Literary Criticism (My Grandmother's Sweater)

My Grandmother's Sweater

The crispness of the morning
awaken the sleeping robins.
The sun peeks out from the horizon
as I put on my grandmother's sweater.

I turn and face the body
wasted of life
tired eyes looking back
full of pain.

The other day my sister asked me,
"Which way does the grass grow?"
Down into the ground, I think
as I snuggle deeper into my grandmother's sweater.

"What's life all about?" she asked me next.
Love. Death. Pain. I think,
as they lay her into the ground.

I feel nothing
as the sun shines down
upon the crosses in a row
only comfort in my grandmother's sweater.

This poem was presented in a free verse. There was no particular pattern of rhyming neither a particular pattern in syllabication. It was a narrative poetry, a story I supposed which was divided into parts to form a poem. This used the first person point of view which probably was one of the techniques so that it will be better understood by the readers. Such method also helped in expressing the emotion that the narrator felt.

Though the poem starts with a positive scene with the rising of the sun, still it wasn't able to hide the sad aura that the poem represents. The author used symbolism which was emphasized in the lines:

The other day my sister asked me,
"Which way does the grass grow?"
Down into the ground, I think
as I snuggle deeper into my grandmother's sweater.

"What's life all about?" she asked me next.
Love. Death. Pain. I think,
as they lay her into the ground.

I wasn't able to understand what these lines really meant but I think the question "which way does the grass grow?" was being compared to life. I would interpret in a way that there is really something deeper about life. Things do happen for reasons we can't immediately see. We have to dig deeper and risk more for us to discover what really are meant by the things that are happening. It may also mean that we always come back to wherever we came from.

The meaning of the poem with regard to the grandmother's death is very obvious. This death was used to make the message vivid for the ones who reads. But as earlier mentioned, with regard to that question, it is unclear. What does the author really mean? What really are his intentions? However, the general idea is very obvious. The narrator was sad because of the grandmother's death and the only thing that made him/her remembered the woman was the sweater which kept (him/her) warm.