Savory Goodness:

"Happiness is for
******************—what? whom?

The one wish, it is my one wish."

Did anyone else get a very big sense of self-pitying melancholy from the lines above. My thought is that this work would be stronger - in the sense of a more traditional dramatic monologue - without this little dab of introspection.

"Self-pitying melancholy" covers a multitude of sins, as it were. Yes, I picked up on the melancholy -- this poem actually resonates with me in what it tries to say (as opposed to how well it says it). Yet I'm inclined to believe that the narrator is not so much expressing mere self-pity as expressing a deeper and legitimate longing for something transcendental, something that satisfies in life. Perhaps in this, I am simply being kind. But that seems to me to fit the tone of the rest of the poem.

wr ()()