A Process in the Weather of the Heart
A Process in the Weather of the Heart - meaning Summary
Bodily Weather as Transformation
The poem depicts the body as a shifting ‘‘weather’’ of internal processes that transform life into death and back again. Images of heart, eye, womb and seed register cyclical change, doubleness and decay: damp to dry, night to day, ghost to ghost. These bodily metamorphoses suggest continuity between generation and dissolution, an impersonal force that alternately creates, halves, darkens and revives human experience.
Read Complete AnalysesA process in the weather of the heart Turns damp to dry; the golden shot Storms in the freezing tomb. A weather in the quarter of the veins Turns night to day; blood in their suns Lights up the living worm. A process in the eye forewarns The bones of blindness; and the womb Drives in a death as life leaks out. A darkness in the weather of the eye Is half its light; the fathomed sea Breaks on unangled land. The seed that makes a forest of the loin Forks half its fruit; and half drops down, Slow in a sleeping wind. A weather in the flesh and bone Is damp and dry; the quick and dead Move like two ghosts before the eye. A process in the weather of the world Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child Sits in their double shade. A process blows the moon into the sun, Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin; And the heart gives up its dead.
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