Now she sees that although the potential for a rich, happy life might have been available to her as a young woman, those possibilities were as precious and rare as “golden dresses in a nutshell.” The air is heavy with her disenchantment and resignation. At first glance, this opening line seems to be a simple, declarative sentence, but the images suggest several other possibilities. 347-66. Today: Many of the countries formerly in the Soviet Union have aligned themselves with the West and become members of NATO. “Rita Dove,” in Current Biography Yearbook, edited by Judith Graham, H. W. Wilson, 1994, pp. After graduating from this school, she went on to study abroad in Germany for a short time. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Giants come in all sizes:Sometimes a moment is a monument;sometimes an institution breathes—like a library. In this final section of the poem, the speaker is again brought back to the reality of her situation—their “lives will be the same.” He will continue to be ineffective in protecting her in this life—his lips will be “swollen from whistling / at danger”—and the speaker will remain “a stranger / in this desert, / nursing the tough skin of figs.” So, even though she realizes that nothing will really happen to make this life more bearable, she continues to try to nurture “the tough skin” of this male-dominated desert of a life. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. The line lengths in the middle of the first and third stanzas define the restrictions that the speaker has permitted to be imposed upon her present life, even in the face of the unlimited possibilities available to her in adolescence. The speaker of the poem realizes that possibilities exist and that they are valuable and beautiful—they are “golden dresses”—but from the perspective of adulthood, with all of its struggle and responsibility, these possibilities are miniature, small enough to fit inside of a nutshell. Describe your interactions with the people in the picture, and with people who live in the picture’s world. Schneider, Steven, “Rita Dove: An Interview,” in The Iowa Review, Vol. Tight control of language and imagery demand the active participation of the reader to discern meaning, as in the line “Our lives will be the same.” Though the poem is metrically varied, the accents lean toward iambic tetrameter in the full lines, where meaning is most discernible, while the dimeter of the shorter, compressed lines defines the constrains and limitations of the speaker’s life. SOURCES The tone is restrained and guarded. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Pine Historical Context Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Color imagery plays a pivotal role in the subtle suggestion of vision and freedom of movement in the “green lamp”; caution, limitation, and restriction in the yellow light of “golden dresses in a nutshell”; and the subliminal red light of danger and unfulfilled dreams in the “lips, swollen from whistling / at danger.”. FRANK BIDART If a work of art is meant for a viewer to identify with, then this woodcut did its job almost too well. Born in 1952 in Akron, Ohio, to well-educated parents, Dove is the daughter of Ray A. Dove, the first African-American chemist to break the racial barrier in the tire and rubber industry, and the former Elvira Elizabeth Hord. Encyclopedia.com. As the speaker watches the girl in the picture, she creates an idealistic romantic fantasy of a free-spirited lover who blithely enters in loose, soft, billowy “white breeches”; open, unrestricted “sandals,” and a “goatee.” In essence, the speaker creates a lover whose attire epitomizes her sense of male beauty, though at that time “[she] didn’t know it.”, Lines spill over into meaningful enjambment as the speaker realizes that her creation of a dream man became her own real life fantasy: “he had / your face, though I didn’t know it.” This epiphany shifts the narrator from the deep recesses of memory to the bright light of reality, as she contrasts the “green lamp” of her early opportunities to the “desert” of her present existence. ". An excellent student, Dove was invited to the White House in 1970 as a Presidential Scholar, ranking nationally among the best high school students of the graduating class of that year. Themes . She even was honored as Presidential Scholar and won a National Merit Scholar award. POEM SUMMARY “Rita Dove: Selected Poems” was released on audio cassette in 1993 by Random House Audio. Taleb-Khyar, Mohamed B., “An Interview with Maryse Conde and Rita Dove,” in Callaloo, 1991, pp. (October 1, 2020). The poem is divided into two stanzas: one of six lines, and the other of thirteen lines. This means that the poem uses no set pattern of meter, and that there is no rhyme scheme. Ashworth, Debora, “Madonna or Witch: Women’s Muse in Contemporary American Poetry,” Women’s Culture: The Women’s Renaissance in the Seventies, edited by Gayle Kimball, Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1981. 954-61. Because Dove exercises such tight control over her subject and uses an economy of words, her terse, compressed language challenges meaning, yet still manages to invite speculation on the freshness and brevity of youthful optimism against the pragmatic resignation of adult survival. But my grandmotherwas nobody’s fool, and she’d tell anybodysmart enough to listen. Write a short paper explaining all that you can guess about the person referred to as “that one, / asleep, upstairs.”. This collision is made tolerable by the working of the imagination, and the result is, for Dove, ’magic,’ or the existence of an unexplainable occurrence. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Dove’s success in the poem is the emotional distance she employs to tell the story of personal loss. Source: B.J. The similarities that are stated between the real lover and the one that she imagined coming to the Japanese girl—with sandals, a beard, and a casual attitude toward danger—are not the qualities that ensure a strong adult relationship. Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Today: Genetically engineered vegetables are commonly available in grocery stores; mammals have also been cloned. In using the word “this,” the poem’s very title tips the reader off to the speaker’s feeling of frustration, making the point that she is bothered about having to live this particular life and not a better one. But in the next two lines, the speaker fuses her memory of the childhood fantasy with her present reality. The following year, Dove studied at West Germany’s Tubingen University as a Fulbright scholar. Rita Dovewas an exceptional student, even while still in high school. “You tell me the same thing as that one, upstairs. CRITICISM History becomes a ruling motif as the speaker arrives at the realization that it is “This” present life, not “that” past life with which she must seek reconciliation. Critical Overvi…, Curse Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of one of the first Black chemists in the tire industry. 2002 Poem Summary This led to further studies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As a young adult, Rita Dove attended Miami University. The speaker sees that “the possibilities” in this life may be impossible, “like golden dresses in a nutshell.” As a child, the speaker relates, she “fell in love / with a Japanese woodcut / of a girl gazing at the moon.” Further, the speaker confesses, “I waited with her for her lover.” Her identification with the imaginary girl is so complete that even now, in this life, the speaker associates the imaginary lover with her present lover: “he had / your face, though I didn’t know it.” Finally, the speaker concludes that her life and her lover’s “will be the same,” and that she will remain “a stranger in this desert,” this life, though she will continue to try to attain the impossible, “nursing the tough skin of figs.”, This poem may also be portraying the difficulty of being a woman, with certain emotional and romantic needs, as symbolized by the image of the moon, in a society dominated by men. She was alwaystalking around corners like that;she knew words carried their treasureslike a grape cluster around its own juice.She loved words; she thought a bookwas a monument to the glory of creationand a library…well, sometimesjust trying to describe Jubilationwill get you a bit tongue, so let’sleave it at that.

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