[A few years
back, I shared a handful of my favorite American poems in a
weeklong series. Before I go back to sharing poems for money—well, teaching
them as part of my job, but you get the idea—I wanted to highlight another week’s
worth of favorite poems and a couple reasons why I love each. Share your
favorites in comments, please!]
Today’s favorite
poem is Lucy Larcom’s “Weaving”
(c. 1862).
I love “Weaving”
because it builds on Larcom’s
amazing biography—from a starting point as one of the Lowell Mill workers
who started the Lowell Offering to a life
as an abolitionist activist and a dean of American poetry and letters—and brings
all those stories and histories together into its central, multi-layered image
and metaphor. We talk about the concept of “intersectionality”
in identity and society in the 21st century—well, Larcom and her
poem portrayed and modeled it pitch-perfectly in the mid-19th.
Next favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on this
poem? Other favorites you’d share?
“So, at the loom of life, we weave
ReplyDeleteOur separate shreds, that varying fall,
Some strained, some fair: and, passing, leave
To God the gathering up of all,
In that full pattern wherein man
Works blindly out the eternal plan.
I picked out these verses specifically because the poet speaks to what it means for us - for mankind - to be carefully 'weaving' together the fabric of God's plan in the world - though we don't necessarily know it... all the hows and whys. Heavy stuff, for sure.