A Man In His Life
by: Yehuda Amichai
A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000)
Biography:
- Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany in 1924 and emigrated to Israel when he was twelve.
- He is a modern day love poet whose poems are filled with love and grief.
- Discharged from the British Army in 1946.
- He died of cancer in 2000, at age 76.
Poem Analysis:
The speaker in this poem could be one of a higher power. In the end of the poem the speaker talks of how “the bare branches pointing to the place where there’s time for everything” the branches could be pointing to the sky which could be heaven, where there’s time for everything. The speaker is talking about how there is no time for man, in earth form, to do everything. Man needs time to fully experience all there is to the physical world. The body remains on the earth for forever, but without the soul the body is of no use.
The tone of the poem is anxious, and sorrow. The speaker is talking about how man needs time to do all that he desires; however, man won’t have enough time to do so. For the reader it creates a sense of worry. You wonder, what’s next after this life, and if you’re fulfilling every second of your time on earth.
The theme of the poem is that, time is precious; therefore, achieve all that you can while you’re here. Experience the highs, and the lows, and just know that you won’t be able to slow life down. The theme really makes you think of what’s to come. The theme of this poem inspires you to reevaluate what you’ve been doing in your life. The theme also shines a light of hope that you'll continue on after life.
The poem follows a certain order. The poem begins with man starting out as young, and grows until man is of age, getting ready to die. If you interpret the beginning of this poem as man being born, the speaker is like a guardian who already knows that this man just born will not have a chance to accomplish all that he sets out to do. The speaker also uses an point of view of an observer. The way the speaker talks of man can lead us to interpret that the speaker knows more than man knows. The speaker seems to know more which could lead us to think they are of a higher or divine power. This contributes to the poem because you look to divine powers for guidance and help, so in a sense the speaker is helping man understand why he won't be able to achieve everything.
Quotes:
- “What history takes years and years to do.” : History in this part of the poem is being personified. It’s personifying history as one who has much more time than man does, and that man can’t do everything.
- “He will die as figs die in autumn.”: This is a simile between man and the dying figs in fall. This is important because it’s symbolizing the end of man's life in physical form. It draws the ending to the story that time on this earth is not forever.
- “And his soul is seasoned, his soul is very professional.”: This is a personification of the soul of a man. The man is not the body on the outside, but what is on the inside. This is significant because man in his earthly body can't experience nearly as much as his soul after his body is of no further use.
I agreed with your interpretations on your poem analysis. You had really good points about the man and the speaker. The man and the speaker in this poem definitely have a connection. The speaker uses a sense of history to foresee that this man will want to reach great things in his life time, but he knows he won't quiet get there in the body he's in. His soul will only remain with what he accomplished and that will be it. I agree with your first quote and how you went about explaining it. History does have way much more time then this man, history is forever, just repeating itself over and over again, while the man will only last a couple decades.
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