“The Piercing” By Christine Garren
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An uncertain purpose, a troubling situation, a breakup, is bestowed upon a woman in “The Piercing” by Christine Garren. The blatant ending of the relationship has caused this woman anguish and has caused her pain. Through imagery and comparative language, the central theme of the poem illustrates that one with a life of reliance on happiness from a partner, or a relationship, will amount in mournfulness and instability.
In between each line of the poem there are spaces, gaps, breaks, fulfilling the implications from Garren of a cavity within a womans life. The imagery of spaces that Garren includes not only helps to better imply the titles meaning, “The Piercing,” but it implies the void this woman consumed because of her annulled relationship. The spaces depict her feeling of depletion as a loss within her life, a feeling of emptiness, what his “leaving caused,” (Garren, 2). Garren also uses the gaps to symbolize the problems and difficulties her speaker is experiencing from her spouses departure, all the while still expressing, indirectly, the concluded relationship. Parallelism is also evident within the structure of the poem because of its inclusion of gaps; the poem becomes unstable, almost unsteady, which is parallel to her relationship–shaky and strenuous. “The shingle pulled offthe nail off” (Garren, 8), the relationship off. The imagery of the roof represents the last straws in their relationship; it represents the last fight, and their ending. Her emotions are portrayed through the imagery of the “view through” (Garren, 3) the hole that the breakup has caused her to endure. Garren exposes a small portion, a “millimeters width opening” (Garren, 6) of the hole, yet juxtaposes it with a larger portion of hurt and pain. The parallelism of a piercing to her relationship is clearly evident through her many references of leaving and holes and pulling off and fitting through and manic fathers. All these quotes from the poem are examples of what will only let “time fill [in]” (Garren, 2) for this woman.
Rapidly deficient from a relationship, from a marriage, Garren uses an extended metaphor of a piercing to tell a womans story of a hurtful separation. Her fragile, broken heart was