Pursuit of happiness? July 3, 2012

  

The poem she posted today said a lot about her, I had not suspected, although should have.

It deals with the concept of “fate” or inevitability, although she uses neither word. The poem seems to deal with innocence and guilt, but in an odd way, of unrealized expectations, and how struggles may not always be tied to experience.

In the poem, she is speaking to a new born baby, and raises the speculation of what she expected to feel when seeing the baby for the first time, and what she actually felt at first contact.

She apparently dreaded the idea of becoming a mother, describing it as “justly afraid,” or perhaps an even greater fear that she might succumb to mother nature’s call to motherhood.

Instead, she found an odd commonality with the infant she did not at all expect, noticing that the baby struggled with sleep just as she often has, only with the poet, there were justifications for this inability, worries that kept her mind running on what she often calls the hamster wheel in her head.

What did this infant have to worry about with so little time on the planet that allowed it toa accumulate such deep concerns?

The poet wants the infant to rest peacefully (an odd reference suggesting “rest in peace” and perhaps an allusion to the only real time when any of us are free of the things that keep us up at night, death being the end of all consciousness). The poet wants the infant to have the peace she herself as never felt.

How can this infant be struggling when it has everything it needs, love and affection, protection, and such, and yet it still cries, having none of the adult experience to justify it?

In some ways, this poem raises questions about the nature of innocence and whether or not we as humans are fated to misery, even when as young as this infant is.

This infant has had no time to build up a ledger filled with guilt or regret, hurt or disappointment, and has been showered with apparently endless love (perhaps suggesting for the poet that the pursuit of love may not be the answer she is seeking for herself.)

This kinship between poet and infant appears to be based on pain or concern, and the question as to why people cannot find contentment – and perhaps more fundamentally, the poem seems to ask, if the infant with so little baggage and so much love, can’t find happiness, what hope is there for the poet?

 

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