Bella Furst | Week 11 “Ash” by Tracy K. Smith

 

"Ash" by Tracy K. Smith

We are everything that we have experienced.

    “Ash” is a darkly written poem that personifies the self in the form of a house. The poem is written eerily and uses wording like “House whose rooms are pooled with blood” to enact a haunting sense of dread. 

    By personifying the house, Smith dictates that a “house we must keep and fill” with memories and life’s experiences that are simultaneously thrown at you, one after another. The house is not simply the individual, but encompasses everything they have lived and the people they have met; it has become a structure of isolation and bravery. There exist “other houses built. Houses of lies”, the houses of other people with their own sense of selves. The house is a house of “pride a bone. House afraid to be alone” and the house itself holds the experiences of life; memory, pain, love, and human emotion and pride.        The house begins to become more than just a house. It is a “House that believes it is not a house” and memories haunt the individual, build their character, and form them into their fullest self. 

    This poem is simply beautiful. It shows that the self is not just a bundle of characteristics and traits, but rather a complex site of emotion, experience, and memory. We are what we live and defined by that which we have seen and that which we have accomplished. We embody the relationships we have built and the mistakes we have made, and I think Tracy K. Smith is perhaps the only person who could’ve written this and taken into account the littlest things that make us into what we are.