The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov

The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov instantly drew me in with the structure of the poem, the punctuation, and most importantly my perceived interpretation. The structure progresses slowly, a little bit at a time, similar to the healing over time after “love cracked [you] open” (1488). During this healing you can take life only a little bit at a time, dealing with small doses of reality as they come. I’m not entirely sure what Levertov meant by each carefully placed colon, period, hyphen, etc. but I personally love punctuation and the way it can make or break a sentence, change the entire meaning of a passage, or cause the reader to overthink the meaning behind such placement (as I’m probably doing right now) and I feel like, with her attention to detail in the rest of the poem, she meant something by it. 

As far as the content of the poem goes, I think it perfectly, and yet vaguely, describes the period of healing after a break up, the loss of a loved one, or any such devastating event. The opening eight lines “who’d believe me if I said, ‘they took and split me open from scalp to crotch, and still I’m alive, and walk around pleased with the sun and all the world’s bounty’” (1488) seem to me to explain those moments during this time of healing when people ask the customary “how are you?” and since you know they either wouldn’t care to hear about your troubles or they wouldn’t believe that you were still functioning, you respond with the programmed “good”. Instead of confiding in your friends and family, you bury yourself deep in the third dimension where no one can see what’s really going on. And you fake a smile “here in the sweet sun” (1489), putting on a mask of “fiction, while [you] breath and change pace” (1489) and figure out how to reply with an honest “good” again.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

There were parts of this play that I both loved and hated. To start off, I couldn’t stand the mother! She immediately reminded me of the typical overbearing mother such as from the book Pride and Prejudice or the movie Penelope. She talks solely for the love of her own voice and desperately, pathetically tries to marry off her daughter who, in her mind, clearly has no hope of finding a man without her meddling. Most likely the reason Laura “lives in a world of her own- a world of little glass ornaments” (pg. 1291) and the cause of her husband’s and Tom’s eventual departure, Amanda herself seems to live in a world of her own- a world of pretty dresses and gentleman callers by the dozen. As shallow as she is judgmental, Amanda appears to have never actually seen Laura for the imaginative, pretty girl that Jim notices after just an evening of being around her. Which brings me, in my opinion, to the more successful aspect of the play. Throughout the story, Laura submits to her mother’s incessant bickering with a quiet grace, she endures her mother and brother’s constant fighting, and she apparently has no idea how pretty she is- “in a very different way from anyone else. And all the nicer because of the difference, too” (pg. 1308). While, at first, she seems painfully awkward and destined to be a spinster for the rest of her life (through the eyes of her mother), all Laura ever really needed was someone to see her true beauty and to build confidence in her in order to do away with her inferiority complex that she, again, most likely got from her boastful, overly confident mother. I think by the end of the play, when “we cannot hear the mother’s speech, her silliness is gone” (pg. 1313), Laura appears triumphant as “she lifts her head to smile at her mother” (pg. 1313). By this small gesture, I got the sense that Laura is now equipped with the confidence needed to face both her mother’s insensitive comments and whatever her future may hold, without the help of Jim, her brother, or anybody else.