Milan Kundera, a Czech and French writer, once wrote, "The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering.' So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."In translation, there is pain in nostalgia, there is pain in looking into the past, and there is a pain in the "yearning" for a life that could no longer be lived the same way again. In the poem "The Water's Chant," the speaker is writing the poem to metaphorically move on from his nostalgia; he is trying to move on from the life he can no longer live. The author, Philip Levine, is best known for writing poetry about working-class Detroit; however in this poem, Levine illustrates how hard it can be to forget something so great but have to in order to keep living the current life. In the poem "The Water's Chant," the author, Philip Levine, uses imagery from nature, the aspect of God, and the life of his brother to illustrate the feeling of pain in nostalgia that the life the speaker is trying to remember, could no longer exist.
In the beginning of "The Water's Chant," the speaker starts off by describing the day he went to the High Sierras, where he was "stunned by the desire to die". (Levine) The author describes a scenery with water rushing over rocks, a sensation of colored light disappearing, and the water's sound in his background, where the speaker can easily escape into. "For hours I stared into a clear/mountain stream that fell down/over speckled rocks, and then I/closed my eyes and prayed that when/I opened them I would be gone/and somewhere a purple and golden/thistle would overflow with light." (Levine) The author uses the aspect of nature, that surrounds the speaker at the High Sierras to try and escape from the world that they are currently living in. It is clear throughout the beginning of the poem, that the speaker has this feeling overwhelmed-ment by his pain so much that the speaker wants to disappear and just escape. The author decided to include imagery from nature to help bring a sense of natural escapism. However, imagery through nature is not the only way the author has illustrated the speaker's painful nostalgia.
Although the author, Levine, uses imagery from nature to help illustrate the pain in the speaker's nostalgia, the author decides to also use the aspect of God to convey the same message of pain in nostalgia. The speaker felt the urge to reach out and pray to a deity when he was at the High Sierras, a deity in which they hadn't prayed to in years. "I had not prayed since I was a child/and at first I felt foolish saying/the name of God, and then it became/another word/I could pray now, /but not to die, for that will come one day or another." (Levine) The author decided to use the aspect of God in this poem to help put in perspective how low the speaker was feeling, the speaker stated he hadn't prayed in years and even felt "foolish" for doing it, but all of a sudden the speaker felt the desire to pray. In opinion, whe...
