_Over_the_Days_Past__by_Xuan_Quynh

“Over the Days Past” by Xuan Quynh Xuan Quynh poem “Over the Days Past” was written during the post World-War 2 years where the conflict between USA and the conflict between North and South Vietnam. This poem has a imaginative journey of an women who had her love going off to war to fight and she wished that she was there with him helping him with the obstacles in his way. The poem starts off by saying how she wasn’t there to see her lover leave as she suggested in Line 4 first stanza “But I was not there when he left”. This impression gives that it is going to be about the trauma that she was not able to say goodbye. But they didn’t know each other at the time of battlefield as suggested in first line second stanza “Those days, you hadn’t reached me yet!” She also tells about how old the boy by his diary “Sixteen years old, the pages of your full diary” which suggest the boy was sixteen when he left to fight and he didn’t complaint about this which is suggested in second line third stanza “You had no complaints, only a little sadness”. The persona in the poem suggested how she would have like to be there with him every step of his way and how she could have been there to soften his path of the journey as “the blades of grass”. The use of repetition of “I wish I could have been” suggest how she is willing to help him but it is impossible to do so. The use of strong imagery suggest how would have been there to help him sing “a lullaby” when he couldn’t sleep or when he caught a forest cold to be his “comrade to bring you a cup of cool water”. The sadness of her suggests that she wishes she was somehow part of his life either by using metaphors such as ‘a rice satchel” when he is hungry, “a roof” to cover him from rain or “a light in the darkness” to make it easier for him to travel in the night. The Lines 7&8 in stanza 3 she uses simile to suggest the breadth of her love “Like the blue sky” then saying it again but adding unfathomable which suggests that her love could not be measured like the blue sky and is mysterious. She uses punctuation like “you hadn’t reached me yet!” to suggest that her love was always going to be. In the last few lines she suggest that even though her lover is with her right now she still regrets those days where she wasn’t there with him.