Author: SHIRA TABAROKI

Yehuda Amichai’s relationship to history is clearly quite personal and emotional. To him, history is not just a collection of facts and not just memories of things that happen to people he’s never heard of. Perhaps my favorite poem of his, “Endless Poem,” illustrates this very well. It is so simple, yet it expresses so much. He visits a modern museum that has restored, or rebuilt, or maybe encased an old synagogue. It’s a juxtaposition of the new and the old living literally inside one another, inseparable. Yet, he also lives inside that synagogue, and his heart, which lives in him, has a museum inside it. The museum crucially is not in his memory or in his brain. It’s in his heart. He has the museum at the center of his emotional core. The museum, in turn, has a synagogue in it, which has him in it, which has his heart in it, which as a museum in it, ad infinitum. He’s written a sort of Russian doll of a poem that never ends, always having him, his heart, the museum and the synagogue inside it. All of that is part of his character and part of his self. It’s part of his emotional core, as well.

Additionally, I think he’s writing not just about how he feels, but about how all people of Jewish descent feel. The poem strikes me as representing the familial nature of Jewish history, one of shared strife and shared triumph. He’s saying that just as he sees Jewish history as emotional and personal, so do Jewish people in general.

The bird in the poem serves a couple of functions, as far as I can tell. First, he calls attention to the changing of the seasons, with lines like the bird signaling “early petal-fall is past,” and thus calls attention to the passage of time. Therefore, one can say that the bird also represents death, perhaps man’s return to nature, or the relatively ephemeral nature of man’s life compared to the natural world. Second, the bird also calls attention to the truth of the natural world, how there is decay everywhere, with lines like “He says the highway dust is over all.” In that sense, he almost serves the same function as a poet would. Perhaps the bird and the poet are one and the same. Frost may be saying that, while signs of the passage of time may exist all around us, it takes someone with a keen eye to point it out, or someone with skill with words to make it noticeable. The bird’s singing is thus like poet’s words. They both complement and underscore the world all around them, as well as contribute their own viewpoint of the world.

This text is significant to me because it shows how little Gurov knew himself. He considered himself a lady killer, but in the end, he proved to be a lovesick man who had not met the right woman. His wife, the person who perhaps knew him best, even if they were not meant to be with one another, is the one that ends up pointing this out to him. She knew that Gurov was no lady-killer. In fact, this might be how Gurov may have gotten away with his affairs, as his wife intuited that he was the type of man to value love and commitment even when he did not realize it. By contrast, Gurov believed himself to be above love, and to only see women as objects. While I am on this topic, I would also like to address the question of how one can reconcile Gurov’s apparent misogyny with his newfound love for Anna. Gurov was definitely behaving in a misogynistic way and that is not to be overlooked. However, it seems to me that Gurov’s misogyny partly stems from his society. He devalues women because his society devalues women to the point that when he actually falls in love, there is nobody to say this to. His society values marriage, faith, and appearances more than actual love and women’s qualities as equal companions. He behaves in a misogynistic way because that is what he knows, until he meets the woman that he actually loves and sees that women can be companions and provide emotional happiness.

Money in this story serves the function of symbolizing how people think certain things will help them rise above their situation, but in the end, it can be an illusion. Money seems to be a solution to both Joe and Missie May, to the point that Missie May was willing to cheat on her husband to get some, but she soon discovers that money is no solution to her problems at all, and that it is a false promise of hope. In the end, Missie May and Joe lacked money, but they possessed something more important, the love of a true companion, and did not realize it. Perhaps as a broader metaphor, money may be meant to stand for the aspirations of White American society, which values wealth above all else, and how it is counterproductive for African Americans to pursue those same values, because there are more important things they may want to pursue. As a metaphor for the greater situation of African Americans in the South, Hurston may be stating that seeking equal treatment, being wary of charlatans with false promises, and valuing community, are more important than seeking to compete in White America’s pursuit of wealth.

I think that Hurston chose her setting for her story because it shows how much hardship Missie May and Joe had to overcome to be happy. They are living in the South, a region fraught with racial tensions. In fact, this sentence very aptly sets the scene by figuratively hitting the reader over the head with how typically despondent the situation for African Americans is in the South, and how much the subjects of the story have to contend with in their everyday lives. They even live close to a fertilizer works, which I imagine is introduced in the sentence to illustrate how much the place might smell. Nevertheless, as the opening states, they are happy in their situation despite it seeming bad from the outside. Almost certainly, that is because they found each other. Love, Hurston asserts, can help people overcome even the worst of circumstances. Even when their marriage is tested, the pair is able to rise above their problems because they are truly in love.

Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” should not be taken literally, as the poet is not truly writing just about the west wind, but instead about change. There are numerous references in the poem to the themes of death and rebirth, and they are connected to the wind. In one instance, Shelley writes, “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe/ Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” The wind takes something that is dead, which no longer works for the benefit of anyone, and gives it a new life. Through metaphor, Shelley thus asserts that change is both inevitable and good, especially when considering the poem’s final lines, “O Wind,/ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Overall, Shelley equates the wind with change, likely emanating from Western society (thus the “west wind”), which the poet sees as creating a better world.