The Blue Bowl: Story of a Buried Memory

When a person is left by their significant other, it will hurt and make them feel down. It is nothing different when the pet owners are abandoned by their precious animals, as it will crush them as much as they lost their beloved one. The misery will not go easily especially when they have shared joyfulness to each other. That sadness is entirely shown through “The Blue Bowl,” a poem written by Jane Kenyon. The whole plot of this poem tells the readers about the speaker’s and her family sadness feeling when their beloved cat was dead. Furthermore, the tone, the diction, and the senses that the poem convey can be used to analyze the feeling of the speaker and her family.

The first component of the poem that will be elucidated is the tone where it describes the sadness of losing the cat. The tone will influence the readers’ perspective and may give them the experiences of grief after reading the poem. By starting with “Like primitives we buried the cat/with his bowl. Bare-handed /we scraped sand and gravel” (Lines 1-3), the speaker tries to depict the heartbreaking image of the cat’s burial. Another than that, the tone of grief is also expressed by “There are sorrows much keener than these./Silent the rest of the day, we worked” (Line 10-11). Those two lines indicate if the death of the cat extremely hurt the speaker’s and her family feeling. Moreover, the 11^th line specifically told the readers that the speaker and her family pass the day in silence, showing if the death of the cat is very impactful to their lives. The tone used in this poem gives the readers a very clear overview of the speaker’s and her family feeling.

Kenyon also uses some dictions by employing few poignant words in the poem where it can be used to identify the speaker’s feeling. For example, the title of this poem consists of two terms which are “Blue” and “Bowl.” The diction “Blue” shows the readers if the speaker prefers to use Blue rather than lighter colors since Blue is deemed as a gloomy where it represents the feeling of sorrow. In addition, the "Bowl" is the object that we can assume as the cat’s important possession, where an ancient belief suggested that if a person is buried with their belonging, they will arrive safely in the afterlife. Besides the title, the speaker also uses the word “Stormed” in line 12. The storm itself usually occurs if there is a big rain where it might symbolize the tears. That selection of words in the poem signifies how the speaker is filled with melancholy towards the death of the cat.

It does not stop there, Kenyon also applies the senses component to form a more vivid illustration of the speaker’s feeling. Hearing sense and vision sense are parts of the senses that is noticeable in this poem. In the line 4-5 “back into the hole. It fell with a hiss/and thud on his side,” the speaker uses her hearing sense to hear the hiss and the thud. That sensations are the sounds that people used to hear during the burial process, which comes to be the most saddening moment. In addition, the line 6-8 “on his long red fur, the white feathers/that grew between his toes, and his/long, not to say aquiline, nose” indicates if the speaker cannot fully embrace the death of his cat as the reason why she still remembers the details of the cat. The sense that Kenyon implements in the poem have exhibited to the readers what the speaker is truly feeling towards the loss of the beloved cat.

The sadness and sorrow of the speaker and his family can be felt throughout the entirety of the poem by analyzing the tone, the diction, and the senses. Jane Kenyon has successfully delivered emotional experiences and many melancholy moments to the readers. She explores not only about the sadness during the burial process but also the silence that the speaker felt after that day. The title also points out to us immediately if the bowl has a blue color where blue is mostly believed as a symbol of despair. In this poem, the speaker also elaborates the cat’s appearance in line 6-8, where the speaker cherished the memory of the cat. Time goes by quick and everything that speaker has went through with the cat is ended entirely by the burial. Thousands of memories of the cat might still live on, but the unquestionable happiness between them will stop there and buried eternally into a story.