An Exposition on "Kindness": A Movement Within Concentric Circles.

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Peng Suqing

EC2101E

11th September 2004

An Exposition on “Kindness”:  A Movement Within Concentric Circles

Kindness presents a poetic narrator’s tussling conundrum between motherhood and death.  She fluxes in coexistence between her personal conquest for death and her required responsibilities as a mother.  Her restrained mockery of everyday ordinances stresses her disdain yet necessity for mediocrity as she falls within the constrictions and restrictions of motherhood.  This disdain typifies her longing for death: which she sees as a gateway of release, but this true want has to be forced into suppression and coexistence with the false but necessary self of motherhood.

Notably, the poetic narrator is very passive to her surroundings while she goes through this inner turmoil.  Even though she is physically near, her detachment is obvious in her detailed observations of Kindness, “glid[ing]” about, “filling” the house with “smoke” and “smiles”.  This reflects a certain numbness that gives her the distance to objectify her surroundings: “What is so real as the cry of a child?”  The drop of such a sudden, pert question strikes a contrast to the nice, neat flow of the first stanza.   Here semblances of the poetic narrator’s pain are introduced.  Arguably, she could be talking about her crying children or her own state of struggle for her children against herself.  Perhaps both.  The different interpretive possibilities lend reflection to her confused state of mind, the tussles for her existence, even the reasons for her madness.

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The poetic narrator goes on exemplifying this struggle in the use of imagery from the ordinances of everyday life.  She takes Kindness’ belief that “Sugar can cure everything” with detectable scorn in her own reiteration: “so Kindness says".  Sugar cannot cure anything to the narrator’s wretched state of mind.  Such a sweeping assumption made comes across as thick ignorance to the poetic narrator, and is hence treated with irritated sarcasm.  “O kindness kindness/ Sweetly picking up pieces!”  Like how she passively watches Kindness pick pieces of sugar into a teacup, Kindness’ symbolic attempts to “pick up” pieces of her life ...

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