The Vacuum Essay

632 Words3 Pages
The Vacuum Love is a very important emotion and feeling in a persons’ life, specially the love of family and the soul mate. If we lose a family member or our life partner, then it hurts us and we cannot get rid of the moments we had spent with that person. This poem “The Vacuum” is driven by the same emotions and feelings that Howard Nemerov felt for his beloved. The poem mainly keeps revolving around the grief and sorrow of the poet who has lost his wife and is missing her badly. It centralizes on the loneliness of the poet. The house seems to be dead for the poet which can be said by the very first line of the poem, “The house is so quiet now”. The poet has personified the vacuum with his dead wife; so that he can feel her presence in his life and she could take away his loneliness, grieves and the filth he feels in her absence. Personification has been used throughout the poem, which reflects the thoughts and feelings the poet had for his wife when she was alive. This can be seen in the seventh and eighth line of the poem, “But when my old woman died her soul/ Went into that vacuum cleaner.” So to the poet, the vacuum is his personified wife. The second line of the poem says that, “The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,” which suggests that his wife is angry and refuses to speak to poet because she is offended by seeing all of the dirt in his present life; which would never happen if she was alive. This argument is further supported with by the lines three to five which states, “its mouth/ Grinning into the floor, maybe at my/ Slovenly life, my dog-dead youth.” The vacuum seems to be grinning and getting mad at him, by seeing how pathetic and awful he has turned up. The word vacuum also stands for the void or emptiness which has been created in the poet’s life after the death of his wife. This shows that metaphor has also been used by the poet.
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