Summary:
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave me is very beautiful and quite easy to understand. Bolland describes a lot, which helps the readers to get into the poem
Comment on The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave me
I think this poem is very beautiful and quite easy to understand. Bolland describes a lot, which helps the readers to get into the poem
The use of the adjective, black, is generally used to portray a feeling of darkness or sorrow. Lace is a delicate, beautiful material usually on the outside edge of other materials that could mean something in this poem may have a frail edge. The phrase "my Mother Gave me" presents a feeling that the fan has a sentimental importance to the author. .
In the first stanza, it states that the fan is the first gift a specific gentleman gave the authors mother. A first gift is usually has an especial value, and because this gift was handed down to a child, according to the title, gives the fan even more sentimentality. The fact that he bought the fan for five francs diminishes its value emotionally, but it was pre-war Paris when the fan was purchased so five francs may have been a great deal of money.
They, he, and she are mentioned many times in the second and third stanzas, they are also the last. The forth and fifth stanzas are about the same subject matter, the fan, and continuality between verses is achieved by ending the fourth verse with the subject and verb it is and starting the fifth stanza with the rest of the sentence. Every line in the forth and fifth verse is about the fan and much longer than others. Another thing that I noticed was that the tense is no longer in past tense, but is now in present tense. Usage of this tense change puts forward an idea that the author is now describing the fan to the reader as if the fan were in her hands. The way the author states what the fan looks like as these are wild roses supports the idea of the author is pointing out details of the fan as it is in her hands.
The author not only informs the reader that the mother gives the author the fan in the title, that it was the first gift the gentleman gave her in the first line, but also reaffirms the chronological order in which the fan was handed down to each person through the arrangement of stanzas.
You can notice that the author describes the climate. Author brings up the state of the weather as being stifling, killing, overcast, dusk before thunder, or sultry. The combination of hot, sultry weather, a black lace fan, and the last two verses containing a improvisation of the past through a bird opening it's wing to cool itself make almost certain the fact that the author is trying to put across the point that the black lace fan is a form of relief from the heat. As the author improvised a blackbird on a hot summer morning put [ting] out her wing as it feels the heat to cool itself, one could picture the author's mother opening the black lace fan to do the same. The blackness of the fan compared to the blackbird, the lace compared to the feather tips of the bird's wings, and a handheld fan to the whole flirtatious span the blackbird's wing.
This is the complete article, containing 552 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
