The Stranger
The Stranger - meaning Summary
Outsider Within the Community
The poem portrays a woman who remains an inscrutable outsider within a familiar community. Mistral sketches her apart through exotic imagery—alien plants, a foreign tongue, a distant faith—and emphasizes her persistent otherness across life and death. Though she lives, loves, and ages among neighbors, her inner landscape and suffering stay solitary and unshared, making her presence both physically intimate and emotionally inaccessible to those around her.
Read Complete AnalysesShe speaks in her way of her savage seas with unknown algae and unknown sands; She prays to a formless, weightless God, aged, as if dying. In our garden now so strange, she has planted cactus and alien grass. The desert zephyr fills her with its breath and she has loved with a fierce, white passion she never speaks of, for if she were to tell it would be like the face of unknown stars. Among us she may live for eighty years, yet always as if newly come, speaking a tongue that plants and whines only by tiny creatures understood. And she will die here in our midst one night of utmost suffering, with only her fate as a pillow, and death, silent and strange.
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