Tuesday 26 August 2014

What is the moral message of the poem "A Woman's Last Word"?

This poem is ambiguous, but one reading of it would interpret its moral as showing that the woman narrating it suffers because she would prefer to live in a false "Eden" of harmony rather than to communicate honestly with her lover. She appears to feel that the only way the two can get along is to "hush and hide the talking." She says that she wants to become one with her love:


Teach me, only...

This poem is ambiguous, but one reading of it would interpret its moral as showing that the woman narrating it suffers because she would prefer to live in a false "Eden" of harmony rather than to communicate honestly with her lover. She appears to feel that the only way the two can get along is to "hush and hide the talking." She says that she wants to become one with her love:



Teach me, only teach, /Love As I ought /I will speak thy speech, Love, /Think thy thought—



While she believes that knowledge of good and evil—"shun the tree ... Never pry"—will keep her safe in her carefully constructed paradise, the fact that she is sad and crying in the last two stanzas calls into question her solution of brushing conflict in a relationship under the rug. She states that "I must bury sorrow /out of sight" and "Must a little weep." She notes in the last line that she is loved, but the reader might ask: at what price? Is it worth it if it makes her sad? The poem calls into question a kind of love based on one partner suppressing and stuffing down truth and emotion: the moral is that this path leads to unhappiness.

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