Poetry help please??

Question

I really need some help to understand this poem written by Dorothy Livesay, could you tell me what its saying and if it relates in anyway to a a displaced person. If it help, this poem was written it the thirties, after the war, its supposed to be about the devastation that occurred

thanks a lot.

A shell burst in my mind

Upheaving roots since birth, perhaps, confined

Before I dreamed

The devastation there outlined

And so my body now

Owes no allegiance to the scythe and plough:

I, dispossessed

Count no blossoms on the bough.

I build no man's land

A city not my own, with others planned

By others dreamed,

And with a new race forged and manned!

Answer 1

We are all displaced if we think home is anywhere but where we plant our feet.

Answer 2

Well. This reminds me of Scarlet Ohera : And I shall be hungry no more. Trying to build her own country,her own city, her own farm. In sum, her own world. War devastates the whole structure of the human being, after which, a (psychological/ mental) reconstruction is obligatory, just to recondition & or restart life in a postwar environment.

Answer 3

Yes, she is talking about up-heaving roots and being displaced. Home can sometimes disappear quickly. I think Buk's answer was also right on to the point.

Answer 4

Where she talks of owing no allegiance to the scythe and plough, and a city not her own, it is talking about the home front during the war. While the men were away fighting, women had to stop their regualr tasks such as tending fields and such to to build weapons for the war.

I don't see any reference to a displaced person :S sorry!

Answer 5

What happened: The speaker of the poem, either a man or a woman of no determined age, thought of something or experienced in the mind something so upsetting and life-changing that now he or she has left the farm ("owes no allegiance to the scythe and plough"). He or she has stopped seeing beauty--doesn't look at tree blossoms.

Instead now the speaker finds himself (herself) constructing a place that has nothing to do with humanity or the speaker himself/herself: other people have conceived it, and those who inhabit and help make it are of a new breed. This is the displacement ("dispossessed").

I suspect that the poem sees this situation as a tragedy. The word "devastation" is a negative one, and to build "no man's land" doesn't sound very friendly. The speaker at the end is living in a situation foreign to him or her. The connection between self and surroundings has been destroyed. There is a slight positive tinge at the close because of the sense of new accomplishments being made, but these are not ones the speaker, with perhaps sentimental fondness, thinks are better than the old way, before the "shell" burst upon the speaker's mind. It's interesting that the speaker sees in the first stanza that she herself is partly responsible for the situation. Did she will her own unhappiness? Is this a comment on the 1930's?

In my judgment, this is a poor poem. Although the form is reasonably tight--triplets interrupted by a single end word repeated in the opening and closing stanza--the poem is abstract almost to the point of vagueness. The word "outlined" adds nothing to the sense or understanding of the first stanza; it is there only to fill out the form. Finally the imagery is tired: scythe and plough, blossom, and "no man's land" are cliches.