Analyzing Tretheway’s Native Guard Without Biographical Interpretations

Can we really look at text without trying to analyze how much of it came from the writer’s life? Well let’s try. During the poetry festival, Natasha Tretheway stated that she really disliked it when people tried to figure out how much of her writing came from experiences that occurred throughout her life. No one likes anyone probing into the sad parts or darker parts of their lives; however those parts of our lives drive our emotions in our writing and allows us to be viewed as human. Our goal when we write is to make an experience seem real. Thus, if we achieve that people are going to assume that we are writing about an actual occurrence. Therefore, let’s remove these thoughts from our mind for a moment and just analyze Tretheway’s poetry without biographical knowledge and interpretation of her life. Does this take away or add anything to the poem?

For the sake of brevity, i will only analyze the poems "Myth." Tretheway writes all of the poems of this book in first person. in the poem myth she used the word "Erebus." Erebus is a reference from Greek mythology which refers to a deity and a place. The diety was the son of Kaos and darkness and the brother of Nyx (night).the place is the underworld. Tretheway uses Erebus as an underworld which is used as metaphor for her memories and dreams.

Throughout the poem, there is a lot of repetition of phrases. We see this in the lines "I was asleep while you were dying, it was as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow, i make between my slumber and my waking, sleep heavy turning." If you look closely, you will notice that the poem has sort of a ballad rhythm. Its almost like a pendulum swinging back and forth. The first repeated phrase "I was asleep while you were dying" has a change in tone and meaning as it is repeated on the last line. First, it appears that the author is stating what happened, and in the last line, the phrase seems to saying that he/she missed the last moment that the person was alive. The phrase "sleep heavy turning" is repeated. However at one point, its not the persona who is sleep but the deceased. The narrator was in a deep sleep while the person was dying however in the next mention of the phrase it describes the deceased in eternal sleep. the deep sleep that the narrator speaks of is him or her not seeing the small hints given that signified that the deceased was going to die. The entire poem switches around phrases which adds to the pendulum effect. The pendulum effect demonstrates how the person went away every time the narrator awoke.

The rhyme in this poem is abcabc, the middle two stanzas end the lines with the words "turning", "follow", and "forsaking". The last stanzas imitate the same rhyme scheme as the first two stanzas. The stanzas are written in tercets.

To answer the question: If you remove the biographical interpretations away from the poem does the poem maintain the same effect? The answer is yes. When people ask questions about the author's life, sometimes its because they are looking for someone that has been through the same thing as themselves, or they are simply curious about the mystery of converting difficult emotions and occurrences into words.