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Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny

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Kirsten Yu – March 5th, 2014

Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny
Context Response

As I read this poem the first time through, I assumed that whoever was talking was a male. The reason I believe that it is a man retelling this is because the title of the poem says “Reading the Brothers Grimm to Jenny”. However, no matter the gender, it is someone that Jenny looks up to. It is evident in the line “you insist I have the golden key” that Jenny admires the author. However, the author believes that he hasn’t done a good job of preparing her for the future. The author believes that they’ve forced her in to thinking of a pleasant and fantasized world where nothing can go wrong. However, she will eventually have to understand that life is not so and has to face reality.

The author understands that she has to “live with power and honour circumstance[s]”. Jenny’s heart is pure, and the author is afraid of how she will react when she is exposed to reality. She’s been penetrated with thoughts that life is perfect, and when mistakes are made, they are fixable. Some examples of tales that have been told to Jenny include: “birds speak the truth”, “beauty proves a royal mind”, and that “death is a small mistake, where [a] kiss revives”. At the end of his list of tales, he says “Jenny, we make just dreams out of our unjust lives”, which clearly means that we only make up fantasies to fulfill a bit of hope and happiness because we suffer through stressful lives. Overall, I assume that he doesn’t want Jenny to worry so much by telling her happy lies.

Other than the main idea of how role models tend to make others not worry and be happy, I’ve noticed a lot of contrast within the story. An example is at the beginning of the poem; “Jenny, your mind commands kingdoms of black and white” meanwhile the author’s description of the “real” world is full of “gray foxes and gray wolves”. I found these phrases interesting because they overlap the idea of colour. How I interpreted this was that; Jenny’s world is very distinguished, it’s either this or that, while the author’s “real” word is a mix of both colours, which is considered to be represented as more complicated. I believe that this contrast and comparison is very supportive of the theme because it differentiates the worlds of Jenny’s and the author’s.

While reading this story, I was debating whether or not Jenny was actually royalty. Was she a princess? Was she supposed to be queen? Throughout the second and fourth stanza of the poem it talked about how he knew that she must “live with power and honour” as well as he mentioned an “imagined throne”. Could the author be the queen or king (parents) that Jenny (the princess) looks up to? However, I do think about how this poem is about fantasy, which makes me think that maybe she isn’t royalty, and merely told to me one. Aside from some vocabulary that I am not used to, there was one other thing that I wondered about. In the first stanza it states, “You shoulder the crow on your left, the snowbird on your right”, and I made no sense of it. I thought about it more, and predicted that maybe it represented a devil and an angel. I understand that a crow is large and black; meanwhile I assume the snowbird is small and white (considering the word “snow”). I found this interesting because the phrase before this mentions the colours black and white and makes me wonder if they are relevant to each other.

This poem reminded me of the short story “The Flowers” that we had read in class. The Flowers features a girl named Myob who is roughly ten years old. Although we do not know the age of Jenny, I can assume that she is fairly young considering that she has not been exposed to “the grays” of life. It seems as if Myob is frolicking through the woods, decides to be independent for a day and take a wrong turn and comes across a dead man. The beginning of this short story seemed to be happy, but by the end it seemed to be filled with lingering death. Coming back to Jenny, she has not yet been exposed to such horror; but I would consider Myob’s experience as “the real world”. However, Jenny will slowly enter the gates of that terror.

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