[Catherine Chandler]

Differing Visions

     Dear parent: Screening suggests that your child may have red-green color blindness.
     This should not be a cause for concern.


The couch she calls maroon her son calls black.
The hot pink sweatpants that she always wears—
he says they're brown. Listen to her: she swears
now, and presses him. Her voice will crack:
Doesn't he see? The kid is five. She keeps
on drumming. There, on the carpet, that green line—
there, can he see it? Can he? It grips the spine,
climbs to the brain, the nervousness that creeps
into her voice.
                         The evidence is cruel
but clear enough: he'll frame things differently,
in layered undertones she doesn't share.
The pigments that he'll grind of earth's blue jewel,
the gold archangels massed for him to see—
they're his. They'll riffle through her hands like air.

Comment by Mr. Gwynn:

This is well organized, with a Miltonic shift at the volta. I’m not sure about the italicized lines. Shouldn’t the second set be “There, on the carpet, that green line – / there, can’t you see it? Can’t you?” I’m not sure about “nervousness” in l. 8. “edginess”? How about “layered undertones she’ll never share”? I also wonder about “grind of” instead of “grind from.” At first I liked the closure, but shifting from sight to touch as the sensory locus may be a little risky.

What appear to be two short lines are in fact one broken one. Formatting didn't come through.

[Catherine Chandler]

This sonnet deftly uses plain-speaking dialogue, an effective back-and-forth of long and short sentences, and repetition to portray the mother’s desperation, ostensibly at confronting her son’s color blindness but also her realization that the two will “frame things differently,/in layered undertones she doesn’t share”. That he will (rightly) question her authority if need be, possibly straining their future relationship.

The only nits I would care to comment on are a preference for a better word than “nervousness” in line 8, and the word “that” in line 12 (he will grind?) but also see the need to continue the conversational tone via contractions throughout.

The last three lines of the poem are to die for.

[Ann Drysdale]

My favourite so far. Right from the start my emotions were engaged. The epigraph posited a situation and I was there with my own "what if...?"

My only real query concerns the italics. I, too, believe that they should only be used for the mother's speech, and would therefore "romanise" Doesn't he see in line 5, change the first can he in line 7 to can you, and "romanise" the second one.

Nervousness is not quite the right word. I think it needs something that implies the beginnings of the cruelty acknowledged in the second half of line 9 (which should perhaps be indented to take it beyond the end of the first half). "Tetchiness", perhaps. Or something similar.

But the ending is sublime.

[Philip Quinlan]

Whoops! Double post.

[Roger Slater]

What bothers me about this well written sonnet is that it's hard to dispute the note to the parent, which the poem (I think) perhaps tries to portray as a teacher's callousness in breaking horrible news: "This should not be a cause for concern." Totally and absolutely true. A little red-green color blindness is certainly not a concern (unless there has been a sudden onset of it). About 8% of boys have it. It's not really a disability at all. People with red-green color blindness still enjoy a world of color and beauty, and it's only a slight problem from time to time when they are asked to participate in activities that may involve distinguishing between two close shades of the colors they have difficulty seeing. I know many parents of children with genuine disabilities, and I can hardly muster sympathy for the mother of an otherwise happy and healthy and typical child who freaks out that her child may not be destined for a career in fashion design.

Now I get it that the mother here is actually not freaking out about her son's color vision per se, but at the realization that she and her son will "frame things differently," which is something that every parent realizes sooner or later, whether or not the child has color blindness. So color blindness is only a metaphor in the poem for a parent's realization that her child is actually a separate person with his own world view and perceptions. But I still find it annoying that the mother here is so unprepared to accept the reality that her child is a separate person, and doubly annoying that her panic at this notion is triggered so irrationally. (And of course, even if her son did not have color blindness, is there any guarantee that any two people actually experience color the same?) Apparently it hasn't occurred to her that he will frame things his own way regardless of color and that there are countless differences between them (e.g., gender) other than color sight that will frame their separate outlooks.

Perhaps it's true that some mothers would react this way to the news this mother received. I'm not claiming that it doesn't happen. But the poem uncritically presents the reaction as appropriate and typical, without a hint (that I can see) of irony or judgment. Someone should take this mother aside and give her a good talking to. The sonnet doesn't seem to understand that.

To focus on a few details, I also wonder why she needed a note home to break the news when the poem starts off with her own observations that he sees colors differently. Had she already noticed his color blindness before? Or is she just noticing it now because of the note?

Also, I don't get why the note says the child "may" have red-green color blindness. If this is an otherwise normal five year old who can identify various numbers, shapes and letters, the test for color blindness is pretty definitive. You show the kid the bubbles and if he can't see the number, shape or letter inside, it means he's color blind.

Very well written sonnet, to be sure, but almost as difficult for me to fathom as would be a sonnet about a mother's melodramatic reaction to the cruel realization that her son was left-handed.

[Philip Quinlan]

If I like one thing about this it is the short lines. So many sonnets are padded out to the required length and shape.

"Sweatpants" is a most unpleasant word to me. But I guess usual in U.S. English. To this Englishman it sounds like damp underwear.

One nit: I want to stress "her" in the last line to make the contrast with "his" (which is stressed) clear. But I can't because of the metre. Well, not can't--I'm sure someone will tell me there is a really clever substitution in there somewhere. I just feel that I want a visual indicator of that stress. Dare I suggest italics in a poem which already uses them for something else?

Philip

[Jean L. Kreiling]

With due respect to Roger, I think that color-blindness does work as a vivid metaphor for how differently a parent and child will see things, and a vividly disturbing reminder to the parent of that fact. (Okay, maybe she's a little overwrought.) There's also an acknowledgement, especially in L11-12, that in a sense, the parent is the one with a deficiency of vision.

For those reasons, and because the poet has handled an unusual subject well, I like this a lot.

But I must confess my own deficiency of vision--I don't get the last line.

Best,
Jean

[Petra Norr]

But isn't that the point of the poem? We're "supposed" to think the mother is being too hard on the child. There are parents who would, if they could, literally press their kid into a cookie-cutter just to make the kid normal and like all the other kids. The narrator of this poem is like a third party (or onlooker), narrating the events and paraphrasing the mother's words to the child, and the narrator's sympathy is clearly with the child, most noticeably at the end.
RogerBob said, "Someone should take this mother aside and give her a good talking to. The sonnet doesn't seem to understand that." But on the contrary -- that is exactly what the sonnet is doing. It's (the third party) is basically pointing out that the mother is too harsh and "telling" her, and us, that the child will be fine, that he will even have something she and others won't have.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks for the due respect, Jean! But I don't disagree that color blindness can be a good metaphor for how differently a parent and child will see things. I just think the poem doesn't frame it clearly enough as a metaphor and gives too much currency and sympathy to the mother's histrionics, never really backing off from the notion that the difference between her and the child is a deficiency on the child's part rather than the fact that they happen to be two separate people with inevitable differences. (And isn't the real problem here that she always wears hot pink sweatpants?)

PS-- Cross posted with Petra. Interesting that you see it that way, and for those who get the same impression from the poem I can see why it would be a powerful sonnet. It's well-crafted and sounds very good, and all my objections were based on my getting a different impression of the poem's approach and attitude.

[Petra Norr]

Yeah, well, I don't have a good track record at this bake-off as far as analysing correctly. But there's a freedom in expressing how I see things. And I think it's my right to be wrong.
And going on,
Here's what I picked up, Bob. The choice of words at the start of the sonnet:

The couch she calls maroon her son calls black.
The hot pink sweatpants that she always wears—
he says they're brown. Listen to her: she swears
now, and presses him. Her voice will crack:
Doesn't he see? The kid is five. She keeps
on drumming.

The reason I underlined "The kid is five" is because I think it's said somewhat in the manner of "for heaven's sakes, he's only five (give him a break)". Not like that exactly, but maybe you get my point.