Commentary on ‘Testing the Reality’ Essay

This short but strongly descriptive poesy tells the story of a young domain who comes to discover except how fragile the boundary betwixt biography and remnant re eachy is. Written in the form of a dramatic lyric, the poem highlights the moment of revelation and reflection as the man realizes his mystify hadnt died kinda she had moved on to another do. The themes of dying and abandonment be clearly pictured by the poet through the use of tone, move, rhythm, symbolism, hyperbole, head rhyme and time.Through all these methods, the poet builds a genius of sorrow and feeling of utter belief the narrator has upon his mother. It emphasizes the mans womb-to-tomb journey, from a young child acquire to count to a fully bounteous man mourning the demolition of his 70- socio-economic class-old mother. As he grows in body and matures in mind, he fills his head with knowledge and pushes at the boundaries of his world, testing it. The name Testing the realism arises because th e son has to face the reality of demeanor, and the deaths that glide by in feel.The poem takes place in a perform, in a funeral set-up, with flocking birds in the throw. We understand this because of the phrase so crammed church roof and campanile. I can toil that it is a funeral because the poet relates the hibernation of the birds to a 70 year old woman. The writer to a fault illustrates a picture of a myriad of birds as he writes There must carry been 10,000 there or more.Even though he feels immense loneliness and glumness subsequently the passing on of his mother, he is not yet ready to come out her, and must remain in reality, therefrom he is the last soul even-tempered uncrosshatched. The poem begins in the low individual as the poet describes his experiences as a boy. We learn that his mother taught him to count to a ragged 20 but no higher. When he was still a boy, the sheer number of birds perching on the belfry exceeded his enumeration abilities, cramming church roof and belfry, dun and spire.At this later award in his invigoration, however, it is not callable to his counting skills that he cannot count but due to the sheer immeasurable quantity and their uncontrollable, kick nature, unable to be caged or catalogued. Their poetry were so great that their final examination victorious off blacked Beestons sky. These birds get throughout the poem, creating a sense of act and movement and dramatic symbolism. Here, the black sky symbolises the unfortunate and sad mood.While the flocking birds spiel what the man is looking at and his memories of them as a boy, they also have a metaphorical meaning, symbolizing the life and death of his mother. The crossroad of reality and imagery appears in line six with the following alliteration picketed piercingly the passing of each twenty-four hours. The power of the repeated P beneficial reflects the sound of the birds cries. In the poets mind, each bird also represents a hit day in the life of his mother. In fact, as the second stanza progresses, the birds only mortalify to measure the accumulated days in the life of the mans mother. Her attraction towards the birds is completed when they unaw bes depart, taking her life with them.The shock of the mothers death is so deep that the first person used throughout the first both stanzas is obliterated and transformed into the 3rd person in the last stanza, the man suddenly being referred to as her son. The third stanza also dramatizes the metaphorical blend of his mother and the birds. Death becomes the wings of night, her life becomes the flocking days. Her departure from the earth is an effusion, a release, of all her physical experiences which are high-flown away. So significant was she to her son that her departing life blocked the light. In the final line the son becomes an unhatched orchis/soul left behind in the clutch or the come near.Having come to partner the birds with his mother, his memories of her are immediately summoned whenever he checkers them. She may be dead but she lives on in his memories of the birds. At first they shrilly hailed the first new light they saw, come up to the new day in what ab initio seems to be an irritating way because they are portrayed as having loud, high-pitched cries that are not particularly pleasant to the ears. However, aft(prenominal) his mother dies, and they leave too, he comes to see them in a different light, afterwards they soared away.His opinion of them has now changed and he sees them as graceful and elegant creatures. This imagery also successfully implies life after death, and the setting of the poem becomes important when looked at in this light. A church is a place of peaceful meditation, praying and holiness, a place where the boundaries between the physical and the spiritual, the barriers between life and death, merge. For these reasons it becomes the nest that hatches souls into the heavens.Even though the birds, a nd the mans mother with them, aviate beyond all sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch they do not fly beyond love or memories, quite leaving a path for the man to follow when it is his turn to be hatched. The lesson the mother taught her son began with counting, but cease with a realization of life after death and the possibility of living, in spirit, for infinity.