“Pieces”: the Poem Explication Essay (Critical Writing)

The poem “Pieces” is written as a free verse to honour my mother with the focus on expressing all the sadness, frustration, hurt, and anxiety associated with her death in poem’s lines. Thus, sadness and anxiety are the main attitudes connected with the subject of the poem, but it is also important to note that I choose to hope for better because of feeling the mother’s invisible protection. Moreover, the reader can understand the attitude with references to the changes in the poem’s tone which is melancholic in the first lines and rather optimistic in the ending lines in order to represent my attempts to convince myself and to concentrate on the idea that I can cope with the loss in spite of being broken to pieces, being alone and abandoned.

The poem is a free verse where rhythm and rhyme are not followed and lines are of different length to present the flow of my thought. Moreover, the stream of my consciousness is accentuated with the help of enjambment to represent my thoughts about the mother’s death as a flow. To accentuate the repetitive symbols and thoughts, I use different types of repetition. Thus, I use anadiplosis to accentuate the key moments for my recovery, “I hope to win / Win to fulfill her dreams”.

Moreover, I use anaphora to add more emphasis on my feelings, “I can feel the walls around, I can feel her protection”. In addition, I am inclined to make the impression more intensive while using parallelism in constructions to discuss my mother’s loss and my loss. From this perspective, I choose to focus more on the complicated syntax of the poem in order to represent my feelings and emotions, and the form of a free verse contributes to my attempts to present my thoughts in lines as they appear in my mind and reflect my feelings.

Alliteration serves me to express my feelings more vividly and to draw the readers’ attention to the crucial stages in my process of coping with the loss. Thus, at the first stage, I am in grief and Januarys are “crystal cold catastrophic”. However, now I hope to feel the protection and support of my mother because she is in “winds, whispers, waves of songs”. The obvious symbol in my poem is the cold January, and the main image is an angel. Thus, January is associated with the death and my frozen heart which is broken to pieces, and the angel is associated with my mother. From this point, I use the metaphorical simile while focusing on the “strength and wisdom of an angel” characteristic for my mother.

One more point to consider is that although I use the open form, I choose to rhyme such lines as “She left me here all alone and weak / She left me bleak” in order to accentuate my feelings of sadness and wretchedness typical for a person falling to pieces because of the loss.

Pieces

At the gravesite I met my January

January, another January

Too many crystal cold catastrophic Januarys

I have fallen to pieces

I lost my lovely mother full of grace

She lost her fight

She left me here all alone and weak

She left me bleak

Her strength and wisdom of an angel are away, but with me

I can feel the walls around, I can feel her protection

All the lessons are taught, and I hope to win

Win to fulfill her dreams

She is not here

She is in winds, whispers, waves of songs

I can hear her everyday.