This poem explores the deepest forms of human experience: birth, knowledge, love, loss, and death. For my blog post, I would like to flush out the portion about the heart and its unique experiences. In part three after Spahr discusses the lengthy list of all the things we “learned” and “loved”, she says “and this was just the beginning of the list”. Perhaps here she is alluding to the fact that we as humans are continuously learning and loving and that the process is ongoing throughout our lifetime. It does not end just because we get old; there are always new things to learn and love. The heart, according to Spahr takes on “new shapes, new shapes every day”. I feel as though the hearts’ capacity to learn and experience is limitless. Using nature as a symbol (or perhaps literally too), Spahr names all of the beautiful things our heart comes in contact with. Following that, she also names some seemingly negative aspects too: “we let leaves and algae into our hearts and then we let the mollusks and the insects”. The heart is subject to both the beautiful and the ugly in the world. Sometimes we “take” the beautiful but “let” the ugly in. The verb difference seems to illuminate the idea that our heart is vulnerable to both good and bad experiences in the world. However, both are necessary for growth, knowledge, and change. The next section of her poem explores heartache, perhaps to emphasize the hearts’ vulnerability to negative experience, but again how this is an inevitable aspect of life.
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