Need help with analysis of "Last Day of Alice"

  • susie
    17 years ago

    Hi! I am trying to figure out what this poem means. I am suppose to teach it to my class but get lost at about the fifth stanza...actually, I am not too sure about those first five stanzas, either. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!
    THANKS,
    Suzy

    LAST DAYS OF ALICE

    Alice grown lazy, mammoth but not fat,
    Declines upon her lost and twilight age;
    Above in the dozing leaves the grinning cat
    Quivers forever with his abstract rage:

    Whatever light swayed on the perilous gate
    Forever sways, nor will the arching grass,
    Caught when the world clattered, undulate
    In the deep suspension of the looking-glass.

    Bright Alice! always pondering to gloze
    The spoiled cruelty she had meant to say
    Gazes learnedly down her airy nose
    At nothing, nothing thinking all the day.

    Turned absent-minded by infinity
    She cannot move unless her double move,
    The All-Alice of the world's entity
    Smashed in the anger of her hopeless love,

    Love for herself who, as an earthly twain,
    Pouted to join her two in a sweet one;
    No more the second lips to kiss in vain
    The first she broke, plunged through the glass alone--

    Alone to the weight of impassivity,
    Incest of spirit, theorem of desire,
    Without will as chalky cliffs by the sea
    Empty as the bodiless flesh of fire:

    All space, that heaven is a dayless night,
    A nightless day driven by perfect lust
    For vacancy, in which her bored eyesight
    Stares at the drowsy cubes of human dust.

    --We too back to the world shall never pass
    Through the shattered door, a dumb shade-harried crowd
    Being all infinite, function depth and mass
    Without figure, a mathematical shroud

    Hurled at the air--blessed without sin!
    O God of our flesh, return us to Your wrath,
    Let us be evil could we enter in
    Your grace, and falter on the stony path!

    1931

  • Iola
    17 years ago

    Hi Suzie

    To me this poem reflects human nature, the 7 deadly sins and this woman's disgust with the constraints of being human. She's fallen into this enternal hole of accepting things as they are, letting herself go and basically selling her soul to the devil because of her lust. The only way she can see her way out of all of this is to "declare" herself evil, and she wants God to do the same, therefore giving her clarity and allowing her to be herself. What she doesn't understand is that she's inherintly good and that she - too - is a piece of a puzzle that need to fit.

    The entire poem to me spells out quick fixes, trying to find an escape route and denying her own depth because of a life that handed her everything on a silver platter.

    All my love

    Iola