A Room in The Past Critique - Essay Example

A baby is beautiful and naïve and unaware of what life has to offer. This is compared to the morning light, which is so bright that one is not able to see beyond the curtains and into the afternoon. The bright sunshine is used by the author to show that a person’s life at birth is beautiful and a lot is expected out of it.

During the mid ages of any person, life is full of surprises such that a person looks like “the bucket /of drinking water rippled as if /a truck had just gone past” (Ln. 7-9). At this age, one does not know what best is for him or her and just results to adventure by trying all the unknowns. The author refers to the truck that passes over the bucket as a thirty-year-old, to show the age at which a person can realize what is right and wrong. It is of paramount importance to note that at thirty, one is mature enough to change the kind of behavior s/he has been leading.

However, life is not permanent and for that, one has to reach old age and pass away. The narrator remembers her grandmother who passed on like a ghost. Her grandmother had a good time and used the utensils in the kitchen and “moved through this life like a ghost, /and when she had finished her years” (Ln. 15-16). Her grandmother had a good time just like anybody else but unlike the utensils in the kitchen which have a longer life, she had to live and go after her time came. After the death of a person s/he never comes back as illustrated by the narrator when he says” turning her back/ on the rest of us, forever” (Ln. 17-18). She realized that she could no longer use the utensils but somebody else will be able to use them. It is for this reason that she (grandmother) wiped the utensils and placed them in their racks.

The narrator can convey his message to the audience by comparing the life of a person to utensils in a kitchen. In addition, the narrator realizes that a person’s life is much shorter than that of the kitchen and that is the reason why the grandmother’s kitchen is still intact. It is of paramount importance to note that at the beginning of the poem the sun is bright which shows that a lot is expected in life because one is young at that time.

As the poem progresses things in the kitchen are no longer beautiful because one’s life is towards the end. The author uses short sentences to make it easy to sing and thus capture the attention of the listener. One can see mist although it is not possible to touch it. This shows that the author has memories of her grandmother but they cannot meet because she is already dead. The use of imagery in the poem makes it interesting to the listener.