Poetry Analysis

1. Ancestors, parents, children. The connections and oppositions among these groups often provide interesting material for poets. In the work of ONE poet you have studied, examine the means by which such relationships have been explored.

  With growing up in a different cultural environment, Naomi Shihab Nye has experienced a long journey of self-exploration. On the way of this journey, her grandmother has been like a mentor, a friend, and a constant companion, who used her wealth of experiences to accompany Naomi grow up. The Words Under the Words is such a poet, in which Naomi expresses her feelings of admiration, love and longing to her grandmother through the descriptions of details of life. 

  From the first two stanzas, I can read the author’s admiration toward her grandmother despite the fact that her grandmother is a farmer and illiterate. In the first stanza, Naomi tells the readers her grandmother’s “magical hands”, which not only can know when the grapes mature but also which goat is the newborn baby by feeling its skin. After showing her grandmother’s rich experiences, she describes their closed relationship. In those days when she was sick, her grandmother used her hands to comfort her with gently covering her head. Then, in the second stanza, she introduces that her grandmother is also a baker. But rather than a baker, her grandmother is also a great mother who had been waiting for the messages from her son. Her son might be soldier who was sent to the war or migrated to another place in seeking for a better life.  I guess the loving image of her grandmother and their closed relationship is one of the reasons that enables the author to not only appreciates but embrace those gaps between different cultures later in her lives.

  Naomi’s reliance on her grandmother not only has an influence to her own personalities but also her belief. In the last stanza, from authors’ words, we know that her grandmother believes in Allah, and often tells her stories about Joha in her childhood. The word “Allah” is the Arabic word of “God”. As we know Naomi is not familiar with Arabian culture at first, her grandmother is like one of the only accesses for her to get information about Arab. More important than the cultures that her grandmother tells her, she also learns many significant lessons. The last sentence of the poem, is a direct quote from her grandmother, “Answer, if you hear the words under the words — otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.” After describing all those beautiful memories with her grandmother, the author ends her poem with one lesson that she was taught: stay away from the appearance, think deeper, do not just be blinded by the surface of things. 

  A kind of dependent and closed relationship between the author and her grandmother is completely demonstrated in this poem. Every aspect of Naomi’s personalities or identity all can be traced back to some specific details of her grandmother’s life.