"Points of View"

"Points of View"

IB English
Commentary Essay

In “Points of View,” Lucinda Roy utilizes the natural and multi-facet state of water in comparison to the organized, structured nature of math to define her present position in life and the inevitable need to revert back to the native and traditional way of life.   There is also an underlying reflection on the subjugation of women. The tone of the poem evolves from the longing tenor of an onlooker to the satisfied quality of a person fulfilled.
The poem is split into two divisions.   Roy uses the first component to observe a type of lifestyle as an outsider looking in to a situation that seems so much more complete than her own.   Roy uses water as a connotation of her life and what she wants her life to be.   An example of this is her contemplation of women who “bend to rivers or to wells [and] scoop up life and offer it.”   Life is reference to water.   This illustrates the immense importance of water as a source for life; so much that water is considered life.   The mathematical term, bend, which is repeated several times throughout the poem (i.e. “women bend to rivers,” and “women bend to see themselves in rivers”), represents the organized and directed form of her life.   She sees the women as a symbol of herself.   In this context, bend signifies the miniscule effect that her form of life has on the traditional fundamental elements of her ancestry. To her, this “tamed [and] encased” form of life is weak against the natural forces of the “rivers” and “wells”: the free form of life.
For women “to bend to rivers” and “offer [water] to men, their children, to their elders, and to their blistered cooking-pots,” bend also signifies the subjugation of women to a position of the server.   The women’s only concern is to the patriarchal figure, the younger generation, and to the old generation.   The women must serve all three in order to receive protection and preservation of their present well being,...