The 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 interwine

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d in the complex ‘patterns’ of the heritage of herself and others. In fact she makes it sound quite painful and cold. The latter is what I believe to be the basic theme of this poem. I think that it could be because it is the colour most associated with light and light is usually associated with birth. The fact that the colour is yellow must also have some symbolism connected to it. Within which she is completely confused and lost as states line 34. The way she describes it does not make Persian rug making sound very pleasurable at all. It depends on how the reader identifies with what the poet has written. Also something interesting is line 4, the fact that she is blind to her heritage suggests that she knows it is there but she and others take it for granted. 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. So basically the 2nd line should be, daily we tread kaleidoscopes of yellow.

Consider where the poem gets positive for awhile (lines 27 –32).

In the first stanza she writes,

“on Persian rugs we set our feet

blind to the woven threads and dyes,

the intricate patterns that shape our lives,”

This is obviously not to be taken literally, the persian rug represents her heritage and the intricate patterns are everything that happens or has happened in her life that has had an effect on her heritage. In line 12 she uses imagery by using an onomatopoeic word (clatter) and by using treadle and shuttle.

Common topics in this essay:
Heather Buck, theme poem, cold bitter, heather buck, cold bitter springs, intricate patterns, daily tread kaleidoscopes, 19 20, daily tread, poem positive, tread kaleidoscopes, happy positive, feels brought,

Approximate Word count = 1393
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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