I Ask My Mother to Sing

The poet/narrator's experience is more indirect; he learns from listening to the song. An implication is that the poet is not asking his go to sing for the first time but this is a pray that is repeated over time to bring the medieval spiritedness in China to look in the present. It this way, the song represents a ritual, a kind of ceremonial recall of a past spiritedness from which the poet/narrator can learn of his heritage and a way of life different from his present. Thus the song of his find and grandmother pass on his native culture to the poet.

I've never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,

nor stood on the great scar Boat to watch

the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers

But I love to hear it sung; (lines 5-9).

The next three lines provide images the poet hears and sees of the beauty of nature experienced by the older generation, images that blueprint a unified image of a simpler former life: "waterlilies fill with rain until they/overturn, spilling water into water,/then rock back, and f

The expiry of a former life includes a world that has disappeared within the Forbidden City in Peking, as well as the wrong of the family's former lifestyle, and the loss of the poet's father. The feeling of loss, hitherto more than nostalgia, is the central emotion of the poem.

This is do clear by the final dickens lines of the poem: " twain women have begun to cry./But neither stops her song" (lines 13-14). The feelings of loss are so great for the mother and grandmother that even the beauty of what they are describing in their song fades in their remembrance of their former life. But they continue singing, signifying that they have come to wrong with their loss and with their new life and country. They may feel upset from their past and experience dislocation in a alien culture, but they continue their "song," their lives. The feeling of deep loss is not as acute in the young poet/narrator. His feelings are more nostalgic and he does not join the crying of the two older women.

ill with more" (lines 10-12). The overturned waterlilies may overly
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