To be honest, I was a little bit unprepared for this weeks reading, not unprepared as in not ready to read this weeks text, but unprepared for the themes and ideas that Gabriela Mistral discusses in her work. After reading through all her poems, I found it somewhat difficult to fully understand all the thoughts and feelings that Mistral expresses in her poems, but I could definitely pick out certain themes and emotions in many of her poems. After reading the introduction by Randall Couch and having finished reading all the poems, I started to somewhat glimpse into the reasons behind the language that Mistral uses in the original Spanish and the English translation by Couch. Although Mistral was born in Chile, she moved around all her life, spending her days in countries all across Latin America and Europe. She never stayed in any one place for any long period of time, instead she seemed to gain a cosmopolitan knowledge of the world and the cultures that she lived in. I also find it interesting that many of the poems that she writes, deals with the feminine ideals and expectations that Latin American and Western society had in the early twentieth century, and the way that she tells her poems seems like a reaction to those expectations or maybe as a way to personally reconcile herself with them.

One poem I especially liked was the Abandoned Woman, as it made me think of a phoenix from Asian folklore. The Abandoned Woman deals with abandonment as the title suggests, although it is undescribed as to who abandoned her, but the poem also has a heavy theme of moving on from personal relationships which have lead to a present that is no longer possible for the woman to inhabit. In this particular poem, I found it interesting how all the words that Mistral uses, have a connotation to either the beginning of life or the end of it. In the end, the woman decides to eventually carry on with her life despite the setbacks from her personal relationships and live for herself, she describes her new self as burning down the life she had before to create something new.

Overall, while I maybe did not fully understand all the ideas and emotions that Mistral was trying to convey in her amazing poems, I did thoroughly enjoy reading them, as I think that they have a very unique prose and I enjoy Mistral’s other works, and I especially appreciate her love for education, as she is known in my native Mexico where she helped to create the modern education system while she was residing there.

My discussion question is pretty simple: Is there an overarching theme to Gabriela Mistral’s Madwomen poems? If you think that there is, what theme is it?