Analysis Of 'Music Swims Back To Me'

Register to read the introduction… Although not an inmate himself, he had breakfast first, in the "normal" world and then goes to work. The doctor is the one who takes control, who has a viewpoint, who is composed, sane, and in disciplined. The speaker, on the other hand, is portrayed by differences with Doctor Martin. The speaker is not given a name. "Her motion is ‘speeds' a word that connects, by means of internal rhyme with ‘queen' in line six and ‘bee' in line seven, to suggest the brittle meaninglessness of her position in the ‘antiseptic tunnel' among the ‘moving dead'. The end rhymes ‘walk', ‘talk', and ‘stalk' contrast Doctor Martin's purposeful action (‘walk') with the lassitude and immobility of the patients (‘talk') and with the frenetic but directionless activity of the speaker, who, speeding around, is a ‘laughing bee on a stalk / of death'. The enjambment emphasizes the word ‘death'" (Hall 16-17). In "Music Swims Back to Me" the speaker is child like, lost in the dark of the asylum, and trying to find the way home. She speaks in the vocabulary and cadences of a child:
Wait, Mister. Which way is home? …show more content…
I mean it remembers better;… (To Bedlam and Part Way Back 8)
"We know how a sudden musical phrase, or sound, or smell, can remind us in a flash a childhood memory, of the way we felt, or of where we were, when we heard or smelled it sometime in the past" (Hall 19-20). The poem plays the importance on confusion and forgetfulness, and the poem has a circular structure. The word circle, line 31, is telling the speaker there will not be answer to the opening question, "Wait Mister. Which way is home?" Her mother died March 10th 1959, due to cancer, and her father June 3rd due to cerebral hemorrhage. In March 1960, her father-in-law was killed in a car accident. Anne expressed her feeling of guilt in these events by writing. "I am depressed, My mother is dying of cancer. My mother says I gave her cancer" (Hall 6). Her father was ready to remarry, but he died before the marriage could happen. Anne remembers what happened in All My Pretty Ones:
This year, solvent out sick, you meant to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.
But before you had that second chance, I cried on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.
(All The Pretty Ones …show more content…
Love Poems, was Anne's fourth volume to be published. Anne observed in an interview that in her first two volumes, To Bedlam and Part Way and All My Pretty Ones, she had dealt with madness; in her third, Live or Die, she had become more poetically daring; and in Love Poems, "I have not only lived but loved, that sometime miracle" (Hall 73). "These themes, of male lover as both life-giver and destroyer, and of speaker as passive and acted upon, are either implied, realized imagistically, or stated openly in most of this volume's poems" (Hall 75). Related themes are developed as well; love brings torment, anger, and even death as well as joyful life. In "Barefoot," image of love and murder are linked: "You do / drink me. The gulls kill fish" (Love Poems