Points of View

In Lucinda Roy’s poem, “Points of View”, the speaker in the poem is connects women of different times and places through the imagery and symbolism of water. She refers to developed and undeveloped worlds through different points of view whilst connecting these worlds with the same theme of water. Roy emphasises these differences by using a third person woman who travels long distances and is presented with a daily challenge in order to obtain water, then to a first person point of view of a woman who does not appreciate the easy way of life that she has as she readily has water at her disposal. Roy uses this technique of different points of view to highlight the importance of water along with the contrast of the modernized to the non-modernized world.

In the first stanza, the poet tells of a woman in search for water. There is an emphasis on the appreciation for water, ‘offer it to men or to their children, to their elders, to blistered cooking-pots.’ The women offer the water around as it is an essential key to their lives which they hold in high value. This is also conveying the fact that water is needed in their everyday life and is something in which they rely upon to survive. ‘Women bend to rivers’, is highlighting the effort and toil that women must go through in their world to obtain this essential part of life. This daily journey to obtain water has become a routine as each day the women must travel to find water. ‘Water is carried home.’, ‘And water sucks them in, catching the wild geometry of the soul…’ this is conveying the fact that water is such a large part of the lives of these women. It is their role to fetch the water every day and without it their families and elders would be unable to survive; their daily lives revolve around their requirement to source their family with this essential part of life. Water is ‘sucking them in’ to be the centre of their lives. In this first stanza, there is constant reference to women; ‘women bend to rivers’, ‘women bend to see themselves in rivers’, the rivers are alive with women’s hands’, ‘women’s fluid faces’. All these show that women have a place in their society and their world as the core life which brings the water to the rest of their village. Women bring the life to their children and elders and themselves, creating a belonging and necessity for them in life.

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In contrast to this way of life, in the second stanza Roy immediately shows the transition from third person to first person as it is written ‘what can I know of water?’. This view of water reflects how the speaker is able to use water with ease and not know the importance of it. Here, water is now described as an everyday subject that can be ‘compartmentalized’ and ‘tamed’. These words show how water is now something that is taken for granted and not used as a scarce resource but an easily available part of life. The questioning ‘what do ...

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