A Work of Artifice

“A Work of Artifice” was a simple poem, but it had a lot of great meaning behind it. It took nature, a bonsai tree to be exact and compared it to how women were restrained, and they never got to reach their full potential back in the day. Since looking at the poem and knowing what it meant pretty easily I decided to look at the title and I didn’t quite understand what it meant. The word that stood out was “Artifice”. I looked it up and found that it meant trickery or skillful and either could make sense in this context. A work of trickery could easily be what males do to women, they trick them into thinking that all women need to do is grow up and tend to every command from a male. When in that, a women feels that that is all there is for her to do and especially when all the males around do the same; it is one big trick. Also, skillful would work because a work of skillfulness or skill makes sense because like the bonsai tree analogy trimming it and taking care of a tree like that is a skill and the same goes for these women who have been designed by men to cater to their every need. They have been pruned and trimmed to the perfect little women that the man wants with perfect skill. The bonsai tree analogy just goes perfect with this because of how a tree with so much potential to be big and strong and hold its own is pruned and kept very small, weak and is easily tipped over… just like a women when she is with a man unwilling to let her potential grow. A woman is just that tiny bonsai tree, and the man, a gardener with those unforgiving pruners. A tree needs not a little pot, but wide open land to spread its roots and let its branches extent out reaching to the sky and grow… that is the real kind of lucky tree.