Metaphors- Lot's Wives Reflection

 

    In Pireeni Sundarlingham's poem, "Lot's Wives", the reader sees a poetic persona taking on the experiences of Lot's wife metaphorically. In the Biblical Story of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot's unnamed wife is turned to salt as punishment for looking back to Sodom during God's destruction of it. The poem acts as an extended metaphor comparing the experiences of a group of women to the experiences of Lot's Wife. Much like the poem "The Gift", this piece feels to me like one of satire. It uses the irony of the audience, knowing the fate of Lot's wife and twisting it to apply to a larger group of shared feelings. I think that this piece uses the Biblical story as a metaphor for motherhood, marriage, and tragedy. 

    "We the forgotten / Whose names were swallowed by God" was the final line (Sundarlingham 23), and I believe that the poetic persona says this in reference to the women mentioned previously to claim that they are absent of the mercy given to men. In the Biblical story, Lot is consistently emphasized as the righteous entity among Sodom despite his own transgressions. Lot even offers his own daughters to a mob of citizens who stand at his door asking to molest the angels he harbors in his home, and yet throughout the story and beyond he and his lineage is favored by God. Lot's wife, however, is not granted the same mercy, and is immediately cast into the oblivion for failing to heed one order (an order made not to take even one look at the grand destruction of her home). Sundarlingham channels a group with a shared experience into a poetic persona displaying shock and grief through their use of visceral language. The poem describes a scene of horror from afar in a stoic loneliness, and uses phrases that are sure to haunt the imagination like "Our daughters / naked in the hungry mob", and "the fire fall like rain" juxtaposed with the quiet sadness of phrases like "smell of justice / drifting in the burnt wind", "It was quiet then. And cold.", and "alone on the hill's black belly". The specific experience that the poem is alluding to is hard to pin down, it could be referring to mothers experiencing the loss of a child, women of divorce, the loss of marriage or love, a traumatic experience collectively shared by women at the hands of misogynistic society. I cannot say for sure which of these is the subject of this poem, but this is what I see when I try to unravel the metaphor.

    What I could take from this would be the feeling of the metaphor itself. Some metaphors have a specific connotation to them; the comparison to Lot's wife has a connotation of lonely horror. By forcing the reader to envision the Biblical scene, the persona is able to convey a specific kind of loss and grief. By carefully choosing how the right use of a metaphor can alter the message, I can communicate more abstract feelings that I could not do by just trying to describe them objectively. Humans judge experiences based on comparison a lot, so it can be more valuable to connect an idea to the known canon.