how did the ill tattered clothes behave in the poem "the cold within"?
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We open up to a bleak tableau. The poet recounts a tale he has heard, of six persons caught together in the grip of a severe winter. Each of them probably had a single stick of wood.
We open up to a bleak tableau. The poet recounts a tale he has heard, of six persons caught together in the grip of a severe winter. Each of them probably had a single stick of wood.Note the poet’s use of the word ‘humans’; he wants to draw attention to the gathering as specific individuals, rather than as a collective group. They were ‘trapped by happenstance’ implying no escape from a situation created by chance. The adjectives ‘dark’ and ‘bitter’ describing the cold add to the ominous feeling.
The second stanza cuts into a key character in this story — the dying fire. The group’s prospects do not look good. In the heart of winter keeping warm is critical to survival. The fire offers a chance for salvation if each person would use their respective logs to feed it. The dying fire is a silent appeal to the group to help themselves by helping each other.
The second stanza cuts into a key character in this story — the dying fire. The group’s prospects do not look good. In the heart of winter keeping warm is critical to survival. The fire offers a chance for salvation if each person would use their respective logs to feed it. The dying fire is a silent appeal to the group to help themselves by helping each other.The next verses reveal how the situation unfolds. We find that the first person withheld his log from the fire only because it would benefit a black person. This is racism, where there is discrimination because of a person’s race. The man will not even warm himself if someone he looks down upon — simply because of skin color — will gain.
We move on. The second person looked across the fire and saw someone who he knew didn’t share his religious ideology. And just because of that, he can’t bear to give up his log to the communal fire. This is bigotry, which speaks of intolerance to a person because they do not share the same opinions or ideas.
The focus now shifts. Here is a person who seems poor. His tattered (old and torn) clothes in the cold weather hint at poverty. He perhaps felt the cold more than the others as we notice that ‘he gave his coat a hitch’ —adjusting it closer to his body to wry out some warmth from the inadequate clothing. But here too is a dead end. We see that he is a victim of classism — or discrimination based on social or economic class — considering those favorably placed than him to be ‘idle’. He is defensive and in his eyes, the rich do not deserve his meager ration and he will not part with his stick.
At cross purposes, we find the next exhibit of apathy — the rich man. Caught up hoarding his riches in his head, he is oblivious to reality. Greed blinds him as he selfishly connives to keep his wealth. He even miserly holds onto his stick, keeping it from the poor whom he perceives as aimless and lazy.
We witness the grim aftermath of the group’s rigidity of spirit. Death comes and it is personified here with stilled hands. Each individual became their own agent of death — their hands frozen stiff with their refusal to act. The fact that each of them still possessed their firewood when they died suggests the twisted motives in retaining their firewood — proof enough of sin. The final lines abound with Irony. We realize it was not the cold weather outside that really killed the group after all, it was the cold in their hearts, the lack of warm human spirits — the cold within.
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