Tell Me a Riddle (35 page)

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Authors: Tillie Olsen

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BOOK: Tell Me a Riddle
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Page 141
some typed drafts, tend to be romantic, lyrical, full of the pain of lost or unrequited love, the anguish of loneliness, and the mysteries of nature, especially the winds and snows of the Nebraska winters. Several express deep love and affection for a female friend, and one describes a bond with her younger sister. Olsen says that there were other poems, now lost, on political themes like the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. Mostly, though, these early poems are the effusions of an intense, imaginative young woman as influenced by the romantic traditions of nineteenth-century poetry and its twentieth-century practitioners like Millay as by the ''larger tradition of social concern."
Olsen's decision to join the YCL in 1931 was a turning point; for the next year and a half she dedicated much of her energy to political work. She was sent from Omaha to Kansas City, where she attended the party school for several weeks, formed close ties to political comrades like the working-class women Fern Pierce and "Red" Allen, whom she helped to support by working in a tie factory, and became involved in an unhappy relationship with a party organizer. It was during this time that she was sent to the Argentine Jail for passing out leaflets to packing house workers. She was already sick at the time, having contracted pleurisy from working in front of an open window at the tie factory with a steam radiator in front of it; in jail, she became extremely ill and in 1932 was sent back to Omaha.
During this time, her poems begin to acquire different subjects, a different quality. They still focus on personal experience and emotion, including the anguish of an abortion or miscarriage and the bitterness of misplaced or betrayed love. But now she sometimes interweaves political metaphors to express emotional states. One such poem begins with the speaker sitting "hunched by the window,/watching the snow trail down without lightness." The poem goes on:
The branches of trees writhe like wounded animals,
like small frightened bears the buds curve their backs to the
white onslaught,
and I think of what a Wobbly told me of his third degree,
no violent tortures, but exquisitely, civilized,
 
Page 142
a gloved palm lightly striking his cheek,
in a few minutes it was a hammer of wind pounding nails of
hail,
in fifteen a sledge, in twenty, mountains rearing against his
cheek...
Somehow, seeing the constant minute blow of the snow on
the branches,
and their shudder, this story falters into my mind,
with some deeper, untranslatable meaning behind it,
something I can not learn.
The untranslatable meaning finally has something to do with the
wisdom
of covering the dead, the decaying,
the swell and stir of the past, the leaves of old hope, with
inexorable snow,
Of stripping bare and essential the illusions of leaves,
leaves that were moved by any wind.
This poem uses the landscape in a traditional way as a mirror for the speaker's state of mind, bleak but resolute, from which she can draw a lesson for living, but it complicates the natural imagery by attributing to a snowfall the implacable, impersonal characteristics of the professional interrogator an analogy accessible only to someone with a certain kind of political experience and sympathy. The analogy doesn't quite work, because ultimately the inexorable snow has something redeeming in it, as the political interrogation does not; yet the parallel between the speaker and the Wobbly, both of whom must remain firm under onslaught, gives the poem a social as well as a natural dimension and suggests that its writer was struggling for both personal and political reasons to discipline the chaos of her emotions.
During this period of intense political organizing, Olsen began to have the ''deep, unalterable convictions" she had earlier wished for, and she took herself to task for the relative absence of a political dimension in most of her earlier work:

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