It was a dream

“It was a dream” was a simple poem by Lucille Clifton. Clifton describes her dream, taking an outside view looking at herself and what she has done with her life. There is a sense of anger with her self throughout the whole poem. Clifton starts the poem like this, “in which my greater self rose up before me accusing me of my life with her extra finger whirling in a gyre of rage at what my days had to come to.” From the start, it is revealed that obviously she hasn’t become exactly what she wanted, and her “greater self,” the one who knows she could have reached her dreams if she would have tried harder confronts her defeated self. I picture the same girl but one is business like, looks better off, and then I picture one who looks sloppy and a little lost, and the better off of the two is pointing a finger with rage not understanding why it was so hard to try harder. The second part of the poem is basically her reaction to what her greater self had said to her. “what, i pleaded with her, could i do, oh what could I have done? and she twisted her wild hair and sparkled her wild eyes and screamed as long as i could hear her This. This. This.” For this second part the angry tone is heightened, and the frustration from the greater self has become even greater. Thegreater self is showing that she isn’t going to accept the excuses and that there were so many things she could have done to better her self... there is always something. This poem has that angry tone, but I also think it has that fear in it too because of the word “pleaded,” and the lack of capitalization of “i,” and at the beginning of sentences gives off that sense of being fearful, belittled, or very unsure. If I were to interpret this dream I would think that this just represents the fear in a person of not realizing their dream when there were so many things that can be done to reach those dreams in life. In a couple of ways it reminds me of us seniors and going off to college, it scares a lot of us and the fear of failure and not reaching our dreams is scary and what can we say if we don’t succeed… what could have we done… who wants to admit that theydidn’t try hard enough? At the end of the day, this sounds less like a dream and more like a nightmare, for the realization of the possibility of failure can scare anyone and bring out a lot of anger within oneself.