“Introspection”
“Introspection” makes use of parallelism. The opening stanzas commence with the sentences: “if you go deep/Into the heart/What do you find there?”. In the last stanza, the first three lines are : If you go deeper/into the heart/What do you find there?” In the last stanza, the word deeper is in the is comparative unlike in the first two stanzas whereby the word deep is used. Also, the question in the third stanza has an additional word “there”. Notwithstanding the slight modifications in the third stanza, the three stanzas are parallel. The parallelism calls attention to the focal point of the poem which is the “ depth of the heart”.
Arguably, the heart in “Introspection” makes reference to the unconscious where worries and sorrows are concealed. The heart , “In Introspection”, is poles apart from the conventional heart that propels blood in human beings. The word “deep” infers that the distress , unhappiness and death fears are so omnipresent that human beings do not diagnose that they are harbouring them in their unconscious. Also, the uncertainties, pains and death are intangible.
“The Dead”
The comeback of the dead people in the reminiscences of the living is ascribed to unconscious retentions. The speaker has blocked memories of the grandmother; as a result, the memories are a part of the illusory detections of the grandmother. Maybe, the grandmother wounded the speaker when she was still alive, that is why the speaker inquires ,from her mother, whether she should let off the grandmother. Clinging to the unsettled problem with the grandmother, who is departed, is bound to deny the speaker concord The speaker’s unconscious may initiate ineffectual attempts to search for the grandmother so that they can work out the issue.
“The River”
The river utilizes a religious allusion in the phrase “Water of life”. In the Bible, Jesus speaks of Himself to “The water of Life”. The religious allusion is contributory in construing the latent content of the speaker’s dreams.The manifest content portrays the speaker engrossing in the life at the side of the river. However, the waiting car dislocates the speaker from the absorption by driving her way from the uncontaminated river.The underlying message in the dreams is: worldly makings, which the car epitomizes, can be a deterrent to a sensible, sanctified life in Christ that the river embodies.
