A Few Updike Poems Through Literary Lenses

Feminist View:

The speaker thought about death as his wife's breathing because when 'death' is coming, that's a time we could turn to a new life that is bette, more peaceful. joyful, and relaxed. It is also a metaphor between women and deat.  It means that women are not really dangerous, angry,complicate, or mean-minded as almost all men usually think like that. On the opposite site, women nice as Nature if we know how to treat them. That is a harmony between men and women. Thereafter you could discover many good things from the women as sources in the swampy.

Burning Trash

At night- the light turned off, the filament

Unburdened of its atom - eating charge,

His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low

To touch a swampy source - he thought of death.

Her father's hilltop home allowed him time

To send the nothing  standing like a sheet

Of speckless glass behind his human future.

He had two comforts he could see, just two.

One was the cheerful fullness of most things:

Plump stones and clouds, expectant pods, the soil

Offering up pressure to his knees and hands. 

The other was burning the trash each day.

He liked the heat, the imitation danger,

And the way, as he tossed in used - up news,

String,  napkins, envelopes, and paper cups,

Hypriotic tongues of order intervened.

Marxist View: Through the marxist view by reading this poem, you can identify the tale of a poor setting in the first stanza and how it separates the rich from the poor, "the tv remote awaits by the bed like a suicide pistol." The stanza shows the person doesn't do much or have much in their life. Also shows the person is helpless or lifeless. In the second stanza, "uncut lawn," shows the person is not wealthy or have any kind of responsibility of having a nice landscape. In the last stanza, " a man just like you guards the Grail" stating the life of a poor person need guards for their grail where as the rich, a person just needs money.

Poem: On the Road

Those dutiful dogtrots down airport corridors while gnawling at a Dunkin Donuts cruller, those hotel rooms where the TV remote waits by the bed like a suicide pistol, those hours in the air amid white shirts who wearers sleep-read through thick staide thrillers, those breakfast buffets in prairie Marriotts-such venues of transit grow dearer than home. The tricycle in the hall, the wife's hasty kiss, the dripping faucet and uncut lawn- this is life? NO, vita thrives via the road in the laptop whose silky screen shimmers like a dark queen's mirror, in the polished shoe that signifies killer intent, and in the solitary mission, a bumpy glide down through the cloud covr to a single runway at whose end a man just ike you guards the Grail.

Psychoanalytic View:

Poem: Outliving One's Father (2009)

 He sat up on the sagging bed

he and my mother had shared forever

and complained of pressure.  He had felt

the pressure before, his heart

has given him trouble for a decade.

I wasn't there. I was an adult,

long gone.  She drove him in

to the hospital.  His young doctor came, and later

hinted to her darkly how her husband had struggled

and fought, furiously for so mild

and Christian a man, the closing down,

the strangling amid bright walls.

He wasseventy-two, Now so am I,

and some weeks more.  Wherefore this lassitude,

this guilty absence of what was always there

before, desire and daring compounded

of childish panic and a passion to wreak on the world

my parents' revenge?  Is it a sin

to top a progenitor's quota

and thus outlive one's best, least selfish self?

Through this excess of time I walk

as if in some sense posthumous,

as if all men are, having outlived

so many former selves.

I could feel, above me,

the hunger in his stride, the fear

that hurled him along an edge

where toothaches, low pay, discipline

problems in the classroom were shadows

of an all dissolving chaos.