On Isolation
Poetry is often an outlet for the poet’s innermost thoughts
or feelings on life, politics, religion, etc. It is arguable that being a poet
in itself constitutes a certain isolation from the rest of society. Not everyone
possesses an understanding of language that allows for poetic expression of one’s
world views or sentiments.
Isolation is a recurring theme throughout the readings
studied in this course. When I first began thinking of how to frame my thread I
kept toying with the question: Isolation of what? Isolation of thought, emotional
isolation, Isolation of man from nature, Isolation caused by death? There were
endless possibilities, so I decided to keep my frame as vague as possible so
that I could narrow it down as I went back through the blog posts and began to
think about my essay. As I read posts and thought about how I wanted to frame
isolation in context with the readings, one mode of isolation became
particularly interesting to me: the isolation female writers may feel or may
have felt in a primarily male-dominated world. With this in mind I went back
through my thread and chose to focus on poems written by females. Fortunately
we have read many poems written by women this semestter, so it was not
difficult to select poems from my thread to use as examples of isolation within
the texts we have studied.
I ended up with poems that I felt demonstrated isolation as
a common theme, and also had something significant to say about what it means
to be a female poet. These three poems are ‘The Bird and the Arras’ by Anne
Finch, Dickinson’s ‘340,’ and Anne Sexton’s ‘The Truth the Dead Know.’
Finch’s poem can easily be read as a poem about being a
woman poet and the isolation she felt trying to find a place in a
male-dominated literary world. The bird in the poem is trying so hard to find a
place within the arra, which is a tapestry depicting images or scenes and hung
on a wall. The tapestry could be read as the literary world and the bird is
Finch as a woman poet. There is obvious isolation here. She cannot become a
part of the scene the tapestry depicts of ‘immitated fowl […] in flight and
aiming still more high’ that she wishes to be included in. There is disconnect
and isolation between her world and the world of those other birds which are
woven into the arra. She struggles to join in the image but her efforts are thwarted
when she hits the ceiling and the bird falls to the ground. She tries the
window, but must be let out by ‘some kind hand.’ To me, this poem is about the
isolation of being a woman poet and trying to find a way to fit into the
literary world. The help the bird receives to fly out of the window to be free
in the ‘Heav’n of Birds’ could be read as either the help of poetic inspiration
as Kellsey mentions in her post or, perhaps, of a man. The latter reading would
further invoke a reading of what it was like in Finch’s time to try to create
her own voice as a woman poet, or maybe even a desire for isolation from
society’s views.
This theme of isolation is maybe at first a little less clear in
Dickinson’s poem, but is certainly there. She is experiencing this funeral in a
very isolated way. She does not include herself as one of the mourners. In
fact, the only role she seems to have in this funeral is in her reflection of
its happening. When I first went back to this elegiac poem to flush out my
isolation theme I was again struck by the way in which Dickinson uses the
rhythm of a hymnal to create a very specific form in her poems. I think she
could be using this formal mode as a way to mock the church. The subordinate
housewife was a prominent religious ideal in the time of Dickinson’s poetry. She
refused to ever marry, rejecting this model in her own life. This use of the
hymnal form in her poems could certainly be read as a mockery of such religious
paradigms. She chose solitude and isolation in order to avoid giving up her
sense of self in order to be a proper wife. Then there is the ‘treading
treading’ which I found particularly interesting. It seems to me that she talks
an awful lot about the walking of people in this piece, which led me to think
Dickinson was alluding to women as doormats and her fight against this. As she
may have been one of the few who recognized this as one of the plights of being
a woman, her apparent resistance to such a dilemma could have been very
isolating.
In Sexton’s work, she seems to be isolated by her feelings
at the deaths of her parents. She isolates herself from the funeral and her now
dead parents by ‘refusing stiff procession to the grave.’ She does not seem to
feel grief, which is an isolation from the feelings she is expected by society
to feel at the loss of parents. I think there is a turning point toward the middle
of this poem when she says ‘I am tired of being brave.’ This could be read as Sexton
talking about going to her parents’ funerals one after the other so close
together (they were only a month apart). However, I read it as her confessing
that she is tired of being a woman in a man’s world. She is tired of being
isolated by her sexuality. Sexton was famous for her beauty and well known as a
model. Her fame led her to many infidelities which inevitably took a toll on
her marriage, isolating her in a world of flashing cameras and alcohol abuse.
The poem, goes on to
have a more sexual reading and seems to be somewhat a critique on ‘touch’
between men and women, which implies sex. I think she was using this poem as a
way to talk about how being considered beautiful and being sexually desired by
men was a very isolating place for her as a woman poet, and contributed to her
depression and sadness.
The recurring theme of isolation in these poetic creations
ties in with the separation a woman poet has been confronted with for
centuries. All of these women could claim feminism as a stance they take within
their work, and each of these poems gives us a glimpse into what it was like
for each of these writers to be women.
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