19 pages • 38 minutes read
Carolyn ForchéThe Colonel
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Body Parts
“The Colonel” is strewn with details referencing parts of the body, seemingly (or literally) detached from the whole. In the poem’s introductory sentences, the Colonel’s daughter “filed her nails” (Line 2). When the house’s fortifications are described, it is in terms of their ability to “scoop the kneecaps” (Line 7) not from a person’s body per se, but from “a man’s legs” (Line 7). Alternatively, the broken bottles can “cut […] hands to lace” (Line 7). When the poet is warned not to speak out against the Colonel’s outburst, her friend communicates to her “with his eyes” (Line 15). Most obviously, the sack of “human ears” (Line 17) are detached from their owners. The poem even focuses on isolated elements of the Colonel during his outburst: He “took [an ear] / in his hands [and] shook it in our faces” (Lines 18-19).
Even aside from this grisly central image, the text is punctuated by isolated and alienated parts of the body. As a motif, this ties the text together with its central image, both foreshadowing it before its appearance and alluding to it afterward. The motif also communicates the way in which the Colonel treats those around him as objects, figuratively or literally reducing them to their constitutive parts.
Food & Eating
The central scene of the poem hinges on a dinner, and many of the details the poem describes are culinary. Even before the dinner begins, the first specific detail the poem describes is of food: “His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar” (Lines 1-2). Additionally, the poem describes each element and course of the dinner: “rack of lamb, good wine […], green mangoes, salt, a type of / bread” (Lines 9-11). Even when the horrible sack of “many human ears” (Line 17) enters the text, the poet finds “[t]here is no other way to say this” (Line 18) than to describe them “like / dried peach halves” (Lines 17-18). In the final quarter of the long prose block that follows the introduction of the ears, no new details are introduced except “a water / glass” (Lines 19-20) and the “last / of [the Colonel’s] wine” (Lines 22-23).
The poem’s fixation on eating and drinking takes on a distinct connotative force in light of the Colonel’s brutish power. The Colonel feasts only by virtue of his human rights violations, of the violence he inflicts to gain money and political standing. Therefore, each mention of food recalls this injustice. Furthermore, the continual references to food and its consumption combines with both the presence of the ears “on the [dinner] table” and their comparison to food (that is, “dried peach halves” [Line 18]); this creates a grim and evocative link between eating and the Colonel’s figurative devouring of those he oppresses.
Speaking and Listening
Speaking and listening appear through the poem’s imagery and allusion, playing into the theme of journalism: The journalist listens to others and reports their stories, giving them a voice. Later, others listen to (or read) the report.
The motif’s most blatant emergence is in the poem’s grotesque central image—the grocery sack of severed, shriveled human ears. While ear imagery inherently connotes listening, the poet further introduces an element of wordplay: “Some of the / ears on the floor were pressed to the ground” (Lines 24-25). This is a pun on the idiom of “keeping an ear to the ground,” which means to watch or listen closely for new information on a given situation; such is the task of a journalist. The Colonel’s talking parrot is also part of the motif of speaking, and when the Colonel tells the bird to “shut up” (Line14), this is an oblique, symbolic, darkly comic cameo of his hostility toward the journalistic poet at his dinner table.
The poem’s ear imagery forms a bookend. While the poem ends on the image of ears, it opens with the line, “What you have heard is true” (Line 1). These words—in addition to grounding the narrative in historical fact—imply that the reader may have, up to that point, doubted the veracity of the story due to its horrific nature. The poet assures readers that it really happened. At the same time, the words have the ironic effect of evoking urban legend, an oral tradition that also bears the motif of speaking and listening.
