A Mother In A Refugee Camp And Poem At Thirty-Nine

It is always hard to accept that someone or something you have loved dearly is gone and the poems “A Mother in a Refugee Camp”, “Poem at Thirty-Nine” and “Once Upon a Time” are all no exception to this concept. Love being the dominant link in these poems further presents that if you do not accept or keep grieving for something you have lost, the harder it will be to move on with your life and be happy. In “A Mother in a Refugee Camp”, you can see the infinite love of a mother for her dying son and in “Poem at Thirty-Nine”, you see the love and longing of a daughter for her dead father. Both these poems depict the loss of a loved one but in “Once Upon a Time”, love is not portrayed through death of a loved one. Love is expressed showing the love and longing for innocence of youth. The minor poems “Sonnet 116 ‘Let me not to the marriage…’”, “Remember” and “Plena Timoris” also explore similar notions related to the topic love.

In “A Mother in a Refugee Camp”, the persona being the mother is compared in the first line of the poem to Holy Mother Mary holding baby Jesus, who is represented as the dying son in the poem. This metaphor being a perfect comparison of the persona to Mother Mary already conveys how strong Chinua Achebe is trying to express the mother’s love for her son, just as in the Bible, Mary is a character who has divine love for her son Jesus. Strong imagery of the surrounding environment is further used to show us the grueling conditions the refugees had to bear on a daily basis, showing the full enormity of it, stressing even the slightest details of the smells and unhygienic conditions. The paradox of the “unwashed children” with their “washed-out ribs” further adds to the strong imagery of the atmosphere but also c...

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...the persona gave the impression that love is temporary and may not last forever.

Loss of a loved one will inevitably bring about pain and grief, but it is better to have loved and lived life’s experiences, as without love, life would be like an empty vessel with no flavour, colour or spice. The daughter in “Poem at Thirty-Nine”, would never have learnt so much if it weren’t for her beloved father and the mother in “A Mother in a Refugee Camp”, cannot imagine a life without her son and would surely cherish the days that she had spent with her son rather than never having had a son. The mother in “Once Upon a Time”, only recognizes the fake personalities because she has experienced and has been an honest, loving and truthful person herself. The minor poems mentioned further contribute to this notion as it brings about the concept that love and pain go hand in hand.