Tissue Essay Questions

How is time portrayed in the poem?

Using an extended metaphor about paper, the speaker comments on the fragility of human nature and the structures it builds. This zooms out to hint at broader historical topics such as the rise and fall of civilizations, but it also hones in on the births and deaths recorded in one family's history. The speaker imagines an architect building a structure that is "never meant to last" (Line 34). The materials that will create this structure are the products of writing: script, numbers, and lines. This suggests that the act of handwriting or drawing on paper is a gesture: a hope to make something that will last beyond us. The labor and care that goes into creation will not make something permanent, but it will make something worthy.

Discuss the allegory of the Creator at work in the poem.

The allegory of the Creator appears in Dharker's poem "Tissue." The description of a beloved copy of the Koran, in which someone recorded family histories, invokes a specific religion to which the speaker may belong. But the overall allegory could apply to many religions and world views.

The allegory is employed through the metaphor of an architect, who represents the creator. The architect raises "a structure / never meant to last, / of paper smoothed and stroked / and thinned to be transparent, // turned into your skin" (Lines 33-37). This is all traced from a "grand design," which suggests that a higher power is at work in our lives (Line 32).

How does the form of the poem create meaning with its content?

"Tissue" is composed of nine quatrains and a final single line, all written in free verse. The quatrains provide a sense of order and structure—though the lines are not all exactly the same length, the variation is small. The quatrain (a four-line stanza) gives a poet room to convey a full thought, or two, in a single stanza. This can be seen in "Tissue": the poet goes from the subject of transparent paper to a beloved copy of the Koran, to imagining buildings made of paper, to contemplating paper maps, to describing business records from a grocer, and finally to an architect who uses all this to trace a grand design and raise a structure of paper that turns into the reader's skin.

Often, Dharker relies on enjambment to stretch an image into the next quatrain. For example, the description of what someone has written in the Koran extends from the second stanza into the third. This plays subtly with the quatrain structure because these are not neatly contained stanzas. This contributes to the comment the poet is making about the transient nature of things.