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For my final blog post I chose to write about “The Bean Eaters”. From this poem I took away a message about nostalgia and human’s tendency to yearn for the past. The poem paints a bleak picture of a couple in their elderly age. I found that the poem’s title really encapsulated the entirety of the poem. The title “The Bean Eaters” not only references such a mundane task that all humans do, but also mentions one of the most plain and simple foods that there is. This lack of detail and simplicity seems to be carried on throughout the poem in details like the plain dishware and walking through tasks like putting on clothes with barely any detail. I found that the surface level explanation and detail in the poem painted a picture of a very nondescript couple, one where you could think of this couple as anyone. I think that that’s the point of this poem, that anyone can relate to the sullen feeling of everyday life and the yearning for the past that the final stanza describes.
As I mentioned earlier the first two stanzas paint the picture of a rather versatile couple, almost faceless. It is in the final stanza of the poem that I feel it reaches its meaning. In this stanza line three is particularly longer than other lines in the poem. This line lists elements and memories that remind the couple of the past. I found that the length of this line emphasized the degree to which the couple is remembering. I think this is meant to be a commentary on human’s tendency to lean towards nostalgia and miss out on the beauty of the present. Hence why when the poem describes the present it is rather bleak and sullen.
I love the points you make about the present and past, about nostalgia and yearning. In addition to how simple and universal the poem is, I think the repetition the poem draws is also significant. The elderly couple has probably shared this meal, or any meal, so many times in their lives. “This old yellow pair” simultaneously describes the couple aging and fragile appearance while connecting it to the plain and simple beans they are eating. Lines 6 and 7 both start with “Two who…” and the next lines describes how they keep on putting on close and putting things away. They put on the same clothes but put away things of the past like receipts, dolls, and tobacco crumbs. The repetition of this cycle emphasizes the couple’s mundane routine of the present in contrast to their eventful past. The remembering of the past is done with “twinklings and twinges,” both joy and pain, suggesting a sense of nostalgia rather than strong yearning to return to the past. There is a sort of acceptance that the past has passed and his simple bean-eating life is their present now.
I totally agree that the beans are a symbol of the mundane life that this couple lives, but I also think that the ability of the beans to sustain is important. Beans have a lot of nutrients and you could probably live off of them for a while. I feel like this connects to the cycles that Mandy found in the poem. The couple eats beans because they sustain them so they can keep chugging along. However, it feels like this is all they have, and for me this raised a question about what would happen if the couple stopped eating beans? It seems like these beans are one of the only things holding them together and that they are necessary for their continuation of life.