This Living Hand

List of images: menacing hand, ghostly hand, haunted grave, icy tomb, ghosts, death, underworld, eerie bedroom, haunted house, blood, beating heart, dark corners, paranoia, suicidal, deathbed, disease, vampires, old age, desire, desperate, near death.

The line, "This living hand, now warm and capable of earnest grasping, would" evokes an image of a last desire before death. Perhaps the writer was in love with a woman who did not feel the same way and wrote this poem to make her feel guilty. Though the owner of that hand is obviously alive at that present moment, the word "now" tells us that his hand won't be warm and capable for long. Perhaps the writer is telling us that he is on his deathbed and wishes to fulfill his longings before he passes away. However, the poem then changes to a different tone. In the line, "if it were cold and in the icy silence of the tomb, so haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights," the writer's tone changes to an almost threatening, even vindictive tone. This line evokes an imagery of a ghostly hand reaching out from beyond the cold icy grave, perhaps to exact punishment or revenge. It almost sounds like the writer is threatening to come back from the grave to haunt the reader, or perhaps a person the writer knows, so that he/she will never feel at peace. Perhaps the writer has been betrayed in some point of his life to feel such vengefulness. The fourth line combined with the line where it says "that thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood" sounds like the writer is trying to say "I will haunt you day and night until you'll wish you were dead !" This line makes it seems like the writer's threat is even worse than death itself and thus evoke imagery of a haunted house, an eerie bedroom, or an endless nightmare. The next line, I thought, was quite interesting. The next line reads "So in my veins red life might stream again." This line provokes an image of blood running through veins or a beating heart. Maybe the entire purpose of this poem was so the writer can be "alive" and live forever through the poem and the mind of the readers. What better way to live forever in someone's mind than to haunt them forever? If that's true, than the writer wants nothing more than to simply be remembered when he is gone. Once the reader figures it out he/she will be "conscience-calmed."

Why symbology?

I chose this as my title because, really, what are words exactly? is a word an ink stain on dead carcasses of trees? is a word to a human as is a "meow" to a cat? A word is not a thing that you can touch. If you are touching the pages of a book you are touching paper and ink. A word is simply a representation or a symbol of ideas, feelings, or things that we can touch. Therefore, when we read a book, we are deciphering symbols so that we understand the meaning that the writer is trying to communicate to the audience.

I first saw the word "symbology" when I was reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The main character of the book is Robert Langdon, who is a professor of symbology and is also the main character in some of Dan Brown's other book such as Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol. The reason it struck me that the word "Symbology" would be the perfect title for my blog is because Robert Langdon was always solving riddles to get to the bottom of the mystery. So whenever I try to interpret a poem or a piece of literature, I feel like Robert Langdon or Sherlock Holmes trying to solve a puzzle or a clue.