Madame La Fleurie
Madame La Fleurie - meaning Summary
Mortality Consumed by Imagination
The poem confronts mortality and the collapse of a man’s private perceptions into a larger, consuming reality. Images of a reflective glass, the earth, and a mother figure portray how his lived impressions are absorbed and nullified. Language and art are presented as inadequate attempts to hold experience; grief becomes the recognition that what he saw will be fed into an impersonal, dying order. Tone blends dread, resignation, and bleak intimacy.
Read Complete AnalysesWeight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of the end. Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it. Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting parent. His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew. Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the moon. It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he could be told. It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know. It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak. The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black... The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals. He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay. His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and what he saw, In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead light.
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