When we paraphrase poetry, we take a section of text and translate it into our own words, often trading figurative language for literal language. Typically, paraphrases are nearer the length of the original text than summaries are, as summarizes seek to distill many words to few, which is not the goal of paraphrase.
In the first stanza, the speaker seems to directly address the reader, telling us that we are surrounded by people who are getting older. It is as though they are being pushed down by a giant thumb, as they get shorter and pudgier. They also grow paler, and their eyes show wisdom rather than innocence. In the second stanza, the speaker describes what it is like to walk into a group of aging people. It feels, apparently, like death: like being poisoned or stuck in a spider's web. Or else it feels like walking into a room...
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full of garden gnomes, those stone lawn decorations with bulbous faces and funny expressions, but without the lawns.
In the third and fourth stanzas, the speaker acknowledges how impossible it is to get used to this process of aging, of watching people age. Then, those aging people begin to disappear, and this feels even more inexplicable to us, the watchers. Soon, we see them only in pictures and memories. Most upsetting is the fact that "whatever they ate or did / to get this way / is about to happen to you." In other words, everything we see happening to these aging people will happen to us as well.
In the poem "Gathering," by Margaret Atwood, the poet addresses the physical and mental changes brought upon people through the process of aging. In stanza one, Atwood uses metaphors comparing an older person's eyes, now "small and knowledgeable," to the "backs of beetles" and "hard black berries." Once, when young, the person had eyes that were amazed by life, "guile-free." Now that they are older and wiser, a transformation has occurred. The aged folks cling to vines just as the hard berries do in an attempt to avoid the frost. This negative image of frost relates to winter and death.
In stanza two, Atwood uses more negative imagery to explore the aging process. When in this gathering of old people, the thoughts of "cyanide" and "webs" occur to the person who enters the room. Unfortunately, their "meadows" have become "puckered dreamhouse versions" of themselves—that is, they are physically wrinkled with age, and through life's challenges, they have become merely a version of what they once were.
Stanzas three and four continue to emphasize the degeneration that accompanies aging. The poet questions how people lose themselves in the process of living and only appear as shadows of what they once were as they age. The poem ends on a cautionary note: this transformation will happen to us all, the readers, as well.
The poem uses many images to describe the ways in which people physically change as they get older.
People frequently become shorter with age, which the poem says happens because "A great unseen thumb is pushing gently and relentlessly down on the tops of their heads." At the same time, the people who are getting older are also getting heavier, "spreading sideways." Changing from the varied colors of hair and complexion of youth, the older people "whiten" and "silver." The speaker in the poem goes on to describe eyes that are wisened and hardened and surrounded by wrinkles and cracks.
The speaker sympathizes with the person being addressed, who is observing these older people and trying to understand what has happened, how these people once known as young persons have aged and changed as a result of passing time. "What happened to the meadows?...How were they lost?"
The speaker ends the poem by warning the listener that "whatever they ate or did to get this way is about to happen to you." The listener is not immune - the aging process and all the changes it brings are going to come to the listener as well as the friends s/he is observing.