Classic and Contemporary Poetry
CHAMBER THICKET, by SHARON OLDS Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: As we sat at the feet of the string quartet | ||||||||
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grosse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there -- and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome. Copyright (c) 2001 by The Modern Poetry Association. This poem appears in the August 2001 issue of Poetry Magazine. http://www.poetrymagazine.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...CONTRA MORTEM: THE COMING OF SNOW by HAYDEN CARRUTH A PORTRAIT OF MY ROOF by JAMES GALVIN ANTIQUITY OF FREEDOM by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT CITY TREES by EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY WHICH WAS MOST TRULY DEAD? by CHARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE THE LACHRYMATORY by CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER THE GLASSES AND THE BIBLE by ST. CLAIR ADAMS LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND: 9. GOING TO THE FAIR by WILLIAM ALLINGHAM |
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