Castle poem-review

 

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✍️ Essay Based on “Castles”

Title: Castles Within: The Architecture of the Human Psyche

By Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy, essay compiled by chat-gpt  
Mirpur Cantonment, Dhaka | June 2025

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We often envision castles as symbols of majesty, security, and heritage—fortified with high towers, polished floors, and laughter echoing through gilded halls. Yet, in truth, some castles become prisons. In my poem “Castles”, I explored this duality—the illusion of external beauty masking internal desolation. Beneath stone and crown, beneath ritual and celebration, there often lies a wailing unheard: the whispered laments of those bound to the very spaces that were meant to free them.

The poem opens with this contradiction. A royal home devolves into confinement, not just of the body, but of the spirit. This is a reflection not only of history—where monarchs were often the loneliest prisoners in their gilded cages—but of a broader, collective human condition. Sociologically, many of us construct “castles” of our own—identities, careers, marriages, and online personas that appear strong, successful, or joyous. Yet, behind these curated facades often reside deep wells of loneliness, guilt, or emotional exhaustion.

The metaphor of the castle here can be aligned with Erving Goffman’s concept of the "presentation of self in everyday life". Just as courtiers perform for a king, we too perform for society—presenting polished exteriors while concealing our more fragile realities. The “joyous uproar of courtiers” may represent the noise of social media, performative relationships, or public expectations. But beyond the festivity lies “a wall of tears”—the cost of constant performance.

Psychologically, the poem gestures toward internal repression and existential fatigue. The lines “shiny outwards but hollow inside” and “reigning champions dead and faded while still alive” evoke what Carl Jung described as the persona—the mask we wear for the world, which, if overused or mistaken for the self, can lead to neurosis or disconnection. We shine because we are taught to shine. But hollowed out by silence, sacrifice, or servitude to social roles, our inner “champions” begin to perish—while we remain technically alive.

The final lines—“Mummied and crucified”—carry deep symbolic weight. The mummy suggests the preservation of an identity long dead, while crucifixion implies a public, painful punishment for simply being different—or perhaps for daring to live authentically. In this sense, the poem alludes to not just personal suffering, but collective historical traumas: how societies entomb, ridicule, or erase those who challenge their myths.

Yet the poem’s most potent line might be this: “There is a ‘Castle’ in all of us.” This is the turn inward—the metaphysical moment. It recalls Plato’s cave, where illusions are mistaken for truth, and also touches the mystical metaphysics of Ibn Arabi, who saw the self as a layered being—a city of rooms, each deeper than the next, each holding divine potential but also divine forgetting.

In our inner castles, some rooms remain locked. Some halls echo with ancestral voices. Some towers offer freedom, but only if we dare to climb. The poem, then, is not merely an elegy to loss or a critique of social masks, but a call to inner excavation. To confront the architecture of our own suffering, and perhaps—rebuild.

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📚 References (Optional for academic submission)

• Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956.

• Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959.

• Plato, Republic (Book VII - Allegory of the Cave).

• Ibn Arabi, Fusus al-Hikam (The Bezels of Wisdom).

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