Bonsai

By Edith Tiempo
All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe
All that I love?
Why, yes but for the momentAnd for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Sons note, or Dads one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a young queen
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.
Its utter sublimation,
A feat, this hearts control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hands size.
Till seashells are broken pieces
From Gods own bright teeth,
All life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child

ANALYSIS
A.
The poem Bonsai by Edith Tiempo is basically a poem talking about love. At first, it will be hard
understanding the poem as it is, but as one reads this poem further the more one would understand
what this poem or what the poet is trying to convey to its readers. This poem talks about how one
could have that ability seize such a huge thought and compact them down to something small to be
able to hand them over to one person to another. This poem is about a love of a mother and this love
is now being passed on or being handed over to her daughter.
One of the literary images that was shown here in the poem was the stanza, All that I love? Why, yes
but for the momentAnd for all time, both.
This stanza is an example of an oxymoron. An oxymoron is defined in the dictionary as a figure of
speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction. In this part, the poet is telling
its readers that love can only be for a moment or temporary because hatred could come which could
destroy love and at the same time, love can also be forever or eternal.
Another literary image that was shown here in the poem was the To a cupped hands size. This part
of the poem is telling its readers that love is something that could be given and received. This shows
how the author thinks that love is something that we ask for and also what we give away. This being
said, this stanza also shows that love can also be reduced into something small or in other words, a
cupped hands size, that could handed over to everyone.
One could be wondering or asking himself why the author used Bonsai as its title when a bonsai is
just defined as an ornamental tree or shrub grown in a pot and artificially prevented from reaching
its normal size in the dictionary. The poem was entitled Bonsai because one loves just as something
that could be kept much like a bonsai. This poem, Bonsai, is about how love is simplified and reduced
so that one can give it out to others. Since this love is now compacted or shrunk down to something

small that can be given, it is much like a bonsai which is a simplified version of a huge and enormous
tree that could be given away and handed over to others. Thus, this love is now being passed down to
generations.
B.
When love is great, when love is profound, it becomes more difficult to control. And in the hands of
people who are unable to control it, love overwhelms the person. This is the destructive nature of love
which is why the award-winning poet Edith Tiempo, in her poem Bonsai, scaled down love into a
cupped hand size.

The next stanza tells about how when love is sublimated, it is made into something positive. The
lines, A feat, this hearts control/ Moment to moment/ To scale all love down/ To a cupped hand
size pertain to ones victory in sublimating and taking hold of love so that it will not be destructive.
A cupped hand was the metaphor specifically used to convey the image of asking and giving love to
another. It signifies the lovers basic needs, that which is the need to love and be loved.
In the line, Till seashells are broken pieces the mystery of how something so vast such as the ocean
can be heard from something so small such as a seashell. It is the same with love, that something so
vast and huge can be contained in a small thing is a mystery.
The essence of the poem is that love is simplified and reduced so one can hold it in one hand and pass
it on to another.

The poem is an example of a work that is objective-correlative wherein the ideas depicted are
abstract. In this work of literature, love is the abstract idea.
In the first stanza, Bonsai describes everything one loves as something that could be folded into the
smallest size so that one could keep in a box/ Or a slit in a hollow post/ Or in my shoe. The idea is
to turn one large concept such as love into something that folds and keeps easy so that ones
memory will not be cluttered. Memory stays with a person forever but it is often unreliable which is
why there is a need to simplify love if it has become overwhelming so that it is easy to handle and
quick to retrieve the memories from the labyrinths of the mind.
Then there came the question in the next line that said, All that I love? The interrogative statement
was posed for self-examination which was, in the next stanza, assured with the lines Why, yes but
for the moment-/ And for all time, both. The two lines are an oxymoron for love can be both
temporal and eternal. It was like saying often one remembers a lover but there are times when he does
not.
Tiempo even made love familiar and within reach by reducing it to things that people use and hold
dear such as Sons note, or Dads gaudy tie,/ A roto picture of a young queen/ A blue Indian shawl,
even/ A money bill. By using these objects in the poem, Tiempo portrayed the sublimation of love as
something that is abstract like gas penetrating the vast space surrounding two people into something
that is concrete like a solid object that one can hold unto and control.

C.
The poem "Bonsai" by Edith Tiempo is about love and how people imbue certain objects with love
for a person, and those objects become the symbol of love. Edith Tiempo starts out her poem by
describing what she does with love. She folds it to make it smaller so that she can keep it in a box,
hollow post or shoe. Because love is an abstract concept and has no physical form, she is obviously
talking about objects.
However, it is not love of the objects themselves that this poem is referencing. It is rather about how
the love for a person or place can be best touched through an object that evokes them.
These objects are easy to keep, and, thus, they become the keeper of memory and of the love that is
held for the person. In a sense, they are a physical manifestation of love because they can be held and
touched, and they remain constant in form. So even if the love itself fades, the object remains, and it
is evidence of the love that was experienced. More, it is evidence that love is real because these
objects are concrete and not abstract. Because of them, she is sure that love lasts until the world ends.