commentary on the aforementioned poem

In the poem “Passed On” by Carole Satymurti, the speaker tells a story almost as in a novel of their mother and how she left them a box of index cards with advice on life when she died. The speaker’s gender is never clearly stated. Parts of the poem make them seem male, others female. For purposes of this commentary, I will refer to them as “the speaker.” In the poem, the author presents the theme of growing up and becoming one’s own person through the maturation and acceptance process. They personify the index cards themselves, comparing them to the speaker’s mother. They also characterize the speaker and the speaker’s mother and create a mood of sadness and longing, implying that the mother has died and perhaps been dead for some time, but the speaker has never truly accepted this.

The title of the poem itself is a triple meaning that can be viewed in several different lights. On the one hand, the speaker seems to have grown up since their mother’s passing. As the speaker grows and matures, the cards their mother left them “seemed to shrink.” They would find parts of the cards “blank, the edges furred, mute, whole areas wrong, or missing.” There is a certain point in everyone’s life in which they realize that their parents are not infallible and make mistakes just like everyone else. Whereas earlier in the speaker’s life they felt like “the world was box-shaped,” that their mother had included everything in this box full of index cards, they have since had many new experiences that their mother had not anticipated. This feeling of growing up and becoming your own person may be the meaning of the title “Passed On.” The speaker has passed up their mother in terms of maturity and their mother can no longer teach them what they were able to before. The death of the mother itself may be the meaning of “Passed On.” The speaker tells of burning the index cards, stating, “the smoke rose thin and clear, slowly blurred.” This incendiary action recalls the age-old act of the funeral pyre. By burning the cards, the speaker is giving themselves closure in a symbolic funeral of sorts for her mother. Earlier, she states that her mother had “rendered herself down from flesh to paper” and she would “shuffle them to almost hear her speak.” The author personifies the speaker’s mother through these cards in order to give the reader a fuller idea of how much the cards meant to the speaker when they were younger and how symbolic an event it is to burn them on the beach. The funeral imagery is further reinforced by the speaker “creating a hollow cairn,” almost to act as a headstone for the cards, symbolically their mother’s, funeral spot. The final possible meaning of the title “Passed On” is the speaker’s own maturation. As they grew and started to doubt their mother’s wisdom, asking, “Had she known?” they have “Passed On” their mother’s advice because it is no longer pertinent to them. They have taken all they can from the cards and now can no longer see any real use for them.

The mother is characterized throughout the poem as a sickly woman but also a wise, foreseeing mother figure. The speaker is characterized at first as childish but eventually matures and moved past their immature ways into a wiser, world-wearier person. The speakers tells how they saw their mother’s “strength drain, ink-blue, from her finger-ends providing for a string of hard winters I was trying not to understand.” It is unclear what these “winters” refer to but I think they refer to the winters in which the speaker will have to survive without the mother’s guidance, in which she will have already died. She knows she is dying and wishes to impart everything she can to her daughter so they will not be completely lost when at last her heart does stop beating. The childishness of the speaker is presented by her “nagging” the mother and trying hard “not to understand” the winters that she knows she will eventually have to face. It is a very childish thing to do to see something and try to pretend it isn’t real just by forcing oneself not to understand it. It is hiding from the world and from the truth of the future and the speaker does it. The mother’s eventual deterioration is presented in the fourth stanza in a string of seemingly unrelated one to three word phrases. The speaker prefaces this by comparing their own notes to their mother’s “urgent dogmatism, loosening grip.” Their mother is seemingly slipping into the senseless world of senility and she shows it by writing in her index cards that she held in such high importance “infinitives never telling love lust single issue politics when don’t hopeless careful trust.” This obviously makes no sense and serves as a representation of the mother’s “loosening grip” on reality, her slow degradation into senility. This development in the mother is paralleled with the speaker’s own maturation. Adding “notes of my own” gives the speaker a newfound level of maturity; they feel experienced enough to alter the cards themselves. Enough time has passed for them to gain new experiences that they feel is worthy of being noted and they note them in these index cards. The speaker’s maturation process is ultimately completed in the symbolic burning of the cards. They have finally accepted their mother’s death and can survive without her. The speaker states, “Then I let her go.” Their maturation is finally complete; this is adulthood and the speaker has achieved it.

The general mood of the poem is quite sad. The author creates this mood by telling of the mother’s desperation to finish her project before she dies. She “rendered herself” from the flesh, making her “strength drain.” This is all of course being told through the speaker’s child and it is very sad to think of a young child having to witness this in their own parent at such a young age. When one is young, one thinks that one’s parents are supposed to be rocks of stability and strength and any hint of weakness is a truly sad thing to witness. The mood is furthered in phrased like “hard winters” and the speaker’s “doubt.” The speaker seems to dislike the fact that they were childish beforehand and could not relate to their mother while she was alive, but they can’t really change that. They finally accept the past and resolve to move on with their life, “let[ing her mother] go” through the burning of the index cards. This eventual tone of resolve is comes at a time in the speaker’s life when they feel they can finally move on.

This poem is truly a fantastic poem. The writer gives so much meaning and so many things to think about in such a short amount of space. It is truly incredible. The real measure of a poetic mind is how much a poet can say in how little space and Satyrmurti says very much with very little. The poem imparts a feeling to me that is hard to explain. It makes me step back and appreciate that I have those around me that I love so much, not just in my parents, but also in my friends and other family members. It has truly impacted me and thus was very successful. It imparted an experience that has changed the way I think and will forever be held in my heart.