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A Summary Of Claudia Emerson's Poetry

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Relationships are difficult. They succeed when two people can build a rapport through patience on both spouses’ part. In an ideal scenario, each partner would always be able to communicate their feelings, and in turn, respond to their spouse’s feelings in a respectful and constructive way. In her collection, Late wife: poems, Claudia Emerson employs varied verse forms and tones in “Surface Hunting” and “Stringed Instrument Collection” to express different levels of compatibility with her two husbands through her descriptions of their respective hobbies.
Following Emerson’s chronological layout of her poetry collection, it is no surprise that “Surface Hunting” comes at the beginning of the book. Unlike many of her other poems, it has a condescending tone to it, as if the subject of the poem is childlike. She portrays her husband as a messy, energetic child: you’d tracked in from whatever neighbor’s field had just been plowed. Spearpoints, birdpoints, awls, and leaf- shaped blades surfaced from the turned earth as though from beneath some thicker water you tried to see into. (9)
Immediately, the speaker symbolizes their clashing personalities by suggesting her husband carelessly tracked mud into the clean, orderly house. Use of the second person pronouns “you” and “you’d” implies that the two of them are battling each other—quite to the contrary of an ideal, cooperative marriage. Moreover, Emerson incorporates these pronouns with the combative mood to create an elegy

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