Burning the Tomato Worms (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Carolyn Forche
- First Published: 1975
- Type of Work: Meditation
- Genres: Poetry, Meditation
- Subjects: United States or Americans, Sex or sexuality, Nature, Grandparents or grandchildren, Fire, Russia or Russian people, Worms, Insects, Plants, Gardens or gardening, Autumn
The Poem
“Burning the Tomato Worms” is a long poem of thirteen stanzas in free verse, the key poem among seven others in the section of Carolyn Forché’s Gathering the Tribes that bears the same name. At first, the poem seems not to be about the event named in its title. Stanza 5 finally mentions burning the tomato worms, an act that is transformed in stanza 10, when the tomatoes and their worms are brought in for shelter from an early frost. The symbolic significance of the round, red tomatoes and the cylindrical worms that destroy them becomes clear by the end of...
[The entire page is 1517 words long]
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