The first line in “Love..” is,
“The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving,
at your own door,”
a line foretelling that eventually you will recognise who you are. Whether this will take a mirror or whether a person will realise who they really are through their own head and deep inside their own souls. It also suggests that you shouldn’t care about others opinions with the line “ in your own mirror..” which makes you wonder “How do I see myself?” which I thought could be trying to question basic human ideas, why do people look at who they are in the first person, why is the person whose eyes they see through them?! What makes them that individual? The answers here are clear, a love for life, for one’s self and what they feel within their soul. Both poems, I felt used techniques to suggest being unique. For example, In “This Room” the author uses extensive use of caesura, using punctuation in the middle of a line, and enjambment, a technique by which you don’t use normal punctuation at the end of each sentence, thus creating a flowing and textured piece of poetry. With these techniques, Dharker has created flowing text, I think that this might be a suggestion that life flows quickly and that you should take advantage of it because of this.
The second stanza suggests that one has to fit in with others' ideas or accommodate oneself to the world, with the phrase,
“Give back your heart,
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you.”
This suggests that you have spent a lot of your life living in a pretentious way, trying to be someone else to fit in with society and so become a stranger to oneself - but in time one will see who the stranger really is, and welcome him or her home, hence the line, “..in your own mirror,” this suggests that when you see yourself, you will feel as though you are a new person on the inside, and this you cannot see in a mirror. Our everyday life is seen, therefore, as a kind of temporary disloyalty, in which one ignores oneself “for another” - but all along it is the true self, the stranger “who has loved you” and “who knows you by heart”, these statements come across as metaphorical. But they really do ring true because a lot of the time you do things you don’t want to do to fit in and be accepted.
In “This Room”, there is a lexical field of furniture coming to life. Due to the liberation felt by the room, one's sense of self is also confused - we say sometimes that we are all over the place, and Dharker depicts this literally, by using the imagery of the furniture and household appliances floating about the room.
The line,
“From dark corners, chairs
are rising up to crash through clouds.” This suggests that these chairs, now liberated, feel ‘high’ so to speak on their newfound freedom and also could be a metaphor used to suggest that maybe they aren’t weighed down with troubles anymore.
She could have also used the line,
“I’m wondering where
I’ve left my feet, and why
My hands are outside clapping.”
The form of this sentence I thought, suggested that the author was trying to exaggerate the gap between her and her hands, which are “outside, clapping.” and realizes that her hands are not even in the same room - and have taken on a life of their own, applauding from somewhere else.
When the poet states,
“Take down the love-letters from the bookshelves.” I thought that this suggested that the letters weren’t important because they were sent by someone who was in love with the deception of their self, and not their real self, or the “stranger” as it’s referred to in the poem. And it says “bookshelves” because maybe these letters were works of fiction because the lover didn’t actually love who they were, but an illusion of them, this “stranger” was the real person inside but went unnoticed.
I thought that the caesura in this poem could’ve been a suggestion that life was something you could only look back on. As the comma’s and punctuation are in the middle of the line, and enjambment is still used at the end of the majority of lines to make the poem flow.
I also has the idea that the gaps in the poem. Between verses, could symbolise a time in your life where nothing really interesting or worth writing about happens, thus making the poem like a diary, but more intricate and complex.
The poem is written in the second person- as if the poet addresses the reader directly. It is full of imperative verbs “sit”, “give”, “eat”, “take” and “feast” these draw the readers attention and make it seem, through the fact that the sentences “Sit.” And “Eat” make it seem as though these are very important points. . The poet repeats words or variants of them - “give”, “love”, “stranger” and “life”.
Whereas in “This Room” In the poem our homes and possessions symbolize our lives and ambitions in a limiting sense, while change and new opportunities are likened to space, light and “empty air”, where there is an opportunity to move and grow. Like Walcott’s Love after Love, it is about change and personal growth - but at an earlier point, or perhaps at repeated points in one's life.
In my opinion, both poems do an excellent job of encouraging a love of life, and making it seem very attractive and using metaphors for it to make it seem less serious. This is definitely a good thing. Both tell that you should live your life as you wish and should take advantage of every second of it. To conclude, I believe these poems both hold a strong moral point. Why should you become someone else to satisfy society’s needs? The resounding answer from both poems? You shouldn’t.
