The Garden

En robe de parade.
Samain

Like a skien of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.


For the first time this semester I analyzed our reading before being asked to, on my own, to see what I could pull out of The Garden before given any direction. I’d say it was a success. Although at first I was having trouble fully understanding the poem but using imagination and making the attempt to “dig deeper” I got something. The first line that caught my attention as “And she is dying…” This seems to be the overall message of the poem, that “she” is dying and a description of the time, feelings, and surroundings is, in a way, given. “She would like someone to speak to her,” following the previous line tells me that she is alone.


I feel that she really does want someone to speak to her. What if she was of the clergy, being isolated from the rest of society in order to keep her high expectation of a noble woman. In many similar stories most of us have heard throughout our lives, the young girl that is born of nobility seems to grow up alone, meeting depression and a lack a social life at a young age.


Where did I get the noble part from? “She walks by the railing of a path…” could that be a private garden?


“In her is the end of breeding,” only shows that all hope may be gone soon. She is alone and needs someone there for her.


Professor Corrigan had a very insightful reflection on this poem as well, applying similarities to events and situations that have happened in his own life. This is something that I did not think of doing. Actually comparing what we read to our own lives to try to make a “better” or “different” kind of connection. I really enjoyed reading Corrigan’s essay because I was introduced to yet another way of looking at, analyzing, and reading literature