Claims

I was extremely surprised and upset by this poem. At first I really respected the grandmother for carrying eight children and then being able to sleep in comfort and to accept with her old age the idea of celibacy and all that has happened in her life and then I made the “mistake” of continuing onto the rest of the poem. I then felt some pity for her knowing that she had lost three of her children, her flesh and blood and how hard that must have been to get through yet she managed to do it and raise the other children until the author showed us exactly how she raised them. Telling your daughters that they steal your days and that they become your life as a prayer, the author gives the phrase very negative feelings and it may have to do with the italics making it seem insincere. When the author talks about the pact made with man and nature it almost seems as though the grandmother did not want to have any more children simply because she did not really want to be a mother and had never really wanted to be a mother and it was then that I lost the respect that I had had for her in the beginning of the poem. The idea of her dying was not a surprise but it was interesting that the author decided to use the images of the children that had passed away unwanted to show that the grandmother passed away the same way, at least to me, the same way, unwanted. All of their deaths were in some way related to the sea and the sea can vary from being very calm or very rough and is usually referred to, at least in my experience, as a feminine entity. This seems to make sense in this poem because it begins one way and then changes like the tide. I found it interesting that the last line talks about her “claiming back her territory” which I believe is talking about those babies that she had lost before. I would like to believe that she has regret for the way she treated her living children because she did not want to go through the pain of caring about them and then having them die like the other and now that she has died she can “know” her other children as she has all eternity with them, but I just can’t believe it.