NPPF: Notes C.1-4 - C.42

[jbor]

>>>> "TSOTWS" being metaphorical, but not necesarily the event in his
> bedroom, and
> not a literal event. <<<

on 27/8/03 7:15 AM, s~Z wrote:

> Don't you have to understand the literal meaning of the words to understand
> the other thing they are pointing to? Surely there is a reason the literal
> event is placed in a canto which locates the event in his childhood in his
> bedroom.
> 

There's a consciousness of the present time of writing the poem throughout
Canto 1, however, and it's made quite explicit, eg. "whilst now ... I look"
(43-4), and "[i]t is now stout and rough; it has done well" (54), describing
the shagbark tree. There are oblique hints of a process of the poet
imaginatively threading his way back through time in the second stanza too:
"Retake that falling snow" (13), and that "winter code" of the pheasant's
footsteps "pointing back" (23 & 24).

But I tend to agree that the verb tense of the first couple of stanzas
indicates that Shade is standing in his childhood bedroom, a room "now
reserved for guests" (80), reflecting back on his life from birth. So I
guess another possibility is that it's the death of his parents, both of
them "ornithologists" (71), which equates to the moment he became "the
shadow of the waxwing slain" -- this rather than, it is perhaps implied, the
healthy waxwing he had been before their deaths, blithely flying through a
happy and normal childhood.

But Hazel's death still seems to me as to me to be the climax of the poem
overall, and the turning point in Shade's life that the opening conceit
*should* have related to.

best