Joe Rossi
Cline
Essay #2
English102
September 15, 2011
Lost and Hopeless
As I read the poem over and over nothing was really clicking in my head, I was trying to discover what each word meant and tried to puzzle it all together. I couldn’t get much past my mind other than what I could imagine. The poem to me did not rhyme too much to me but it definitely got my attention with all the detail the author included. I think Mary Karr does a great job at the letting the reader really interpret what she is to trying get across, she only gives just enough detail and then lets the reader fill in the blanks. I think this poem can mean so many things, and it all depends on the reader. Although I didn’t relate to the poem, I could only imagine what this poem did for people who did feel lost or like they are at a dead end in their life. To me this poem is about a hopeless lost man who does not have the desire to move on with his life and his only option is suicide.
It wasn’t until I read this poem with a clear open mind when it really started to take shape. I was on my journey to discover what this poem meant to me and to unlock the mystery to Mary Karrs poem. To me this poem comes off as something traumatic, something that just happened to this man, who now feels lost. I feel that what he was going through was so painful that he thinks there is no hope left but to let the evil in his mind win. At this point I started to ask myself questions like, was it a murder he witnessed? Did someone close to him die? Was he unhappy with his own life? What truly happened to make this man feel so lost in his own dark confined world? Mary Karr does a great job at letting the reader try to discover what happened. So my next immediate thought I got was this man has to be suicidal. He feels lost, sees death and doesn’t care about what is going on outside his four walls.
What Mary Karr would consider the main reason behind the main of the poem is still a great mystery to me, but here is my take on the poem. She, to me, portrays what is really just going on in the characters mind, and how he is so tormented that he is on the verge of suicide. From early on in the poem you get a sense of misery that this man is feeling, as though if he had hit a brick wall in his life and had nowhere else to turn but death. As I read the first few lines I got a vivid picture of a man sitting in his home, which could also be his mind, staring off into darkness outside the window, almost as if the night was cold dark dead end in this own life or the lost hopeless feeling of his empty soul. “Stare hard enough at the fabric of night, and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at” (Karr Lines 1-4). This is a man who just dealt with intense pain, almost as if he just lost a dear person in his life, that he would not have the strength to move on. As the poem reads on you can see that he is so consumed by the thoughts in his head that while sitting there sipping gin, he is being consumed by the nothingness of the darkness in his mind, so consumed that he doesn’t even realize, nor care that the television is still on. I reread that a few times and also got the impression that no matter what else happens; he had hit the lowest point in his life and nothing else around him mattered, even to the point that he was oblivious of his surroundings. This man could really care less about anything else in life, even as the light from the television tried to distract him from his misery. “Sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love Lucy reruns have gone off” (Karr Lines 5-6). I can imagine this man being in this lost and hopeless state for days without any wonder as to what is going on outside his four walls or the world for that matter.
As I read on I could imagine this man being trapped in this room, maybe his own mind! Replaying the horrific event, over analyzing the situation and making it worse than it really was. ” and behind any night’s taut scrim will come the forms you expect pressing from the other side” (Karr Lines 7-9). For him he kept recreating his own nightmare. “For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania. They’re plain once you think to look” (Karr Lines 10-12). As the man continues to dwell on what happened to bring him to this suicidal state, he starts to think that maybe someone could be after him or maybe he is after himself and confirms in his mind that there really are evil people in the world, almost as if he didn’t think that this would ever happen to him, this suicidal state. Soon he would become one of those evil humans he so greatly disliked. “You know such fields exist, for criminals roam your very block, and even history lists monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe who stalk the earth’s orb” (Karr Lines 13-16). Almost immediately he begins to scroll through his mind and ponder the idea of death and what it is held in store. But then the author throws in a line about his fellow coworker, the disgruntled mail clerk. Could this man in the poem have caused animosity between them two? “Perhaps that disgruntled mail clerk from your job has already scratched your name on a bullet” (Karr Lines 17-19). Makes me wonder what this man did to have such evil people after him, that he would want to take his own life and be so threatened that he would rather just sit in this confined space he calls a room, or the space that is in his mind. “You caress the thought, for it proves there’s no better spot for you than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa” (Karr Lines 20-22). So thinking about the room, is it really a room? Or is it his mind? I think the room is a safe place in his mind and the television is the outside world which doesn’t even distract him. The blackness in the mind is the emptiness in his soul, a place where there is a dead end.
I think this man feels hopeless, lost and so alone. So alone that there is not even a god who can save him. I kept asking myself what this man did to deserve this. “You stare and furious stare, confident there are no gods out there” (Karr Lines 24-25). This man can only focus on this one event, nothing more, nothing less. He is so consumed by it that he only can see to a certain point, like his eyes, only being able to see so much in the dark.” In this way, you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine and to the light it sees by” (Karr Lines 25-27). Everything beyond the darkness is what his mind is imagining “For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania” (Karr Lines 10-11).
My assumption to this poem is that there is a lost hopeless man who has no desire to continuing living his life in this depressed, hopeless, dark, and angry state. This man feels that he is trapped in his own mind and nothing will set him free. All he has to look forward to is the torment of not know what is next as the field of skulls consuming his mind.
Works Cited
Karr, Mary “Field of Skulls” from Viper Rum. New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993.
September 15, 2011 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171884
I am not sure if I cited everything correctly. Can anyone help with that?
