Poem Reading

For my English 3000 class, I was required to pick a poem and give my interpretation of it. This is the draft. I will be changing it to suit my professor's grading and to add more development; however, I also really like the way it is now. Anyway, I just thought I would share.  Feel free to give some of your thoughts, critiques, etc. (:  I just really like this poem.

Eden--Emily Grosholz (1992)

In lurid cartoon colors, the big baby
dinosaur steps backwards under the shadow
of an approaching T-rex
"His mommy going to fix it," you remark,
 Serenely anxious, hoping for the best.
After the big explosion, after the lights
go down inside the house and up the street,
We rush outdoors to find a squirrel stopped in straws of half-gnawed cable. i explain,
trying to fit in the facts, "The squirrel is dead."

No, you explain it otherwise to me.
"He's sleeping. and his mommy going to come."
Later, when the squirrel has been removed,
"His mommy fix him," you insist, insisiting
on the right to know what you belive.

The world is truly full of fabulous
great and curious small inhabitants,
and you're the freshly minted, unashamed
Adam in this garden. You preside,
appreciate, and judge our proper names.

Like God, I brought you here.
Like God, i seem to be omnipotent,
mostly helpful, sometimes angry as hell.
 I fix whatever minor faults arise
with bandaids, batteries, masking tape, and pills.

But I am powerless, as you must know,
to chase the serpent sliding in the grass,
or the tall angel with the flaming sword
who scares you when he rises suddenly
behind the gates of sunset.

     In Emily Grosholz’s “Eden,” readers listen to the discourse of a mother to her child.  The way she talks allows readers to infer that perhaps the child is not listening; the mother may simply be musing these fearful thoughts in her head.  After all, to confide many of these thoughts to her child would only expedite the process she hopes to avoid.  This poem exhibits that, though loss of innocence is inevitable in the scheme of life through maturity, it is still a tragic loss.

            The poem opens with the mother speaking of vivid and harsh “lurid” colored cartoons (Line 1).  This unnaturally bright scene reflects the unnaturally bright disposition that many children possess.  The use of colors will become significant at the very end of the poem.  In the end of the poem, the mother references a sunset.  This image evokes thoughts of an array of colors yet again; however, these colors are natural.  This reflects the understanding a child gains as they mature, a more natural understanding of the world.  The sunset also serves to show the ending or death of a “day.”  In this case, the “day” represents childhood and the innocence that accompanies it. 

            As we move to the second stanza in the poem, the mother speaks of a “big explosion” in reference to a power outage (Line 6).  She is likely using her child’s vocabulary to emphasize the way children often find ordinary events amazing and fantastical; this is a blessing of youth that adults often tragically leave behind.  It is easy to dismiss the small things in life as ordinary instead of taking time to marvel.  In this stanza, the child encounters death a second time.  The mother attempts to “fit the facts” which evokes a sense of attempting to put together a puzzle (Line 10). After this precarious struggle, she bluntly tells her child that the squirrel has died.  Moving on to the next stanza the child replies that the mommy squirrel will fix this; mommies fix things is this child’s reality.  Therefore, the child shapes all other experiences around this fact.  The third stanza closes with a seemingly paradoxical phrase “the right to know what you believe” (Line 15).  This is the center of the poem, and it leads us to a change from the occurrences of the day to the deeper thoughts of the mother.

            In the fourth stanza the mother alludes to The Bible she calls the child, whom we now know to be her son, as an “unashamed Adam” (Line 18 & 19).  This compares the child to Adam who was completely and happily naked in the Garden of Eden.  The child wears his ignorance of death, ignorance of weakness, and childlike illusion unashamedly like nakedness bare and unaltered.  He does not even have an understanding of shame.  This is a beautiful image of untainted innocence; it is reflective of complete contentment.  However, drawing upon this allusion, the mother is unable to avoid its progression.

            She goes on to compare herself in her son’s eyes as God.  These two parallel reflections on herself as God reveal the speaker’s attitude towards God.  Although motherly, she comments that God can be “angry as hell” (Line 23).  This negative light of God appears to stem from the mothers own fear, remorse, and frustration at being unable to prevent her own son from The Fall.  This fall is not a fall of sin, but it is a fall that will remove his innocence.  Like God chose not to intervene during Adam’s fall, so parents must chose to one day release their children. 

            This inevitability lends to the closing of the poem.  The last stanza reads like a confession.  “I am powerless, as you must know,” she says to the child (Line 26). She proceeds to allude to The Fall.  She speaks of the “sudden” appearance of the “angel” (Line 28).  Like the loss of innocence, it is a scary occurrence.  Yet, few of us can ever recall quite where we lost it; it’s a sequence of events.  Like Adam tasting the apple, seeing things anew, hiding, confessing, and being cast out, we all slowly leave our gardens.  We are cast into a world where we experience a new and more painful form of nakedness.