A Poem: Lines from the Thoughts

The coldness consumes her heart,
Where darkness and evil lie,
The luring Death devoured her soul,
Defying Heaven's piercing cry.
Upon the cliff, his heart she held,
Withstanding time and space,
Wrapped in silk she began to gaze
On the betrayer's golden case.
She gazed upon his endearing love,
And sensed her inner rage,
His love, like a rose, greatly grew,
Apart from her naive ways.
Even Versailles could not reflect
The pain she kept within,
Now on this cliff she stands alone,
Preparing for her dip.
As her corpse drifted ashore
The people stood amazed
For on that day three years ago
They set her secret ablaze.
The night she disappeared
The men hunted the grounds,
And as they came into her home
They were frantic upon what they found.
Into her chamber they slowly crept
And what they found was shoddy
For in the bed was a slain mistress,
And the lover's lifeless body.
They moved in closer at a slower pace,
In awe of what they saw next.
For what they found on the deceased man
Was an empty hole where a heart should be placed.







I assume that many people may need some background to the poem in order to get a better understanding. So this post is going to describe the previous poem.

Now the poem is, in short, about a girl who fell in love with a boy. The boy had an affair with another woman and, in response to her broken heart, the girl kills the mistress and rips out her lover's heart. After this event, she kills herself by diving off a cliff into the sea. No one knew what had happened to her, and the men of the town go and search for her. They begin at her home where they find the dead mistress and her lover. Her body drifts ashore three years later, but by then, everyone in town knew what she had done.

When the poem begins with a small description about her character now; she is cold and heartless (it is later that you discover why). Now, many people would think that the line "Upon the cliff, his heart she held" would mean something figurative, but in this case it is not. The girl is literally holding her lover's heart in her hand. Now the idea of the heart being wrapped in silk comes from the mysterious theory revolving around Mary Shelley. After the death of her husband, it was presumed that Mary Shelley kept his heart with her, wrapped in silk, until she died. The next five lines explain how she believed he loved her dearly, and how naive she was to believe him.

When she realized this, the girl was hurt. Here I made an allusion to the Palace of Versailles's Hall of Mirrors. When I wrote about how Versailles couldn't reflect her pain, I meant that even all the mirrors couldn't show her pain, and the result of all that pain was her death. The poems makes a quick three-year shift, and then turns into a flashback of how the town found out about the young girl's murder.

That's pretty much the essence of the poem. I didn't try to make it very complex, nor did I try to make it simple. The idea for this poem came from a combination of pieces of literature:

"Ozmandiyas" by Percy Shelley

"The Sick Rose" by William Blake

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

--Alyssa :)