“Was the child with hands outstretched to the blaze less constrained? Taking her place on the trampled earth floor with lambs brought in from the cold bitter springs”
The child is herself and she’s saying that when she was born she was innocent, because her hands were held out to fire, which is a symbol of purity. She says that even though she was a new born baby she was already intertwined in the complex ‘patterns’ of the heritage of herself and others. Lines 19 and 20 show that she saw that life was not always joyful because they talk about the cold and bitter springs and hardly anyone would describe spring as being cold and bitter if they were feeling happy and positive. Possibly she feels that she brought a new type of pain to her family. Either that or she feels that she was brought into a world already full of pain and suffering.
Then in the last stanza she shows how out of place she felt growing up,
“but the young child is lost in a forest of towering adults…”
From this you can tell that she was probably an only child and perhaps even an unwanted child. The last line of the poem is not open to easy assessment. I believe that there are two ways to interpret it, you can either assume that the child she is talking about represents young minds everywhere that are struggling to come to terms with their new lives or you can assume that she wasn’t loved as a child and as a consequence she felt very left out of her heritage and very misplaced. The latter is what I believe to be the basic theme of this poem.
The Poet uses a great deal of poetic devices to really bring out the general theme of her poem, however she uses them in such a way that the theme and point of the poem are debatable as is the true meaning of her extended metaphor. In the first stanza she writes,
“on Persian rugs we set our feet blind to the woven threads and dyes, the intricate patterns that shape our lives,”
This is obviously not to be taken literally, the Persian rug represents her heritage and the intricate patterns are everything that happens or has happened in her life that has had an effect on her heritage. Something interesting is line 4, the fact that she is blind to her heritage suggests that she knows it is there but she and others take it for granted. Throughout the poem she is constantly generalizing issues that are obviously quite personal to her. As if because she had these experiences everyone else or everyone reading the poem must have had them as well.