Thursday, April 29, 2010
Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell
this poem is describing the process of a flower like if it was a human being. a flower is beautiful specially when it is full grown. if a person opens up it could be very beautiful or very nasty/negative at the same time. the writer speaks about love and happiness as he describes the flower.every beautiful thing has something bad like the flower it has spines that might cut you. i also think he is describing how a rose becomes lively for example in spring and how bad it could be when is dying or how sad.
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Yes, but be careful of the over generalizations, like "Happiness and love"; if we look closely at the images, it's about something more specific, more eath bound, and more relevant to life in its fullness. Also, we can't forget St. Francis, the allusion to whom leads us the the imagery of the second half of the poem (Kinnell's poems often turn in this way); as the poem tells us up front, it's not really about flowers, per se--everything blooms "from within," though sometimes we/they/it may need reminding. We follow St. Francis into the animalness of the animal (sowness of the sow), touching imagistically the earthy beauty of the stereotypically unlovely, as in Bishop's "The Fish." Kinnell's poem's often engage us with the animal/natural "other" in this way, like Snyder, though stylistically different, reminding us of our interconnection with both the human and the non-human, that sense of interrrelatinship that blooms "from within" all of us, and into, all else/other....much as the "blue milken dreaminess" flows from the sow to the "mouths sucking" beneath; mataphorically, those "mouths" are the mouths are not just the mouths of the young animal, but also ours (the reason the image is built around the metonymy of "mouths," rather than locating that mouth in a specific animal)
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