Distilling a Poem

“The House of Falling Leaves” was presented by Elissa last week, and I was very intrigued. During the discussion I made a comment about all of the capitalized and I thought I should revisit it. I was intrigued by the seemingly random capitalization throughout the poem. After further inspection, I realized that I could pull out these words and get the following:

House Falling Leaves

Room

Time

Autumn

Time

Winter

Memory

This represents a distilled version of the poem that manages to maintain a lot of meaning. The first interpretation of this set of words is as a description of the life of a leaf as mentioned in the title. Time is the biggest factor for change for a leaf so this selection of words accurately describes the passing of the seasons and how the leaf eventually becomes a memory. This can be taken in a number of directions symbolically as is true for this whole poem. these words show a clear sense of inevitability due to the emphases on time and passing of seasons. That is intriguing when talking about the people separating or passing away into a memory. We want our life to be meaningful, but similar to Native Son, it all appears to be just as predictable as the passing seasons (shown here). The seasons metaphor is also similar to the discussion we had about Their Eyes Were Watching God and the passing of time for Jamie. We described the phases of her life in seasons as well. Jody could be the ‘he’ in this poem that passes from her as her life passes out of Autumn. It is every interesting to see these parallels emerge from these writers. There is so much more that could be said about the poem itself, but I wanted to take a moment to look at a conscious choice by the author to highlight some key words.

What do you see as their significance?