Monday, May 17, 2010
Ballad by Sonia Sanchez
The poem, “Ballad” by Sonia Sanchez is beautifully written. The main focus of the piece is a woman debating on the proper age of wisdom and love. It feels as if it is a war on one woman being too old and another too young to fully comprehend the meaning and the emotions being the word love. The young woman is told she is too young to understand. Yet while the older woman understands, she is told she is too old to experience love again. A line that caught my attention was, “once. What does it matter when or who, I knew of love. I fixed my body under his and went to sleep in love.” The woman is telling the young person that she has experienced this love, so how can she not fully understand it. The emotions and diction in this piece is amazing, showing her views and feelings on actually experiencing love as it unfolds.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I have to say…. I both agree and disagree with Jenn. "Ballad" is beautifully written; I think it talks about wisdom and love. I think, however, the poem paints a bigger picture. It seems to me the older woman represents older women en masse and the younger woman represents all younger women. Younger women all too often think they have experienced love that has never been felt before by anyone else. How could an older woman understand? The opening line is used rhetorically and the closing stanza reads as if it should be more softly spoken.
Yes, Rosemarie has a good point--ther is both defiance/challenge,and sadness in the speaker's tone; Sanchez uses the ballad form, with the repetition at the end, to effective express this ambiguity. Jen also has a good point that both the young and old are, or will be, "jilted," so to speak, from this "love"; "love" in quotes since, note, there are really at least two different types of love, here. One is the more obvious, human/sexual/"romantic" (though nothing stereotypically romanitc in this imagery) love between couples, which often involves on partner sacrificing "Her" identity to the the other (this is the tpically, male-dominant type of relationship heterosexual "love" realtionship. The second stanza, though, provides a different sort of imagery, and suggests perhaps a broader, or at least not so narrowly focused definition of "love"--and the imagery there is full of sexual passion and earthiness, as well...
The wisdom of the elder speaker, with her more comprehensive grasp of love and experience, and the overly self-confident attitude of the "young" is also relevant...
Post a Comment