Cécile Parrish (1937–1964)
FEATURES / DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY
Feelings, not fact
Written by Ang Shuang
Dated 30 Aug 2023
There is barely anything I can find about Cécile Parrish online. Try as I might to shape what little information I have into a detailed portrait of the poet, who died at the age of 27, the end result is a blank. This means I am forced to enter Parrish’s poems blind: All I have is whatever is on the page, without context acting as a crutch.
Reading the poem “Bidadari”, for example, raises more questions than answers. When the persona visits the grave of her son who “lies drowned,” is the drowning fact or metaphor? What do “drafted towers” even mean? Do I need to fully understand a poem to enjoy it?
With “Bidadari,” I let go of the facts and follow the feelings. Parrish wields juxtaposition like a cleaver — flowers “shiver” in the “heat,” and the “burning sky” and “burning ground” are a scorching contrast against the “drowned” child. Amid this hellish landscape, everything appears bleached and colorless; the sky “white,” the cross “pale,” and the stone “blinded.” Loss, to the persona, is searing yet restrained. As she struggles to express sorrow (“my deficiency of tears”), the rigid structure of eight-syllable lines within the sonnet’s 14 lines echo the cemetery’s “narrow lanes of loss,” suggesting the persona’s inability to fully confront her grief.
Yet there are moments where the reins slip. The rhyme scheme shifts abruptly from ABBA to ABC from the first to the second stanza, and in the second-last line, “tears” is an eye rhyme for “bears” (even the persona’s attempt to rhyme perfectly, it seems, is deficient). While most of the poem’s lines break at natural pauses in speech, the abrupt enjambment in “My ritual hand is all that bears / remembrance” stands out, as if to suggest the persona no longer bears a child, but only a ritual.
Did I understand the poem accurately? I don’t know. But to me, “Bidadari” contends that nothing is ever truly rigid. Our thoughts, in the end, are ours — and ours alone — to reconcile. As a poet, I’ve also had to come to terms with the fact that once we release our poems into the wild, they belong to their readers, who ascribe their own opinions and analysis upon them. This is what I kept in mind while writing my poetic response to “Bidadari.” I wanted to write something not just open to interpretation, but also detached from my personal life — something a reader would have to navigate solely on their own.
•
The Gardener
How wild it is, she thought,
to try to make something
out of air, of nothing,
each tired month of rot
dissolving into salt.
These narrow lanes of loss
constrict with dreams of moss —
each bud a tightened vault;
a wreath of thumbs, blunted.
How feral it is, to
catch what you want in view.
To leave it there, wanted.
