In Jane Hirshfield"s, The Lives Of The Heart, she uses poetry to openly express her understanding and feelings towards the workings of the heart. The poems that Hirshfield included within her volume convey her individual thoughts and relationships between the natural world and the different forms of love that she believes the heart revels in. She writes about the ongoing process in which the heart is strengthened and weakened by life's predicaments, the situations that cause the heart to swing open and closed, and the different ways in which the heart experiences suffering. Jane Hirshfield considers her life with acceptance, admiring the wholeness and grace that she acquires through everything that she experiences. In a sense, she is using her writing and individual explanations of life to help her readers bear and accept their own lives.
The Lives Of The Heart, the first poem in the novel, is the poem that initially introduced me to Jane Hirshfields ideas about the workings of the heart. The poem explains the different faces of the heart with strong relations to the natural world .She describes the suffering, joy, and pain of the heart as something that no person can be exempt from. The heart is sensitive to the love, kindness, cruelty, and pain that everyone and everything experiences in one manner or another. The poem begins with Hirshfield defining the strong natural relationships between the world and the heart, Hirshfield writes;.
Are ligneous, muscular, chemical.
Wear Birch-colored feathers,.
Green tunnels of horse-tail reed.
Wear calcified spirals, Fibonaccian spheres.
Are edible; are glassy; are blue schist.
Can be burned as tallow, as coal,.
can be skinned for garnets for shoes.
Cast shadows or light;.
shuffle; snort; cry out in passion.
Are salt , are bitter,.
tear sweet grass with their teeth(3).
In these opening lines, she explains that the heart is in constant movement and always feeling emotion, the heart is open and strong, but yet it can be maimed and betrayed, left to close off from pain.
