Thursday, September 30, 2010

Getting Out by Cleopatra Mathis

#11



In "Getting Out," similes add to the poem. The first stanza states "we hardly slept, waking like inmates who beat the walls." This comparison stands for the trapped feeling of the couple in the poem, confined to the walls of their apartment. They felt like prisoners to their problems left unsolved. "Heaving words like furniture" portrays the heaviness of the words in a domestic state; throwing furniture would leave permanent scars, just as verbal fighting causes more harm than good. The "unshredded pictures" represent the memories the couple wanted to keep, indicating that there was a time when pictures were destroyed.



From the poem, it's evident that the couple tried to work things out as they lie awake during sleepless nights or he tried to leave several times and couldn't quite make it out the door due to "piles of clothes" and "unstrung tennis rackets." They didn't want to leave each other, but the problems had grown to be too much, the fighting too often, and love not enough.

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