Kizer's Widow In Wintertime

3 Pages 747 Words

Modern poetry midterm

The poem I chose was Carolyn Kizer’s “Widow in Wintertime” seeing as it was the only one I even mildly understood. But for the poor reader who has to read this I am sorry if I totally miss the point that was expressed by the author. This is only my limited view on the piece. Though I did like this piece the most out of the other works there was something raw about the writing style. Something that was not expected from the first few lines.
“Last night a baby gargled in the throes of a fatal spasm. My children are all grown past infant strangles; so, reassured, I knew some other baby perished in the snow. But no. The cat was making love again”. The first five lines talk about a child dying and the persona knowing that it is not her child for they had all grown up. So the persona thought that someone else’s baby was dying in the snow. “But no. The cat was making love again.”
“Later, I went down and let her in. She hung her tail, flagging from her sins. Though she’d eaten, I forked out another dinner, being myself hungry all ways, and thin from metaphysic famines she knows nothing of”. The second stanza speaks of the cat proudly “flagging” her tail, but this is where the persona combines the literal world with the world in her mind. The persona feeds the cat hoping to feed the metaphysic hunger inside of her even though the cat has already eaten.
“The freckles beast! Even so, resemblances were on my mind: female and feline, though she preens herself from satisfaction, and does not mind lying even in the snow. She is lofty and bedraggled, without need to choose.” The third stanza starts off with the persona comparing herself to the cat “female and feline” and from this point on I think that the cat and herself are in fact different aspect of the persona. She is projecting onto this cat things, that she may have don in her youth. Possibly projecting her youthful self o...