Lament for the Littlest Fellow: Reflection and Analysis

       Edith Tiempo’s “Lament for the Littlest Fellow” talks about the sorrow of feeling imprisoned due to denying problems. This poem, like most in her collection, uses the formalist approach along with strong imagery, metaphors and symbolism. The overall tone used in this poem, however, is sorrowful. Although the poem seems quite mind-boggling, there lies an important topic within it.

       From the word “lament,” which by definition means a passionate expression of grief or sorrow, we can think about what the theme is. This poem focuses on a mother’s absent grief. While not directly talking about it, Tiempo makes the message known through her striking use of metaphorical language.

       The first line of the poem’s first stanza, “The littlest fellow was a marmoset,” right away gives us the main metaphor of the poem. The imprisoned marmoset in the zoo represents the speaker. A marmoset is a very clever metaphor as they are known to be very caring towards their offspring. According to several studies, marmosets exhibit behaviors similar to grief when they lose an offspring.

In the lines “He held the bars and blinked his old man’s eyes. You said he knew us and took my arm and set my fingers around the bars with coaxing mimicries of squeak and twitter,” Tiempo uses visual and auditory imagery to further explain why she chose a marmoset. The sounds the marmoset made, along with the speaker’s husband putting the speaker’s hand to hold its cage, intensifies the idea of the speaker being imprisoned by her grief.

Another line that tells us that the speaker is being represented by the marmoset is when the husband says, “Now he thinks you are another marmoset in the cage.” This line prepares the readers for the conflict of the poem.

In the lines “A proud denial set you to laughing, shutting back a question far into my mind, something enormous and final,” the speaker is faced with the conflict when her husband laughed even though she denies it. The speaker then questions herself and later on finds out an answer.

The poem’s second stanza provides the answer to the speaker’s question and also reveals the important details of the story. In the lines “Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow, I would catch our own little truant unaware; He had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage, But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow,” we can tell that the speaker would see the face of her deceased son whenever she looks at her husband’s face. We are able to conclude that the speaker is talking about a dead son through the word “truant,” which means absent, and the line “he had fled from our pain and the dark room of rage.”  From the line “But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow” tells us that the speaker holds on to her son through her husband’s face, further building up the idea of absent grief.

In the final line “You wake, and I bruise my hands on the living cage,” the speaker is faced with reality that her son is gone. The speaker also understands why she was being compared to the imprisoned marmoset. It is now revealed that “Lament for the Littlest Fellow” is not really directed towards the marmoset, but rather for the idea of being trapped in sorrow and grief.

“Lament for the Littlest Fellow” talks about one’s grief and sorrows that hurt too much to put into words. It discusses the importance of learning to go through the problem and moving on. We cannot just deny that we are hurting forever because if we do, just like the speaker, we will become imprisoned by it. So, as difficult as it may be, life must go on, and we must never dwell.