Friday, May 2, 2008

Poem Interp. 3: Ispahan Carpet by Elizabeth Burge

Ispahan Carpet

 

Rough timber gallows on which the carpets are woven

By a silent, sallow, dark-eyed Persian family

Fills the room, bare but for blackened pots and jars

In the cavernous hearth. A flickering fire

Lights on the sensuous jeweled arabesques

Shadowing the makers of the webs.

 

Eight-year-old girls sit sparrowed on a plank

Rope-rising with the pattern, their unsupported bird-bones

Bent like old women. Only such little fingers,

Following the guides of coloured wool upon the warp

Left by their aunts and sisters,

Can tie such exquisitely minute knots-

One hundred to the square centimeter, says the guide proudly-

For the most desired Tabriz or Karmenshah.

 

One hundred knots in the space of my thumbnail

One hundred heartbeats of a young child’s growing

One hundred hours for the space a foot will crush down.

 

O, eyes whose whole horizon is the carpet

And it’s traditional beauty! Who can unravel

The world’s weaving?

 

My swollen hand is gentle on the greenstick shoulder

Her large eyes look back at me with a speaking darkness

 

Analysis

The poem is set in a Persian rug-making facility. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker uses deathlike and cadaverous images to describe the world around them. The speaker is a tourist who is observing and questioning the reason for the conditions in which these people’s souls are.

The speaker refers to the looms, which the eight-year-old girls use, as “rough timber gallows” that are used to hang people. The whole family acts as if they are strangers, being “silent, sallow, and dark eyed”, like all of the life has been sucked out of them. The room is naked, all except the bleak look of the “black pots and jars”.

The only colorful descriptions in the whole poem are about the fire in the hearth and the carpet that the girls are working on. The speaker only describes what the “flickering fire” light does to the carpet. Nowhere does it say that the people were warmed by it, or that is showed the hope in their eyes. It actually does the opposite, casting a shadow on “the [carpet] makers”. The fire seems as if it is there only to make the “sensuous jeweled arabesque” carpet more and more beautiful. Since everything else in the house is bleak, it is easy for the reader to assume that the life has already been taken from them to improve the look of the woven and “coloured wool”.

The speaker correlates the image of colors with life. In doing this, the speaker has made it seem as though the colorless “girls sit sparrowed on a plank” that belongs to the gallows. As they continue in their carpet weaving, the “rope [rises]”, putting them nearer and nearer to death. Soon their bones are “unsupported” and they resemble old women. This change could be analyzed with a literal approach; all of the hours of labour turn the girls' youth into a form resembling “bent…old women”. Approaching it as a metaphorical statement, their souls are hung and become decrepit, “bent like old women”. Either way, the girls themselves had been tying “exquisitely minute knots” for their own nooses.

Though the guide is proud of the work that the Persian family has done, the speaker questions the morality of the situation. The whole third stanza is the speaker realizing how unimportant the making of these “most desired” rugs are. The speaker questions the carpets beauty. “Who”, they wonder, “has decided what is beautiful and what is not? Is a human soul not as beautiful as a rug”? She simultaneously questions the tradition of the carpet makers. She wonders why they, as human souls, would ever ask themselves “who [is capable] of unraveling the world’s weaving”. Why would bad traditions have to be kept?

The speaker lays her “swollen” hand on the fragile girl’s shoulder. The reader can see that the speaker is disgusted with her full and plump condition in comparison to the Persian families’ condition when she describes her hand as swollen; it is something unnecessarily large. The girls' souls are doomed because they are following a beaten path and no one sees the harm in their carpet making. When the speaker does show their kindness and sympathy, all they get in return is a gaze filled “with a speaking darkness”.

1 comment:

Yoli said...

Dark and beautiful.