Mary's Song
Mary's Song - meaning Summary
Holocaust as Inner Landscape
The speaker conflates homey sacrificial images with the mass murder of the Holocaust, turning religious domesticity into a scene of burning and ash. The poem links historical atrocity to personal grief and depression, portraying collective trauma as a persistent, interior landscape. Grey birds, ovens, and molten fat compress public horror into individual feeling, ending with a bleak address to a vulnerable child as emblem of a world that consumes.
Read Complete AnalysesThe Sunday lamb cracks in its fat. The fat Sacrifices its opacity. . . . A window, holy gold. The fire makes it precious, The same fire Melting the tallow heretics, Ousting the Jews. Their thick palls float Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out Germany. They do not die. Grey birds obsess my heart, Mouth-ash, ash of eye. They settle. On the high Precipice That emptied one man into space The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent. It is a heart, This holocaust I walk in, O golden child the world will kill and eat.
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