Bonsai 4o373a

Bonsai By Edith Tiempo All that I love I fold over once And once again And keep in a box Or a slit in a hollow post Or in my shoe All that I love? Why, yes but for the momentAnd for all time, both. Something that folds and keeps easy, Son’s note, or Dad’s one gaudy tie, A roto picture of a young queen A blue Indian shawl, even A money bill. It’s utter sublimation, A feat, this heart’s control Moment to moment To scale all love down To a cupped hand’s size. Till seashells are broken pieces From God’s own bright teeth, All life and love are real Things you can run and Breathless hand over To the merest child

ANALYSIS A. The poem “Bonsai” by Edith Tiempo is basically a poem talking about love. At first, it will be hard understanding the poem as it is, but as one reads this poem further the more one would understand what this poem or what the poet is trying to convey to its readers. This poem talks about how one could have that ability seize such a huge thought and compact them down to something small to be able to hand them over to one person to another. This poem is about a love of a mother and this love is now being ed on or being handed over to her daughter. One of the literary images that was shown here in the poem was the stanza, All that I love? Why, yes but for the momentAnd for all time, both. This stanza is an example of an oxymoron. An oxymoron is defined in the dictionary as a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory appear in conjunction. In this part, the poet is telling its readers that love can only be for a moment or temporary because hatred could come which could destroy love and at the same time, love can also be forever or eternal. Another literary image that was shown here in the poem was the “To a cupped hand’s size”. This part of the poem is telling its readers that love is something that could be given and received. This shows how the author thinks that love is something that we ask for and also what we give away. This being said, this stanza also shows that love can also be reduced into something small or in other words, a cupped hand’s size, that could handed over to everyone. One could be wondering or asking himself why the author used “Bonsai” as its title when a bonsai is just defined as an ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching its normal size in the dictionary. The poem was entitled “Bonsai” because one loves just as something that could be kept much like a bonsai. This poem, Bonsai, is about how love is simplified and reduced so that one can give it out to others. Since this love is now compacted or shrunk down to something

small that can be given, it is much like a bonsai which is a simplified version of a huge and enormous tree that could be given away and handed over to others. Thus, this love is now being ed down to generations. B. When love is great, when love is profound, it becomes more difficult to control. And in the hands of people who are unable to control it, love overwhelms the person. This is the destructive nature of love which is why the award-winning poet Edith Tiempo, in her poem Bonsai, scaled down love into a “cupped hand size.”

The next stanza tells about how when love is sublimated, it is made into something positive. The lines, “A feat, this heart’s control/ Moment to moment/ To scale all love down/ To a cupped hand size” pertain to one’s victory in sublimating and taking hold of love so that it will not be destructive. A cupped hand was the metaphor specifically used to convey the image of asking and giving love to another. It signifies the lover’s basic needs, that which is “the need to love and be loved.” In the line, “Till seashells are broken pieces” the mystery of how something so vast such as the ocean can be heard from something so small such as a seashell. It is the same with love, that something so vast and huge can be contained in a small thing is a mystery. The essence of the poem is that love is simplified and reduced so one can hold it in one hand and it on to another.

The poem is an example of a work that is objective-correlative wherein the ideas depicted are abstract. In this work of literature, love is the abstract idea. In the first stanza, Bonsai describes everything one loves as something that could be folded into the smallest size so that one could “keep in a box/ Or a slit in a hollow post/ Or in my shoe.” The idea is to turn one large concept such as love into something that “folds and keeps easy” so that one’s memory will not be cluttered. Memory stays with a person forever but it is often unreliable which is why there is a need to simplify love if it has become overwhelming so that it is easy to handle and quick to retrieve the memories from the labyrinths of the mind. Then there came the question in the next line that said, “All that I love?” The interrogative statement was posed for self-examination which was, in the next stanza, assured with the lines “Why, yes but for the moment-/ And for all time, both.” The two lines are an oxymoron for love can be both temporal and eternal. It was like saying often one re a lover but there are times when he does not. Tiempo even made love familiar and within reach by reducing it to things that people use and hold dear such as “Son’s note, or Dad’s gaudy tie,/ A roto picture of a young queen/ A blue Indian shawl, even/ A money bill.” By using these objects in the poem, Tiempo portrayed the sublimation of love as something that is abstract like gas penetrating the vast space surrounding two people into something that is concrete like a solid object that one can hold unto and control.

C. The poem "Bonsai" by Edith Tiempo is about love and how people imbue certain objects with love for a person, and those objects become the symbol of love. Edith Tiempo starts out her poem by describing what she does with love. She folds it to make it smaller so that she can keep it in a box, hollow post or shoe. Because love is an abstract concept and has no physical form, she is obviously talking about objects. However, it is not love of the objects themselves that this poem is referencing. It is rather about how the love for a person or place can be best touched through an object that evokes them. These objects are easy to keep, and, thus, they become the keeper of memory and of the love that is held for the person. In a sense, they are a physical manifestation of love because they can be held and touched, and they remain constant in form. So even if the love itself fades, the object remains, and it is evidence of the love that was experienced. More, it is evidence that love is real because these objects are concrete and not abstract. Because of them, she is sure that love lasts until the world ends.