Friday, November 29, 2019

How is the poem "The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls" organized?

The poem begins with an overview of the eponymous "Cambridge ladies." We are told that they "live in furnished souls," that they are "unbeautiful," and that they have "comfortable minds." This is not a particularly flattering introduction to the "Cambridge ladies." The description implies that they have a sense of entitlement, that they are in some way ugly, and that they are unthinking.
After this unflattering introduction to the "Cambridge ladies," the poet adds to our initial impression with the suggestion that they subscribe to a useless, lifeless piety. He calls them "shapeless spirited" after describing how they have "the church's protestant blessings." He also says they believe in Christ, who he then pointedly remarks is "dead."
While the first half of the poem is concerned with introducing us to the "Cambridge ladies" from, as it were, a distance, the second half of the poem seems to bring us closer to them as we are invited into their "present" activities and discussion. The ladies are, "at the present," knitting and gossiping about some local "scandal."
The poem concludes with a rather obscure image, as the poet says that the ladies do not care if "the / moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy." The implication here is that the ladies are so caught up in their own small world that they care nothing for anything which happens outside of it.
The overall structure of the poem is easier to understand perhaps if we imagine that we are looking at the ladies through a camera. At first the camera seems to be at some distance from the ladies, and, from that distance, we get a broad impression of what they are like. Then the camera zooms in, and we can see more clearly what the ladies are doing, and what they are talking about. And then, finally, the camera suddenly zooms back out again, but this time to a great distance, so that we are looking at the ladies from beyond the moon. And from this distance, of course, the definitive smallness of the ladies' world is made very obvious.

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