Request To A Year

 gift – what can be learnt from a traumatic memory - gift from a mother to a daughter.
 This poem reveals the problematic nature of women’s helplessness in situations.
 In reality, women are helpless since they can only observe, art gives them power..
 This poem is supposed to be empowering and supposed to show that women find power in
art if not anything else but it is not.

If the year is meditating a suitable gift,

 personification of “year” – heirloom, gift of accepting helplessness

I should like it to be the attitude

of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
 role of her gg grandmother as an artist

 framing device

who having eight children

and little opportunity for painting pictures, [plosive]
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland

and from a difficult distance viewed

her second son, balanced on a small ice flow,
drift down the current toward a waterfall [synaesthesia]
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below, [guttural consonants, plosive]

while her second daughter, impeded,

no doubt, by the petticoats of the day, [dental/plosives]
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock
(which luckily later caught him on his way).

 The sound devices put you in the scene but also makes you feel horrible because you
cannot do anything which creates a sense of synaesthesia for the fact that it pushes you into
the scenario whilst making you feel helpless since you have no authority to do anything.

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;

And with the artist's isolating eye [synecdoche]
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by.

Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,

Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.

Towards the end the grandma recognises her power, since there is the rhyme scheme in the
ending only not in the beginning.
- Powerlessness of women
- Writing as an art form
- How writing gives women power