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Rooms
I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart.
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—
Rooms where for good or for ill—things died.
But there is the room where we (two) lie dead,
Though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall somewhere in the other quieter, dustier bed
Out there in the sun—in the rain.
Notes
There is alot of alliteration
The word "Room" keeps on repeating
She is remembering the rooms and the part they played in their life
A room is something she is trapped in
Juxtaposition - Paris (The City of Love), and all she can remember is being stuck in rooms
There is confinement, congestion
She is next to the sea, which is a metaphor for freedom. But for her it is a maddening sound
Her happiness and will to live died along with his sister
She is talking about the meanlessness of sleep. She wakes up, but to what purpose?
To her, death represents freedom.However, being dead just takes her to another extremely confining room
The third last rhyme is the longest line, which goes out of the box in the poem
The poem is structured in a way like a confining box, but the third last line breaks it for it to go back. A strand of hope lost.
This perhaps talks about the confinement women are forced to have, forced to live under the weight of social convention
The poem looks like a block of text shaped like a room, the 8th line breaks free only to return again. The 8th line shows a sense of lethargy and pointlessness
Notes by Miss Farheen Khan (2023), compiled by Rayyan Jamil Khan of Class X-T Karachi Grammar School - College Section
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