When first reading May Swenson’s
poem I Will Lie Down I began to
wonder if the speaker is mindful or not to the environment around her. I also began
think on how the nature may correlate with the speaker. Towards the end of the poem I began to
realize that in death she seems the closest to nature and perhaps as she lays
there she feels closer to nature.
In Swenson’s poem the speaker seems
to know what is going on around her but she doesn’t seem to appreciate it. This is most apparent in the fifth stanza as the
speaker states, “I will sleep face down in the burnt meadow no hearing the
sound of water over stones.” She knows
that there is a water source near her since she mentions it, however she does hear
the sound of the water, whether it is because she is too far away or for what I
believe is that she doesn’t want to hear it and is blocking out the sound. I came to this conclusion because in the poem
the speaker states that she slept face down.
Sleeping faced down she is not able to see what is going around her and
yet she knows about the environment around her.
After seeing everything around her, she chose to lie face down and when
doing so she chose not to acknowledge what was going on around her was more
concerned about her own death.
The nature in the poem relates most
to the fact that the speaker is dying.
In the last stanza of the poem the speaker states, “Let snow hide the
whiteness of my bones.” The snow
covering her bones suggest the association between her death and winter. This then connects the speaker waiting to
death to overtake her, to the season of autumn. Autumn can be considered the age before death
since many plants begin to die off or prepare for hibernation before the
winter. I believe that Swenson used the
seasons to show the relationship between the speaker waiting death since both
autumn and the speaker prepare for the next stage in life whether it be winter or
the end of life.
The speaker though out the poem
seems to be the closest to nature as her life comes to an end. Even though she doesn’t to acknowledge the environment
around her she still seems very close to nature in the way she dies. There are many environments that the speaker
could be preparing to die in such as at home in bed or in a hospital, however
she decides to die peacefully within nature.
Nature often has peaceful qualities and dyeing within nature gives her
death a peaceful attribute. I believe that
she may have wished to be closer to nature and that is why she prepared to die
here. Perhaps by dying in nature she
could become one with it before she took her last breath.
I really enjoyed reading I will Lie Down because of the correlation
between nature and death. For me the
poem creates the sense that death can be beautiful because of its balance between
the peaceful atmosphere of nature and the darker undertones of death from the speaker. This would be a poem to keep analyzing to
understand more on how nature and the speaker’s death relates. I am still curious if the speaker may actually
wish she was closer to nature in her life and that is why she decided to be
closer to nature in death.
References:
Swenson, M. (2003). I Will Lie Down. In L. Anderson,
Sisters of The Earth (Second ed., p. 53). New York: Vintage Books.
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