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    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened"
    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened"
    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened"
    Ebook29 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 26, 2016
    ISBN9781535841047
    A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Jane Hirshfield's "Three Times My Life Has Opened" - Gale

      1

      Three Times My Life Has Opened

      Jane Hirshfield

      1997

      Introduction

      Jane Hirshfield opted to place Three Times My Life Has Opened as the last poem in her 1997 collection called The Lives of the Heart, and it makes for an appropriate and intriguing closing thought. This poem is rich in metaphor and mystery, and one line probably epitomizes the latter better than any other: You will recognize what I am saying or you will not. This is the essence of a poem that is presented with an elegant tone, a simple style, and a caring voice that seems to assure the reader that one does not necessarily need to grasp every meaning within it to be moved by it. Instead, the overall gist of this work is most easily comprehended by getting a feel for its content without worrying about deciphering a certain message.

      The word Zen is not mentioned in Three Times My Life Has Opened, nor is koan (an unsolvable, thought-provoking riddle), zazen, (the act of serious meditating), or satori (the attainment of spiritual enlightenment and true peace of mind). Yet the presence of these things can be felt within the poem, even though the words themselves are absent. To explain, then, what this poem is about is first to recognize the mystery to which few may be privy and to view it more as a whole than as the sum of its parts. The parts, after all, tend to elude specific definition or reference, but the work in its entirety reflects a philosophy in which ultimate achievement is more about connecting the innerself to the natural world

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