the sun and her flowers

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Background

Poem Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

The poems are written in free verse. They observe no poetic meter or rhythmic structure and they do not rhyme. The length of the poems varies greatly. Many consist of just a few lines. One poem, “your absence is a missing limb” (44) has only one line, but the poem that immediately follows it consists of 87 lines (“questions” [45-47]), which are divided into eight verse paragraphs of varying lengths. Another long poem is “home” (68-73), which is 132 lines divided into seven verse paragraphs. “broken english” (149-51) is yet another long poem.

These long poems are enclosed in a kind of rectangular text box, and the title is given above the poem in bold text. Kaur has said that she thinks of her book as consisting of one continuous poem stretching over 250 pages, and sometimes it is unclear where one poem ends and another begins. Only a few of the poems have a title at the top of the page. Others have what appears to be a title in italics printed below the poem, and still others have no title at all, which sometimes makes it hard to know whether they are actually part of the poem on either the previous or the following page.

The length of the lines, like the length of the poems, varies considerably. Sometimes, a line will consist of a single word, and short lines of two, three, and four words are common. These will sometimes be contrasted with much longer lines within the same poem.

All the poems are presented in lower-case letters. There are no capital letters, even for proper names. Apart from the use of apostrophes for contractions or possessives, there is no punctuation. One of the very few exceptions is “home,” which uses em dashes (“the truth comes to me suddenly—after years of rain” [71]) and even the occasional period (“fruit flies. webs. bugs.” [70]).

In addition to poems, the collection also includes some prose paragraphs. Examples include “numbness” (60) and “to witness a miracle” (143). In these, the speaker consistently uses periods. Sometimes these prose pieces are made up of complete sentences; others are a mixture of sentences and sentence fragments, as in “amrik singh (1959-1990)”: “I wonder where she hid him. her brother who had died only a year before. as she sat in a costume of red silk and gold on her wedding day” (124).

The format of the poems is on at least two occasions unconventional in other respects, too. “female infanticide / female feticide” (144-45), for example, appears almost as a timeline, with dates in bold appearing above each stanza, such as 1790, 1890, 2006. The effect is to provide an at-a-glance snapshot of the killing or abortion of female babies over the course of more than two centuries. Also unusual is “advice I would’ve given my mother on her wedding day” (133-35), which appears in the form of a numbered list; there are 16 items in all.

Line Drawings

Most of the poems are illustrated by the author in simple line drawings that usually appear at the bottom of the right-hand page but sometimes stretch across both pages. On three occasions, the drawings reference a named work of art. The untitled poem that begins with “I could not contain myself any longer” (169) is illustrated with a line drawing of a work by Sobha Singh (1901-1986). Singh was a painter from Punjab, India, the state from which Kaur and her family emigrated. The poem is described in the caption as an ode to Singh’s Sohni Mahiwal. One of Singh’s most famous paintings, it illustrates a popular Punjabi folktale of a man and a woman who are deeply in love. Since Kaur’s poem is about how great her love is for her partner, Singh’s painting makes an appropriate illustration of it. The poem that begins “on my birth” (203) is illustrated with a line drawing of Dance, a famous 1910 painting by Henri Matisse that shows five naked females dancing. Matisse (1869-1954) was a French artist. The painting makes an appropriate illustration of the poem, in which the speaker’s mother said at the birth of her daughter, “there is god in you / can you feel her dancing.” In the poem that begins with “i am the first woman in my lineage” (211), the line drawing below it shows a group of village women talking together while they drink tea; it is an illustration of a 1938 painting, titled “Village Scene,” by Amrita Sher-Gi, a Hungarian-Indian painter (1913-41) who was well known for picturing everyday life. The figures in the drawing represent the grandmothers described in the poem.

Imagery

The principal imagery in the collection is drawn from the natural world and the cosmic bodies of sun and moon. Most often, when the poet presents the imagery of sun, earth, flowers, trees, water, and other natural things, she uses what is known as the pathetic fallacy. This is a term that describes poetry in which human traits, including emotions and feelings, are ascribed to natural objects. Many examples can be found in the collection as a whole. In “the first mornings without you,” hummingbirds are “flirting with the flowers” and the speaker hears the flowers “giggling / and the bees growing jealous” (23). The whole of nature reacts to human actions, including the speaker’s own emotions and the state of her relationship with her beloved. In “celebration” (167), for example, “the orange trees refused to blossom / unless we blossomed first.” In the poem that begins “this morning,” when she tells the flowers what she would do for her lover, “they blossomed” (176). The natural world, it seems, loves to celebrate love. When she tells the ocean of her love, “the salt in her [the ocean’s] body became sugar” (169). After her breakup with her lover in Chapter 1, the speaker envies the winds “who still witness you” (two-line poem, [25]), thus presenting the winds as a conscious entity.

Sometimes extended natural imagery is used to explain a situation in the speaker’s romantic relationship. After the relationship ends, the man asks whether they can still be friends, and she answers with an analogy drawn entirely from nature: “a honeybee / does not dream of kissing the mouth of a flower / and then settle for its leaves” (“I don’t need more friends” [53]). Similarly, in “the sun and her flowers” (173), the way the sunflower worships the sun and then droops when it goes down is analogous to how the speaker is affected by the presence or absence of the beloved. He is like the sun to her sunflower.

The most common natural imagery is of the sun, which recurs many times. When the speaker’s lover deserted her, he “took the sun” with him (35). Contemplating her own death, the speaker says she will not go “quietly”; a huge cataclysm will take place in which “the sun will eat itself” (“the day I leave,” [106]). In “the chase” (192), she says that if her lover became “any more beautiful / the sun would leave its place / and come for you.” The sun and moon actually speak in “time” (55), as they play their role in the daily passage of time.

The pathetic fallacy is used also for the earth; it too has a voice, as well as emotions. It cries to the moon, bemoaning the suffering that humanity has inflicted on it (“green and blue” [120]); it rises in fear as the speaker, buried alive, digs her way out (“i will find my way out of you just fine” [147]); it has “waited its whole life for this” (“celebration [167])—the coming together or “blooming” of the two lovers.

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