The Problem of Dementia in Anne Carson’s Poem “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan”
- Cardigan Relationship lost (cold) (blue)
- Cardigan Decline in mental state (Cold) (blue)
- Cardigan Emptiness and loss (Cold) (blue)
Dementia is a broad category of brain diseases that cause a long-term and often gradual decrease in the ability to think and remember that is great enough to affect a person’s daily functioning. Dementia not only effects the person directly but it also affects their loved ones. Coping with the loss of a family member is one of the hardest challenges that many of us face. Grief leads us to find something significant like an acritical of clothing or repeating their actions, it is hard to watch someone you love become unable to remember you or there past.
In Anne Carson’s poem “Father’s Old Blue Cardigan” her observations of her father’s mental decline are heart wrenching in their plainly stated simplicity. Carson uses the cardigan symbolically throughout the poem. The cardigan represents her relationship that she lost, the mental decline of her father, and the feeling of emptiness and loss.
Where the poet is seeking to come to terms with the loss of her father. It is reflective but not contemplative, as the poet has yet to fully understand her father’s demise. The poet focuses, as a child or an adult in shock would, on concrete objects as a means of understanding abstract issues. She does not discuss her father’s personality directly here instead, she focuses pragmatically on the “stamping”of his “boots”. The “cardigan” shrouds her, rather than memories of her father. She focuses on the “haystacks” that shocked her father as a means of coming to terms with his deteriorating faculties. The muffled, echo-like thuds of “stomping” and “sat” suggest the cushioned realisations of an extreme change that cannot yet be fully recognised.
The poem’s structure suggests an uncertainty that she has. While uniform in format, a rhyming pattern is not strictly adhered to. Sentence lengths range from five words- “His laws were a secret.” to ten lines, the rambling lines suggest incomprehension on her behalf the only thing Anne is concisely sure about is her living father “He would not have done this.” This a powerful technique that illustrates her confusion. The poet uses comparison to connect the images of her living and dying father. Perhaps she does this to comprehend her loss. At first, her father is stern, rigid man who “stamp(s)” his solid, functional “boots” who perhaps possesses a “coldness” like the snow he shakes off. This is in contrast to the “child who has been dressed by some aunt”, for whom life is so overwhelming that “haystacks” shock him. The wobble of a lower lip and the quiver of realisation is suggested in the repeated “w” sounds “windy”, “will”, “while”. This comparison might ground the poet’s understanding in a more familiar reality it appears to me to be a method of understanding.
I conclude that the poet is struggling to come to terms with the cognitive and possibly physical loss of her father.
