Read "Mandolin"
Take notes about imagery and image patterns
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Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove
© Walter Benefield
Mar 9, 2001
Like snapshots in a photo album, Rita Dove’s award winning collection of poetry "Thomas and Beulah" provide glimpses into the lives of two people in love living together yet apart in an imperfect world. Dove mixes biographical, historical and social elements to create a journey of love, marriage, life and death in 1920's Middle America. Dove’s collection of narrative poems are based loosely on the lives her maternal grandparents.
The journey begins with Thomas in the poem entitled “The event.” Thomas and his friend Lem venture out of Tennessee onto a river boat "with nothing to boast of but good looks and a mandolin", which is a pear shaped stringed instrument. This departure by Thomas would eventually bring him to Akron, Ohio and Beulah.
The poem "Courtship" has Beulah on one "Fine evening...waiting-for what? A magnolia breeze, someone to trot out the stars?" Beulah meets Thomas. "Promises" a poem of marriage contains one of the most beautiful verses in the collection. "A deep breath, and she plunged through sunbeams and kisses, rice drumming the both of them blind." In that, most natural of processes after marriage comes children. "Variation on Guilt" shows Thomas the expecting father in a hospital waiting room less than pleased when "the doors fly apart...It's a girl, he can tell by that smirk." Thomas and Beulah in all have four children all girls.
Dove poetizes the emotional subject of sickness and death in several poems in the collection. In a more descriptive poem "Thomas at the wheel" shows Thomas in his car and eventually "he lay[s] down across the seat, a pod set to sea, a kiss unpuckering", having a heart attack. The poem "Company" is a tragic but fitting near end to the collection, Beulah leaves her dying husband this message, "listen: we were good, though we never believed it."
"Thomas and Beulah" is one personal history told from two perspectives and does not hold to a precise line of chronology and only the most rational of critics would protest; Dove the consummate artist creates her own order of things.
Delving into research before writing this review of "Thomas and Beulah" I unearthed some disturbing facts about this award winning collection of poetry.
Rita Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1987. Many considered the eighties a time of upsurge in the popularity of poetry with increases in published works as proof. Despite the positive climate, the New York Times newspaper respected for its quality literary coverage never reviewed “Thomas and Beulah.” I only make light of these facts because there are other fine works like “Thomas and Beulah” that go unnoticed by those who are suppose to notice.
We started reading the essay about Rita Dove and the imagery that she uses. We did not finish the essay but rather moved on to the book. We read a few of the poems and tried to understand what they were about but they proved to be very difficult.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that Thomas is having a lot of difficulty overcoming his guilt surrounding Lem's death. He can't move on.
I have read 18 pages so far. So far, I can see that the poems start off discussing two slaves escaping by boat. One of them dies from drowning. The surviving one makes it to Akron, Ohio. He notices a huge factory there as well. The use of language is little difficult to understand. A lot of the time, the poems will compare two things that are totally different such as a cage and a whale's belly in "The Zepellin Factory."
ReplyDeleteRita Dove uses imagergy. Even when I don't understand what is going in some parts I can get an example of whant the charasters Thomas and Lem are thinking or feeling at that moment.
ReplyDeleteBy Alicia Green
Rita Dove is a master at imagery. Sometimes the imagery made the piece difficult to understand so we each had interpretations of what was happening. Thomas is depressed and needs to come up off it...(Jahmal is writing)...But the poems we read were really well written.
ReplyDelete-Miller, Rachel, and Jahmal
Light Rays is James.
ReplyDeleteMeredith, Mary, Amanda:
ReplyDeleteWe were particularly struck by the comparison of Thomas's sleep in this line: "He used to sleep like a glass of water held up in the hand of a very young girl." We were trying to decipher what we thought this means and determined that he was always sleeping uneasily, perhaps guilt-ridden from witnessing Lem's death. We also wnjoyed the line: "To him, work is a narrow grief and the musix afterwards is like a woman reaching into his chest to spread it around", although we are unsure of the meaning.