Yet Another Poetry Response

A Work of Artifice
Marge Piercy
(b. 1936)

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers
the hands you
love to touch.

This poem reminds me (after reading the Awakening) of a criticism of a restrictive society. Just as the gardener doesn't let the tree grow as strong as it normally would and tells it it is better off this way, a lot of societies who oppress (not the right word, but close enough. restrict maybe?) some of their members do the same thing. When people had slaves, they told them that they were supposed to be unintelligent and weak and dependent on whites and that the slavemasters would care for them and life was bettter that way. This, of course, was entirely untrue. Women in many socities are also like this, as I think the poet intended to say. The reference to 'the bound feet, the crippled brain, the hair in curlers' is a reference to women. Women in old China were forced to bind their feet to make them mroe attractive. This was very painful and made it difficult to walk. Also, women in many societies were (and in some cases still are) assumed to be not as intelligent as men and so were not given the chance to express their intelligence. The hair in curlers, as women curled their hair, also references women. I think it is interesting to compare these injustices to a bonsai tree.