Poem interpretation...

March 17, 2005 9:29 PM

So I found this poem that, back in high school, I found in one of the poetry books I was obsessed with. It brought back great memories! I'm 28 now and still love it. Just curious to hear anyone's thoughts.

In Recompense
by Eda Lou Walton

Now for the long years when I could not love you,
I bring in recompense this gift of yearning-
A luminous vase uplifted to the sun,
Blue with the shadows of near-twilight.
Here in its full round symmetry of darkness,
Burning with swift curved flashes bright as tears,
I lift it to the lonely lips that knew
Its slow creation, and thw wheel of sorrow turning.
Take it with hands like faded petals,
White as the moonlight of our garden;
And for the long years when I could not love you
Drink from its amber-coloured night.

So the 'gift' is her regret, I'm guessing?

posted by camfys to education (12 comments total)

Poetry is not an algorithm to encrypt thoughts, and the poet is not a professional obfuscator of clarity. I resist the idea that objects in a poem stand for one thing or another in simple substitution. But if you must ask, I'd say that the gift is simply yearning crystalized under the tectonic pressure of years of solitude and searching, having ripened into a thing more beautiful, nearly tangible, for the dark atmosphere it grew in. Penny for your thoughts.
posted by ori at 10:13 PM on March 17, 2005

"When you wanted me, I figured I had, or would have down the road, better prospects than you. Um, things didn't work out as bright and shiny as I hoped. Now I'd, you know, be willing to settle.

"Ok, actually, I really don't even think of you anymore, and your name doesn't still make me pause and wonder "what if", if it ever really did, (it doesn't, even though the mere thought of me is still like a fresh punch in the gut for you after all these long withered years).

"But if it consoles you to think that you cross my mind on lonely white nights at three a.m. and I feel some sort of vague formless regret -- honestly, any regret I feel is more for my lost youth than for you per se, at this point you just kinda symbolize that lost youth for me, like an old "Letter" sweater from highschool or a copy of the program for that play we were in together, or those pictures of guys with long sideburns that you know instantly are from the time of the Nixon Administration --, well, you always were the sentimental sort who wrote poetry and believed bathetic crap like "true love", so keep on with what's essentially your form of mental masturbation if it makes you feel better."

"Ok, stop crying, it always annoyed me when you cried because it made me feel like I was supposed to do something and what did you want me to do, I mean, you were nice and fun and all that --- yes the sex was good, why do you always ask about that --but, come on, we never -- hell, you especially never really expected it to last, I mean we travelled in different circles and you weren't Jewish, not that that's a big deal to me, but Jesus, your family -- please stop crying, ok, so sometimes on occasion I miss you, is that what you wanted to hear?

"Ok, so sure, sometimes I think of you, but really, if I'm the "one who got away" for you, don't you sometimes stop to think there's one who got away for me too, and it's only natural that rather than think of you when I'm lonely -- yes, yes, yes, sometimes I do think of you, and you were really nice. Yes! Yes I mean it! Why would I lie now?? Really. I do mean it.

"Yes, you were really nice. Ok?

"And it was great talking to you. Sure, sure, same time, next year, give me a call like always. No, I do like hearing from you. I do.

"Ok, you have a nice night too."
posted by orthogonality at 10:28 PM on March 17, 2005

I think "the years I could not love you" are the years before they met.
posted by ori at 10:45 PM on March 17, 2005

Ori's right, imho
posted by Pericles at 1:17 AM on March 18, 2005

the gift is her yearning. it says so clearly in the second line.
posted by andrew cooke at 3:34 AM on March 18, 2005

The "gift" is:

- the poet's "yearning" for an almost-lover
- ... which satisfies the lover to whom the poem is addressed because it was absent before
- ... and which takes the form, in the poem, of the vase, but also of the poem itself: "Here in its full round symmetry of darkness," she "lift[s] it to the lonely lips" of the lover, who, presumably, is meant to read the poem aloud (with his lips) and "Drink from its amber-coloured light."

In other words: "Years ago you loved me and I didn't love you in return. Now I think of you, and I offer you this poem to read."

She doesn't say that the vase is full of, say, water, which would make sense, since the poem takes place in the context of a garden, and since water is often used in poems like this to represent religious or romantic salvation (the lover / worshipper wanders in the desert, etc.) And this is because the vase is empty, and to "drink" from it you hold it up to the sun, and "drink" the light that pours through it. So in the light of day (now) vs. the darkness of night (years ago, when things were sorrowful) the vase is beautiful--and it can be drunk from again and again, or read again and again, because it's a poem, simply by seeing it and "drinking" from it--by reading it to oneself. Her love or yearning for the lover is now "the sun"--before that sun was absent--and she offers her love, refracted and made beautiful through the glass of the poem, to the lover parched for light, with "hands like faded petals, / White as the moonlight of our garden."
posted by josh at 5:07 AM on March 18, 2005

In other words, the particular beauty, and the point of the poem, is in the figure of the empty vase, which you appreciate by holding it up to the sun, and in all the resonances of that figure.

For example, normally we cut flowers and put them in a vase--but here the flower was never cut, and the lover has "hands like faded petals." Yet cutting a flower has its own melancholy feeling, so there is something permanent, lasting, and crystaline about the possibility of love, that we can drink again and again.
posted by josh at 5:12 AM on March 18, 2005

Poetry is not an algorithm to encrypt thoughts, and the poet is not a professional obfuscator of clarity.

Someone should tell the people who run the English departments at Duke, Berkeley, Michigan, Iowa, etc, etc. I don't think they got the memo.
posted by spicynuts at 6:59 AM on March 18, 2005

Poetry is not an algorithm to encrypt thoughts, and the poet is not a professional obfuscator of clarity.

Sure, but poetry contains thoughts and almost always is clear.
posted by josh at 7:16 AM on March 18, 2005

Huh. No one answered the obvious question here: Why is that person drinking from a vase?

I'd have to take issue with anyone who thinks they can produce a definitive exegesis of this poem; it is too ambiguous for that. For instance, can you point to any evidence in the poem that precludes its being directed to a parent, or a child, instead of to an ex-lover?
posted by bricoleur at 11:50 AM on March 18, 2005

I think I answered the vase question in my post. As for the "definitive exegesis," no one will ever provide any definitive exegesis for any poem; but certain words ("yearning" and "lonely" for example), plus the focus on the lips of the addressee, point pretty strongly towards a romantic attachment.
posted by josh at 4:01 PM on March 18, 2005

My question about the vase was tongue-in-cheek, but... I still think it's a weird image, and I don't think the poem itself yields an adequate explanation for it.

I think the poem as a whole points weakly in the direction of a romantic attachment. Yearning and loneliness are not exclusively the products of romantic frustration. I can easily read this poem as an apology from a parent to a child who has grown up and turned her back on the parent.

josh, I didn't mean to single out your interpretation or anyone else's; I just think that this poem is sufficiently ambiguous that no strong case can be made for any very specific interpretation. This is by no means true of all poems; I could cite any number whose meanings, down to most of their details, are pretty well agreed on by most educated readers.

Your interpretation is perfectly plausible; it's just not absolutely compelling.
posted by bricoleur at 4:35 PM on March 18, 2005