“A Story About the Body,” written by Robert Hass, may be regarded as an excellent example of a poem that has a clear literal meaning and multiple interpretations of a figurative one. According to its subject, a young composer seemingly falls in love with an older Japanese painter while living and working together at an artist’s colony. When the woman feels there is sexual attraction between them, she warns him that she lost both her breasts due to a double mastectomy. The composer rejects the woman, and in the morning, he finds a gift from her on his cabin’s porch. It is a bowl with rose petals on top and a bottom full of dead bees.
The poem has several powerful meanings – on the one hand, it shows the difference between infatuation and genuine love as the basis of human relationships and the ability to see the person’s inner world. When a person pays attention only to physical features, he does not love as love implies acceptance and a focus on the spiritual qualities of a partner instead of the body’s imperfections. In this case, the bowl symbolizes the man’s feelings – rose petals stand for his seeming feelings, while dead bees represent thinly covered sexual attraction.
On the other hand, the bowl may be regarded as a symbol of a composer’s shallowness and insincere nature. In this case, rose petals refer to his attention to the woman and the courtesies he expressed to attract her. However, they cover an ugly side of the nature of a person who judges people by physical features. In this case, considering this meaning, the poem’s title may be interpreted in another way. While the word “body” is traditionally associated with the painter’s body and initiates the reflection related to the social attitude to health issues that change physical appearance, it may refer to the “body” of a composer as an individual who does not appreciate others’ souls does not have his own one.
In addition, the poem is about the complexity of human nature, its various aspects, relationships between illness and sexuality, and emotions caused by people’s attitudes towards physical differences. This meaning is reflected through the painter’s bowl, as well as it demonstrates that people are complicated, and behind a person’s appearance, multiple secrets may be hidden. In addition, as a bee is an animal that may cause pain through its sting, the bowl full of them symbolizes the woman’s emotional pain due to the man’s selfish reaction.
The speaker of this poem is its author – through a social perspective, he aims to show the complexity of human relationships. Moreover, the poem has a cultural aspect and evokes the feeling of despair as it reflects a disturbing gender-specific social problem that exists in the western culture, and in the present day, a considerable number of people have the composer’s attitude to the physical features of others, especially women, believing that gender roles presuppose a particular appearance. Being a poem and prose at the same time, “A Story About the Body” may be characterized by a distinct narration and vivid symbolism with imagery reflected in a comparison (radiance-like music) that allows readers to perceive characters’ feelings and make their own conclusions regarding the meaning of this work.