"Getting Through" 265, pg. 322

“Getting Through,” by Deborah Pope, has a continuous form.  The only period, a conclusion of thought, comes at the end of the poem.  The speaker rambles on, “and my words hurtling past, like a train off its track,” comparing hurtful, difficult, and suffocating situations with the loss of her lover.  The first reference as to whom the speaker is comes with the line, “so I go on loving you,” proving that she cannot help nor change her circumstance.  This also addresses to whom she is speaking, her lost love.  Extrapolating from the title and the many examples given, such as “a car stuck in gear” and an unlived in house with the persistent ringing of a phone - a stagnant memory - and layers upon layers of dust covering unforgotten times, the desperate plight of the speaker is understood.  Most, if not all, people experience love, and this combined with the authors previously stated metaphors, creates a tone of solemnity, of relativity.  Her obvious desire to rid herself of the painful memories and love she still harbors for him is blatantly said at the end of the poem.  After she lists comparable concepts, she realizes that this is her heart releasing what she no longer wants.  She has confined this sadness and merely “gotten through it” for too long, and now she is ready to let go.  She is the “last speaker of a beautiful language no one else can hear” – that love.

Love is a feeling, an experience, an indescribable emotion so passionately and unequivocally felt that when lost, part of the soul is also lost. And unreturned.  However, that is completely biased.  For me, I’ve only known honest, shared love a time or two in my life.  There is a parent’s love and a friend’s love, but a love that cannot compare is one shared with a lover.  To know if you have experienced love, perhaps you have to lose it.  It is that emptiness, that empty house that no one lives in but the phone still rings when certain senses evoke the memories passed, that will always remain.  Getting through that is no simple task.  It is arguably one of the most difficult things anyone could experience.  After all, life is love.  Thus, when someone, like the reader, so easily lists the pain she has from this loss and the hardship of “getting through” it, an instant relation arises.  The colloquial diction adds to the familiarity of this everyday phenomenon.  Ironically, the last phrase is quite oxymoronic.  “Everyday phenomenon.”  It occurs to us all, but “getting through it,” as the author states, is the hardest part.