of poor and deprived countryside people who struggle to live, with the thoughtless city people who don’t even bother to notice the roadside stand that these people have put up to sell their goodies.

Lines 1 to 6
The poem starts with the description of the roadside stand and the intention behind it. A small time farmer builds a vegetable stand at the edge of the highway outside his house in the hope that passing cars would buy the produce and earn a bit of the money that supports cities from falling into ruin. He only wants to earn a living, he is not begging for money.

Lines 7 to 13
However, no cars ever stop and the ones that even glance in the direction of the stand without any feeling of compassion or relatedness (out of sorts) only comment about how the construction spoils the view of the surroundings or how badly painted the wrongly pointed North and South signs are or to notice without interest the wild berries and squash for sale in the stand or the beautiful mountain scene.

Lines 13 to 22
The farmer tells the rich travelers to keep their money if they meant to be mean and that the hurt to the view is not as important as the sorrow he feels on being ignored. He only wishes for some (city) money so that he may experience the plush life (make our beings expand) portrayed by the movies and other media, which the political parties are said to be refusing him.

Lines 23 to 31
Frost goes on to say that even though these people have benefactors (good-doers), who plan to relocate them in villages where they can have easy access to the cinema and the store, they are actually selfish (‘greedy good-doers’ and ‘beasts of prey’) and only help these "pitiful kin" to indirectly advantage themselves. The altruists wish to make these villagers completely dependent on them for all their benefits and comforts, thus robbing them of the ability to think for themselves and be independent. 'The ancient way' could mean the old way when people worked during the day and slept at night. This is being reversed by the new 'greedy good doers' who teach these people to not use their brain. They are unable to sleep at night because they haven't worked during day time or because they are troubled by their new lifestyle.

Lines 32 to 43
Frost then talks about his personal feelings, saying that he can hardly bear the thought of the farmer's dashed hopes. The open windows of the farmer's house seem to wait all day just to hear the sound of a car stopping to make a purchase. However they are always disappointed, as vehicles only stop to enquire the price, to ask their way ahead, to reverse or ask for a gallon of gas. 'The polished traffic' refers to the rich class who drive their cars to their destinations (with a mind ahead) probably to another city unmindful of the countryside roadside stand and if at all they did get distracted by the countryside (if ever aside a moment) they seemed out of place in it (out of sorts).

Another explanation for theses words given by classmate in yahoo answers seems to make better sense. (http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100303014238AAyfWnz)

Clearly "out of sorts" does not mean "out of place." It means "annoyed." The drivers see the roadside stand with its clumsy, hand-painted signs as a blemish on the rural landscape they're driving through.

By calling the traffic "polished," Frost is stressing a contrast that is central to the poem -- the shiny vehicles driven by well-to-do city folk vs. the unsophisticated, semi-literate, "artless" stand set up by an impoverished farmer.


Lines 44 to 51
According to the poet, the progress required has not been found by these country folk (“the requisite lift of spirit"). Their lifestyles provide ample evidence to support this fact. He sometimes feels that it might be best to simply put these people out of their pain and hardships of existence. However, once rational thinking returns to his mind, he wonders how HE would feel if someone offered to do him this supposed service.
Wolfer, one of the readers ahs this pertinent comment:
Because the greedy good doers are robbing them of their ability to think during the day and they sleep throughout the day, so they are unable to sleep at night(as is the ancient custom) because they aren't sleepy anymore.




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Sunday, September 14, 2008

Explanation for the poem "Curtain"

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

The poem deals with the theme of separation, especially between lovers. The background for the poem is the tumultuous times that England and Europe were going through leading to the Second World War.

The first stanza begins with the word ‘Goodbye’ used for parting. This word ends the first stanza and begins the second. The lovers wish each other goodbye and their intertwined (laced) fingers loosen symbolising a gradual break in their relationship. The sense of touch is evoked in this stanza. The warmth of their relationship symbolised by their hand clasp, slowly breaks down and finally becomes cold and distant like the stiff, cold (frosted) flowers of a garden in November. Their separation is felt sharply and piercingly like bullets. For them even darkness, that unites without distinguishing, feels separate and strange.

The second stanza states that their relationship has broken down fully. This is conveyed by the words “There is no touch now” and by comparing their relationship to a wave that has now broken down in the lonely sea of the world. Though there is a possibility of words still to be spoken or for communication, the separation is too great a gulf for this to happen. It is so great that it swiftly out measures time (time makes us gradually forget) and engulfs one’s identity too.
The third stanza pictures the state of separation. It is like the dreamer startled from her sleep, but the vivid image of the dream is lost in the process of waking. It is a state of vagueness about a vivid moment of life. All the senses like taste and sight feel numb. Even feelings have turned cold as denoted by the words ‘clinic heart’ (dead heart). So there is no question of the heart breaking.

The final stanza asks questions about the separation like whether it easy and if there is nothing besides this ‘quiet disaster’; quiet because it is known only to them. The final question is whether there is cause for sorrow because in the final kiss of parting, which is compared to a ‘white murder’ of love relationship, they have become two different people, (two ghosts, two Hamlets, two soliloquies) living in a distant physical and mental world of the future.


If you felt that this information has been useful for you and if you feel inclined to help orphans kindly donate money to the orphanage that my friend runs. First, take a little time to go through its website: 
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Explanation "To Autumn" by John Keats


A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

Keats's speaker opens his first stanza by addressing Autumn, describing its abundance and its intimacy with the sun, with whom Autumn ripens fruits and causes the late flowers to bloom. In the second stanza, the speaker describes the figure of Autumn as a female goddess, often seen sitting on the granary floor, her hair "soft-lifted" by the wind, and often seen sleeping in the fields or watching a cider-press squeezing the juice from apples. In the third stanza, the speaker tells Autumn not to wonder where the songs of spring have gone, but instead to listen to her own music. At twilight, the "small gnats" hum above the shallows of the river, lifted and dropped by the wind, and "full-grown lambs" bleat from the hills, crickets sing, robins whistle from the garden, and swallows, gathering for their coming migration, sing from the skies.

It is written in a three-stanza structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is eleven lines long. In each stanza, the first part is made up of the first four lines following an ABAB rhyme scheme. The second part made up of the last seven lines is arranged CDEDCCE in the first stanza and CDECDDE in the second and third stanzas.

"To Autumn" is one of the simplest of Keats's odes. The extraordinary achievement of this poem lies in its ability to suggest, explore, and develop a rich abundance of themes without ever ruffling its calm, gentle, and lovely description of autumn. It shows Keats's speaker paying homage to a particular goddess--in this case, the deified season of Autumn. The selection of this season implicitly takes up the themes of temporality, mortality, and change taken up by the earlier odes of Keats. Autumn in Keats's ode is a time of warmth and plenty, but it is perched on the brink of winter's desolation, as the bees enjoy "later flowers," the harvest is gathered from the fields, the lambs of spring are now "full grown," and, in the final line of the poem, the swallows gather for their winter migration. The understated sense of inevitable loss in that final line makes it one of the most moving moments in all of poetry; it can be read as a simple, uncomplaining summation of the entire human condition.

Despite the coming chill of winter, the late warmth of autumn provides Keats's speaker with ample beauty to celebrate: the cottage and its surroundings in the first stanza, the agrarian haunts of the goddess in the second, and the locales of natural creatures in the third. Keats's speaker is able to experience these beauties in a sincere and meaningful way because of the lessons he has learned in the previous odes: He is no longer indolent, no longer committed to the isolated imagination (as in "Psyche"), no longer attempting to escape the pain of the world through ecstatic rapture (as in "Nightingale"), no longer frustrated by the attempt to eternalize mortal beauty or subject eternal beauty to time (as in "Urn"), and no longer able to frame the connection of pleasure and the sorrow of loss only as an imaginary heroic quest (as in "Melancholy").

In "To Autumn," the image of Autumn winnowing and harvesting is an explicit metaphor for artistic creation. The act of creation is pictured as a kind of self-harvesting in another poem; the pen harvests the fields of the brain, and books are filled with the resulting "grain." In "To Autumn," the metaphor is developed further; the sense of coming loss that permeates the poem confronts the sorrow underlying the season's creativity. When Autumn's harvest is over, the fields will be bare, the swaths with their "twined flowers" cut down, the cider-press dry, the skies empty. But the connection of this harvesting to the seasonal cycle softens the edge of the tragedy. In time, spring will come again, the fields will grow again, and the birdsong will return. Abundance and loss, joy and sorrow, song and silence are as intimately connected as the twined flowers in the fields. What makes "To Autumn" beautiful is that it brings an engagement with that connection out of the realm of mythology and fantasy and into the everyday world. The poet has learned that an acceptance of mortality is not destructive to an appreciation of beauty and has gleaned wisdom by accepting the passage of time.


An interpretaion from John:
In the second stanza the poet personifies autumn as a women performing various activities in a way to portray autumn. Also this marks a transition in the poem where in the first stanza it portrays an image of rushing things, activity....in the second the activities start to slow down(use of words like "hours by hours", "sound asleep") And this overall I feel is symbolic of the transition in the seasons as well i.e. from summer to autumn.


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Explanation for "Ars Poetica" by Archibald Macleish


Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:
Not true
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -
A poem should not mean
But be

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

Archibald MacLeish’s imagist idea of art for art's sake is expressed in the poem 'Ars Poetica'. The poem is about the art of poetry or what a poem should be. It is interesting to note that as MacLeish states what a poem should be, he illustrates it as well, in the poem by successfully using paradoxes/contradictions and images to convey the idea that good poetry uses powerful images. The poem is divided into three sections of eight lines each with four rhyming couplets.

In the first section, he insists that a poem should be 'silent', dumb' or wordless. This seems contradictory or paradoxical as a poem uses words and is not silent. However, what he intends is the imagist concept of art, namely being brief and being direct. This is achieved through using the right words and right images which appeal to the reader’s senses of touch, sight, smell, hearing and taste. To convey this he has used the image of fruit that can be tasted or directly felt without the need for words/explanations. Also 'globed fruit' indicates the universality of the senses indicating that sensual images transcend individual cultures and time. Medallions are dumb to the feel of the thumb yet the image of medallions that commemorate past events recalls to memory the emotive past. Similarly, the silent image of 'sleeve worn stone of casement ledges’ evokes the sense of touch and along with it nostalgic memories of someone waiting and looking out by the window. Finally, the image of the soundless flight of birds touches the sense of sight. There is action yet it is a silent action. So too should a poem be: it should speak silently, which means, a poem doesn’t brashly convey a message or meaning but should evoke emotion/experience and impel imagination through images/words.

In the second section, he uses the image of the moon to state that a poem should be 'motionless in time' like the moon. The moon moves but its movement can not be easily perceived. So should poetry be. This could mean that good poems transcend time since they speak of universal experience. Yet each poem is rooted in the concrete i.e. in real, particular experience. What make them universal are the images used and the emotions evoked. Again, the poet uses imagery to illustrate the point. A poem leave memories/emotions/feelings in our mind just like the rising moon. Its imperceptible, incremental movement releases with its light, twig by twig the trees entangled by darkness and with continuous rising leaves the winter behind.

The third section seems to refute the idea that art is a search for truth as echoed in Keats' line 'beauty is truth, truth beauty'. For the poet, 'a poem should be equal to: not true'. Poetry is not concerned with the generalities of truth, beauty, goodness or historical facts. On the contrary what it should do is to capture human experience like an experience of grief, or of love, or of loneliness through images. As in the other two sections he uses images to illustrate the point. He uses the images of an 'empty doorway' or 'a maple leaf' to suggest the universal experience and history of grief and the images of ‘the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea' to evoke the experience of love. The last couplet 'a poem should not mean but be' seems to re-echo the imagist principle of art for art’s sake and poetry as capturing life using precise images that achieve clarity of expression. Poetry should not try to take on great unanswerable philosophical questions or convey some meaning/message. Instead good poetry should use concrete images to capture and evoke a moment of personal experience to take in the richness of being.




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Explanation for "Survivors" by Sassoon


Survivors

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they’re ‘longing to go out again,’—
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,—
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they’ll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter’d all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Craiglockart. October, 1917.
Siegfried Sassoon

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

The poet, Sassoon, explores the effect of war on soldiers and indirectly criticizes the non-combatant’s complacent attitude towards war. He does this effectively using an underlying ironic tone in the poem by making statements (necessarily a non-combatant’s statements i.e. the common people or a politician’s) that seem to reassure the reader that the wounded and shell-shocked soldiers will be fine and that war is glorious, but immediately follows such statements with a graphic presentation of the physical and mental scars that war creates. This jolts the reader’s reassurance and makes the poem doubly effective. The poem is also powerful because it is auto-biographical. It was written while the poet was recovering from shell-shock at Craiglockhart Hospital.

The poem begins by giving the reader the misleading hope that the shell-shocked soldiers would surely recover (the view of the non-combatant) and breaks this hope when he describes how the shock and strain of war have caused these soldiers to stammer and to talk incoherently. It would take them a long time to recover from this and not ‘soon’. Again the statement that they are ‘longing to go out again’ and fight (statement of politicians, probably) makes us imagine that the soldiers are raring to go out to the war front again and fight. This is again negated by describing the soldier’s faces as ‘old’ and ‘scared’ showing how war makes these courageous men old before their time and afraid. Also the words ‘they are learning to walk’ could literally mean recovering physically from battle wounds or metaphorically mean getting back to normal life recovering from the psychological scars that they have received.

Once again the reassuring statement that they will soon forget their haunted nights is contradicted by stating what haunts them in their sleep. Their sleep is filled with nightmares of the ghosts of friends who died in battle and the scenes of killing and blood in the battlefield. When they are haunted by these how can they ever ‘soon’ forget anything? Finally, the poet is ironic when he says that the soldiers will be proud of glorious war which not only shattered their pride in fighting for their country but shattered their individual selves.

The last two lines convey the total effect of war, that is, it turns men who went to war, glad and serious about fighting for their country, returning reduced to the level of helpless children. They are completely broken psychologically and almost insane. They are also filled with hatred for the supporters of war namely, the politicians and the non-combatants. Thus, using irony, the poem poignantly exposes the sham of war and its effects on the combatants.

Anastasia has a further explanation:
I would like to add the fact that the men have been reduced to children because of the fact that war has destroyed them completely; emotionally, mentally, psychologically and physically as well. They aren't able to fit in society anymore and need to be taught various attributes, activities and things again. They have been reduced to children because like children, they need to be taught how to walk and talk again. Also, the line of, 'their dreams that drip with murder', it would basically mean that they dream of their friends and comrades being murdered in front of them and also of the murders they committed of other soldiers on the battle field.



If you felt that this information has been useful for you and if you feel inclined to help orphans kindly donate money to the orphanage that my friend runs. First, take a little time to go through its website: 
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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

A K Ramanujan's "Of Mothers, Among Other Things"

A note: I stopped teaching CBSE 5 years ago and I'm out of touch. So I haven't really worked on the explanations and edited them. You might find some of the explanations not up to the mark especially this poem. You will surely find better explanations on the net. One such site recommended by one of the readers which is really good and tailor made for CBSE is http://englishportal12.blogspot.in/?view=mosaic 

I have written an explanation of this poem. i don't know whether it is close to the accepted explanation given by critiics. i'd be happy if i get responses to this.

Of Mothers, Among Other Things

The poet creates a vivid picture of his mother in this poem using images and words that evoke the senses and contrasts her youth with her present state. The first section of the poem portrays her in her youth. The second section deals with her middle age and the final section describes her old age.

The twisted blackbone tree evokes, in the poet, olfactory images of his mother when she was young. The word 'twisted' suggests that the tree is now old like his mother and was probably tended by her when it was a young tree. Her youth is compared to ‘silk’ and a ‘white petal’, both of which are soft and tender and exactly opposite of the old and rough twisted blackbone tree. The sparkle of the diamond studded in her ear rings is compared to needles being splashed. The metaphor pictures mother as beautiful, bright and lively like the splashes of light of the diamonds. He can recall his mother full of energy running from the rain, probably engaged in some work, to the cradles to tend to her children. The rain is pictured as sewing loosely with its lengthy drops the tasselled blackbone tree. The rain symbolises difficulties in life that try to stitch in and contain one’s energy and enthusiasm in life. Yet his mother faced them resolutely. This is indicated by the comparison of her dexterous hands to an eagle's black pink-crinkled feet with talons that are effective and precise.

The second section continues with the comparison but introduces a shift in mother's abilities. One of her fingers (talon) has been crippled by a rat trap, a handicap indicating lessening of efficiency as she got older. The next lines show that the vagaries of life and motherhood have had their effect on her as a middle-aged woman. This is pointed out by the statement that her saris do not cling to her, instead, they hang loose. She has become thin and weak denoted by the metaphor ‘loose feather of a one time wing'
The final stanza begins with the poet stating that he experiences a gut level, raw feeling/taste (‘tongue licks bark in the mouth’) of the incomprehensible 'motherness' of his mother even in her old age when he sees her slowing moving her four still sensible fingers to pick a grain of rice from the kitchen floor. This shows that she is still mentally agile though physically weakened and is in charge of the affairs of the house.

An Interpretation from Mr Doyal
With the "twisted black bone tree" I interpret the similarity that the poet is trying to project between the rough bark of the tree weathered with time but at the same time the life and all that a tree witnesses over its lifetime. It stands still and sees all that happens around it silently and continues to do its own bit...mutely, never complaining … only seeing. So is the situation of a lady particularly in the Indian system of things. The tree of the Indian woman which could have flourished into a beauty has been twisted and hurt over and over again to the extent that it is left with nothing but only its sense of duty and responsibility.

An additional explanation given by Ananya Sethi on the image of the eagle. I'd like to quote her email to me:

I'm Ananya Sethi, a student from your house 'Dhansiri' when you were teaching at the Assam Valley School. I was recently searching for a summary of the poem ''Of Mothers, Among Other Things' and Ifound out the summary wriiten by you. It was excellent except that the summary has very little comparison to the eagle where if one reads the 2nd stanza of the poem, there's reference to the eagle in 2 more lines.
1) 'They hang, loose feather of a onetime wing' . Here we can see a reference of The saris hang loose like the loosened feather of the (old) eagle's wings.
2) 'one talon crippled...' - Here the mother has suffered an injury while working for her family in the same manner the eagle suffers injuries while arranging food for her young ones.
Apart from these lines, i believe that the summary was excellent.
I'm now studing at DPS Guwahati , in the Science stream and I'm appearing for boards this year. I thank you for everything you and Ma'am Patrick (who was our tutor) had done for us while you were at AVS.

An interpretation of the last lines by Kavya:
The poet feels numb and helpless as he sees his mother, now old and frail, trying to pick up the grain of rice with great difficulty, now with only 4 old and sensible (working) fingers. His mouth is dry, parched and feels abrasive like licking a bark. This show how overcome by emotion the poet becomes.

Another interesting interpretation by Shweta:
I would like to add my interpretation of the last few lines. I feel that through those lines the poet is also expressing his guilt. He took his mother for granted as almost all children do. Even the title "Of Mothers, Among Other Things" suggests that we consider our mothers as ordinary as the other things in life. But when the poet sees his old and frail mother bend down to pick up a grain of rice despite her injured finger, he is overcome by guilt and sorrow.

Honey, one of the readers gives an interpretation that seems to be apt:
I think the rain personified as a tailor who in vain tries to stitch rags with broken threads. It is also used as a metaphor standing for mother who is the cementing factor trying to keep family intact without getting fragmented, by stitching the holes & cementing the cracks by acting as a unifying factor

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