Wallflowers

Wallflowers

Donna Vorrey

I heard a word today I'd never heard before-

I wondered where it had been all my life.

I welcomed it, wooed it with my pen,

let it know it was loved.

They say if you use a word three times, it's yours.

What happens to ones that no one speaks?

Do they wait bitterly,

hollow-eyed orphans in Dickensian bedrooms,

longing for someone to say,

"yes, you...you're the one"?

Or do they wait patiently, shy shadows

at the high school dance,

knowing that, given the slightest chance,

someday they'll bloom?

I want to make room for all of them,

to be the Ellis Island of diction-

give me your tired, your poor,

your gegenshein, your zooanthropy-

all those words without a home,

come out and play--live in my poem.

   I really liked this poem because of it's diversity and it has a spin on the way you look at words.  It makes you think about how there is vast amount of words in existence.  In the first stanza, Vorrey is saying she learned a new word that she had never known before.  She was willing to learn it and use it.  The second stanza is about how you can make a word yours.  Even though this stanza was two lines, it was my favorite.  I especially liked the fifth line.  I took it as if you use any word at least three times, then you will make it your own.  Since the word becomes yours, you will never forget it, making you that much more smarter.  In the third and fourth stanzas, she is talking about how the words have feelings.  In the third stanza, the words have feelings of fury and vengeance but in the fourth stanza, the words have feelings of dejection and dismay.  In line 8, the "Dickensian bedrooms" Morrey was referring to the work of Charles Dickens.  He wrote books about poverty and social injustice.  By "Dickensian bedrooms", I believe Morrey was talking about orphanages and how the words don't belong to anybody.  The fourth stanza is another possibilty of how the words feel when they are waiting.  The words are more gentle and bashful.  Both the third and fourth stanzas end with a glimpse of hope for the words, but they also both end in a question mark.  The fifth, and final stanza is about how she would take all the words in.  She makes a reference to Ellis Island, but instead of taking in all the immigrants, she would make a home for all the words.  In line 18, she uses the words gegenshein and zoanthropy.  These are both words that most people never heard of or don't ever use. A gegenshein is a faint brightening of the night sky in the region of the antisolar point.  Zoanthropy is a mental disorder in which a person imagines that he or she is a beast.  I never have heard of these words until I read this poem, and after I researched what they mean, I wonder why she choose these words, beside the fact they are rarely used.  In the last line, she invites all the homeless words to live in her poem, and to have a home.  The poem is broken down into five stanzas, but there isn't a pattern in how many lines each one has.  There wasn't a rhyme scheme either in the poem.  Most of the poem has monosyllabic words.  I think Morrey did this to show how people generally use the same basic words, over and over again.  She personifies the words in the poem.  She gave them feelings, and acted if they were really orphans waiting for a place to belong.