Forgive
Forgive - meaning Summary
Healing Amid Historical Guilt
The speaker addresses Virginia as a place bearing historical weight—Jamestown, camptown races, slave ships and Richmond’s greed—acknowledging collective guilt while asking to be bound to those memories. At the same time the speaker requests mercy: Virginia should loosen a symbolic turban of flowers so blossoms become epaulettes and ringlets of forgiveness. The poem balances indictment of past injustices with a yearning for tenderness and reconciliatory grace.
Read Complete AnalysesTake me, Virginia, bind me close with Jamestown memories of camptown races and ships pregnant with certain cargo and Richmond riding high on greed and low on tedious tides of guilt. But take me on, Virginia, loose your turban of flowers that peach petals and dogwood bloom may form epaulettes of white tenderness on my shoulders and round my head ringlets of forgiveness, poignant as rolled eyes, sad as summer parasols in a hurricane.
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