Written Thoughts

I like poetry. However, I like writing poetry than reading a piece. The flow of emotions in every single word, sentence, and stanza in a poem is like water, which can sometimes be a gentle stream or a cascading river. I have written multiple poems ever since I was young, and they usually were a poem of romantic nature.

Reading 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, I found some very interesting poems. I am not used to reading poems since I don't read many of them, so I have many questions or inferences as to what I have understood in what I have read. Among the ones my English 1302 class was assigned to read, I have found one poem that sparked most of my attention was Leanne O'Sullivan's "Waiting for My Clothes."

The poem is about a girl in a waiting room of a hospital, probably a mental institute, whose belongings have been taken away from her, including her clothes and journal. She is waiting for them to be brought back to her.

I have become as curious as a cat about her situation. Why is the narrator in a hospital? Did something happen to her? It seems to me that the setting of the poem is a mental institute rather than a regular hospital, so if she is institutionalized, she might have had an emotional breakdown. Considering she said that as if taking her cure were part of a cure, she may have indeed had a breakdown and the doctors were examining the contents of her belongings. Or maybe it's just routine.

One of the most important details of this poem is her implied anxiousness about her journal being taken away. It's quite interesting for the narrator to say that her journal is her "word made flesh" (O'Sullivan 13). At first, I was confused on what she meant, and asked myself why she had said that. I realize what is usually written in a journal, and have understood what she meant by what the narrator said. Then comes another question. Why is there an emphasis on the journal? I am not entirely sure of the answer to this question. The most probably answer is that the narrator feels vulnerable as if she is a baby, who is being observed by doctors and nurses (16). Maybe she is anxious that the doctors may read her journal, which is understandable considering a person's journal is very private, and houses a person's most inner thoughts. It also quite interests me on how stanzas five through eight seems like a girl lost in fantasy. Maybe she is daydreaming about her journal being read and how she feels about this thought. Maybe she really is fantasizing about it for she said "Like my dreams, my clothes come out of their boxes" (32). I understand the clothes returning to her as an interruption to her fantasy and an invitation to the real world.

This poem is very curious indeed, and the deliberate omission of the reason of her stay in the hospital implies many things. Readers can maybe infer that the narrator may have suffered a breakdown, or just sick. Maybe the narrator is having a breakdown, and in order to cope up with this, she fantasizes about her journal being read, but she is interrupted and invited back to the real world by her clothes, which she was waiting for.

Works Cited

O'Sullivan, Leanne. "Waiting for My Clothes." 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Ed. Billy Collins. New York: Random, 2005. 17. Print.