"Never have poets said 'the pear of mine eyes,'"

The simple truth is: We are, more often then not products of where we come from. Our
characters, though maybe not defined by our place, have a distinct influence over all of us. It affects how we feel about issues, how we speak, and how we perceive the world around us. Place, is what we can relate to, just as home, is something we understand. Whether that place carries good or bad for us, is not the question, it is the influence that it holds over us. I know in all of my work, I include something that has to do with my home, my place, my environment, because it is what I know.
That is what I know of place and nature, however the preface describes how poets have taken upon themselves to give their nature, place, and the surroundings around them, a life of their own, a personality as if they live and breath, like in Juan Felipe Herrera's Earth Chorus:

It is the earth that snarls and slashes with black jaguar
eyes and teeth and incandescent claws.

It is the earth that holds these traits for the poet. The earth that creates such creatures as the jaguar, would imbibe such qualities. The poem itself seems to cast the idea that earth has all of the qualities of its occupants. It is an interesting choice.
The poem that stuck out to me the most, however was: Pear's Complaint. Seeing yet again, the use of human emotion given to an inhuman object, always seems to throw me, and I start imagining the pear as a real person, with human qualities.


At other times, feed on me when passion blur sense:
In these epiphanies, I am a treat--
exotic but common, tangy but sweet, long but round
Savor me then in ways you can.

Then, tomorrow, return to your apple
with it's insidious worm.


The language used, in my opinion is very sexual and overt: passion, sweet, savor, exotic, round, insidious -- all seem to conjure a feeling of sensuality, even when describing itself as round, or the fact that the poet used fruit for this piece. There is something truly sensual about fruit, and it becomes the "place," or the landscape for which the artist can identify. The overall piece reads to me like a lover scorned. Someone leaves the pear for the apple, and this is the pear's bitter account.


I never was fruit of fantasy for seers and bards,
nor the food of tales for old wives.
For I am not so red, not so self-contained,
not so easily held or thrown.
Never have poets said "the pear of mine eyes,"


Is the poet using the pear, as an outlet for his own feelings? Perhaps this time it is the qualities of the pear which fill the poet, and make him feel. What a beautiful comparison though: Apple to the Pear, when Apple is the clear winner. Makes me feel sorry for the pear.



And hungry.

-Bluey, aka: Michaela C. Ellis