While reading Vera Pavlova’s poem, To converse with the greats, I found myself confused. No matter how much I read her poem, it didn’t really make any sense to me. It felt so incomplete, yet I feel that there is a deeper meaning behind it. This piece really frustrates me because no matter how much I rack my brain, I can’t come up with an explanation that would suffice for the poem. I believe that it was purposely structured like this to leave the thinking up to the readers. Nothing in this verse really correlates, and I noticed that the picture doesn’t really help the readers understand what “conversing with the greats” is. It’s so short and simple, and even though I can’t grasp the general idea of it, I’m sure that there is a hidden message the author is trying to convey.
Reading this poem reminds me of an image I’ve seen before. This picture was a huge topic of discussion during quarantine. Everyone studied, analyzed, did everything they could, but in the end, couldn’t make out a single object in the image. I remember focusing on the picture for so long and getting so worked up because my brain couldn’t process anything the image was portraying. No matter how long I stared at the picture or read the poem, I wasn’t able to find the meanings within it. Both the poem and image were hard to understand, confusing, and frustrating for anyone who tried to analyze it.
