Mary Karr’s poem “Still Memory” is a childhood dream that Karr vividly walks her readers through. Through each stanza Karr is taking her readers through a new snapshot of her old life. Karr does this in small glimpses due to her fear of one day not remembering. In her poem Karr sways back and forth between the whimsicality of a dream and the vivid remembrance of her childhood. The content of the active poem contradicts its title “Still Memory” by displaying sudden changes of time, the human senses and the breakdown of what Mary’s household looked like before death came over her family all through a nostalgic tone.
Through the first 4 stanzas of Mary Karr’s poem “Still Memory” one is given a feeling of what mornings were like at her house through …show more content…
She states “Its pulleys and levers set in motion/my house starts to throb in its old socket” (Lines 17-18). The second part of the quote “throb in its old sockets” allows evidence of how old and broken Karr’s environment is. The selective word choice of “old sockets” connects to a deceased body in “Still Memory”. It does this by using the words old and socket. Both of these words relate back to the physical appearance of a dead body. Through the smell that Karr gives the reader of death and the connection of the town as a deceased body Karr continues to guide her readers through her memory of the …show more content…
Karr states “The bed came unroped from its moorings/drifted upstream till it found my old notch/in the house I grew up in/then it locked in place/a light in the hall –“ (Lines 2-5) The first part of the quote states, "the bed came unroped from its moorings, drifted upstream till it found my old notch" Karr uses this metaphor to explain how far back these memories come from. Karr’s bed was released from reality and travelled back in time until it she finds a vivid memory of her and her parents. In several stanzas of the poem Karr mentally expresses her parents life through phrases such as “not dead just home from the graveyard shift” and “My parents are not yet born each into a small urn of ash” along with expressing their life in these lines Karr foreshadows her parents death. The graveyard shift is a parallel to her what will soon happen to her father. The connection Karr makes of the smell of her father right before he died to the smell of a deceased person links back to the five human sense in the form of smell. “Smelling of crude oil and solvent” these smells are the aftermath of death, which displays irony due to the fact that her father is soon to be dead. Karr allows the readers to feel more enwrapped in her dream through allowing the reader to imagine what her father would smell