The Lost Heritage
A Commentary on The Lost Heritage by Heather BuckThe theme of this poem is given away by the title. The poem represents human heritage, more specifically the hertitage of the poet, Heather Buck. I think this poem is her way of expressing her feelings and inhibitions about her painful past and the hardships she endured as a child growing up in a world of adults. tipping and tilting them till we achieve These are lines 18, 19 and 20 in stanza three, I believe that when she writes 'we' she is refering to her parents and then she generalises, as if all parents and all families were like hers. I believe she is saying that her parents had a rocky marriage before she was born because she goes on to say, "Was the child with hands outsteched to the blaze less constrained? Taking her place on the trampled earth floor with lambs brought in from the cold bitter springs" The child is herself and she's saying that when she was born she was innocent, because her hands were held out to fire which is a symbol of purity. "...less contrained?..." She uses a rhetorical question there and it says that even though she was a new born baby she was already int
The fact that the colour is yellow must also have some symbolism connected to it. Then she starts to write from what seems to be from personal experiances however she begins to write so that the theme or point of the poem becomes slightly ambiguios. I think that there are two ways to interpret it, you can either assume that the child she is talking about represents young minds everywhere that are stuggling to come to terms with their new lives or you can assume that she wasn't loved as a child and as a consequence she felt very left out of her heritage and very misplaced. the rhythmic clatter of treadle and shuttle or flinched as cold fastened on fingers, winds shuddered and knived through their looms. erwined in the complex 'patterns' of the heritage of herself and others. The way she describes it does not make Persian rug making sound very pleasurable at all. Heather Buck uses a great deal of poetic devices to really bring out the general theme of her poem, however she uses them in such a way that the theme and point of the poem are debatable as is the true meaning of her extended metaphor. The structure of the poem has no obvious pattern as far as the number of lines or any rhyming patterns are concerned, however the way she writes it has a big impact on the way a reader would interpret it. The rhythm of this poem is as follows; stanza 1 is quite slow as an introduction to the main body of the poem, stanza 2 begins to speed up, stanza 3 goes very fast and does this by use of alliteration and enjambment, stanza 4 is quick to begin with but then it slows down considerably and the poem is positive for a few lines, then the last stanza is very fast. Back to the extended metaphor, the next time it appears are in lines 12 - 14 where she writes about, ". She makes the process sound painful by extensive use of alliteration in the next line. She hyperbolises the amount of pain that goes into making the rugs. However white is usually more symbolic of a pure kind of light so in conclusion I think this could be tied in nicely with line 25 where she talks about her birth being cold and bitter or off white which is yellow.
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daily tread kaleidoscopes,
intricate patterns,
cold bitter springs,
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personal experiances,
happy positive,
extended metaphor,
tread kaleidoscopes,
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