The Lost Heritage

The theme of this poem is given away by the title. The poem represents human heritage, more specifically the heritage of the poet, Heather Buck. I think this poem is her way of expressing her feelings and inhibitions about her painful past and the hardships she endured as a child growing up in a world of adults.

        

“we hang our quiet landscapes tipping and tilting them till we achieve an uneasy marriage…”

These are lines 18, 19 and 20 in stanza three, I believe that when she writes ‘we’ she is referring to her parents and then she generalizes, as if all parents and all families were like hers. I believe she is saying that her parents had a tough marriage before she was born because she goes on to say,

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“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 ...

This is a preview of the whole essay