Melpomene Tragedy

Blog 1                           Melpomene Tragedy by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

            This poem was very interesting that had a lot of serious and deep segments to it really making you wonder about a lot of things. From what I gathered, she starts off by explaining her younger years, when she was just a little girl with opened eyes watching the surrounding scenery. It seems as though she grew up in a communist country.  She says that, “beyond the correct setting, immobile placid”, meaning that everything looked normal even when it wasn’t because in a communist country everyone would be controlled. For example, having a curfew, no person allowed to be on the streets hence the “immobile placid “part. Through extreme stillness, she talks about how eighteen years pass and everything is still the same. She can see the airplane bombers flying over her head which suggest that maybe she lived over an air force base. For thirty-six years she lived under communist power, but when the Japanese were defeated everyone followed them to the South without packing a single thing, no clothes or portraits, nothing that evoked their memory. They abandoned all to see the nation’s greed which depicts a communist country in my opinion. Moving forward, she is now in a crowd of prisoners and the soldiers are moving them to a particular area as if in training camps, rounding everyone up into one spot because the soldiers then set off gas bombs since she says, once she felt the tightening of the crowd and heard sounds ripping from both sides of her. The amount of imagery she uses when describing when she saw the explosions, and the bodies and different pieces of rubble found scattered throughout while the streets so thick with blood not even the rain could wash it away. She goes back another eighteen years to reflect on the same day when her brother wanted to join the group of protestors and their mother was begging him not to go. She sent her to retrieve her uncle for help and sadly they did not succeed and her brother died. Shortly after their loss the communism ended. This poem abstracts a short story of her life expressed by her inner most feelings, expressing what she went through and witnessed growing up.