ENTRY 1：Response to “Instructions on How to Play the Comb”

Question: what does hair stand for?

  In this poem, though not directly mentioned, we can indicate that the son of this woman passed away from the context. This is a very sad story as it is about lose of the person you love. In my point of view, the “hair” in this poem stands for “memory”. As we can see in the first line, “as big as Mrs. Delilah’s hair”, which refers to that the mom holds the maximum memory of his son as her son was dead and he can never produce memories for her anymore, so the memory was “big”. The line “listen, it’s not true that the hair of the dead continues to grow” explains the dead person will never give additional memories to the people he knows. The words “Grass is the beautiful uncut hair of graves” that means though the person was gone, the memory of the person just like “grass” which would always exist in the mind of his mother, and his mother would always keep the memories where her son was always with her.