酷我-北美枫

[livetodream]

Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son Drowning”
Nominated by Jane Munro

Atwood’s poem narrates an immigrant woman’s experience of loss — a loss embodied in the death of her child, that new life she’d conceived before the long trip with its tiring waves.

He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth,
again set forth

but this time he has sunk into “the land I floated on / but could not touch to claim.” We see him as the explorer (“his head a bathysphere”) of “a landscape stranger than Uranus / we have all been to and some remember.”

Atwood’s poem enters a conversation with other Canadian poems speaking in images of water, drowning and the cost of a plunge into the unknown — however creative the outcome might be. I think of “The Piper of Arll” and “At the Cedars” by Duncan Campbell Scott, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” by A.M. Klein, “The Cold Green Element” by Irving Layton, and also “The Swimmer’s Moment” by Margaret Avison. But it is Atwood’s poem I remember best, especially the kernel of her final couplet. To me, it’s the poem’s seed: “I planted him in this country / like a flag.”

The poem is
http://user.icx.net/~richmond/fgcgathering/poematwood.html

(ZT from LRC) Canada’s Most Memorable Poems: The LRC Contributors’ List


My question is why she wrote :

I planted him in this country / like a flag

Why flag?

[[FAFAFA]]

Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son Drowning”
Nominated by Jane Munro

Atwood’s poem narrates an immigrant woman’s experience of loss — a loss embodied in the death of her child, that new life she’d conceived before the long trip with its tiring waves.

He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth,
again set forth

but this time he has sunk into “the land I floated on / but could not touch to claim.” We see him as the explorer (“his head a bathysphere”) of “a landscape stranger than Uranus / we have all been to and some remember.”

Atwood’s poem enters a conversation with other Canadian poems speaking in images of water, drowning and the cost of a plunge into the unknown — however creative the outcome might be. I think of “The Piper of Arll” and “At the Cedars” by Duncan Campbell Scott, “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape” by A.M. Klein, “The Cold Green Element” by Irving Layton, and also “The Swimmer’s Moment” by Margaret Avison. But it is Atwood’s poem I remember best, especially the kernel of her final couplet. To me, it’s the poem’s seed: “I planted him in this country / like a flag.”

The poem is
http://user.icx.net/~richmond/fgcgathering/poematwood.html

(ZT from LRC) Canada’s Most Memorable Poems: The LRC Contributors’ List


My question is why she wrote :

I planted him in this country / like a flag

Why flag?

[ericcoliu]

[[ericcoliu]]

[livetodream]

Hi Eric,

Thanks. it makes sense. But then I feel sorry for the woman.

[[FAFAFA]]

Hi Eric,

Thanks. it makes sense. But then I feel sorry for the woman.