A thermos bottle full of self pity
How Lalo Makes Us Feel
- Title / Título
- A thermos bottle full of self pity
- Creator / Creador
- Abelardo Delgado
- Subject / Tema
- Abelardo, 1931-2004, American poetry--Mexican American authors, Mexican American poets, Couples in literature, Self-perception in literature, Regression (Psychology) in literature, Intimacy (Psychology) in literature, Suffering in literature, Pride in literature, Bilingualism in literature, Machismo in literature
- Description / Descripción
- This 97 line poem (7 in Spanish) written in the first person perspective recounts a male speaker's misunderstandings of female intimacy. The speaker reveals an awareness of how his harshness and sarcasm isolates the unnamed woman of the poem, but he regresses to defensiveness rather than act on his awareness. At five instances in the poem, Delgado uses a series of three hyphens as improvised m-dashes to isolate dialogue from women that he then responds to largely by acknowledging but not absorbing their message. The speaker also directly addressed three male figures -- Pepe, Juan, and Miguel -- in order to commisserate with other men how women, especially anglo women, are incomprehensible, or to find solidarity in not caring and resigning oneself to self-pity. The poem feels heavy and frustrated when the speaker identifies with a bird that walks for hours rather than flies. It also feels distant and uncaring when the speaker hears the woman's words of pain as block-like objects that he drops and breaks. By the end, the poem feels forlorn, with the speaker seemingly aware of the depth of love the woman offers him but also his own self pity and its will to strip all memories of that love in a defensive self-protection.
