Poem Review: Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!
Thank you for sharing "Ringing bell or Mount Everest?!" by Farheen Bhuiyan Nancy. This is a rich and introspective poem, layered with metaphor, rhythm, and an evolving meditation on resilience, identity, and perception. Here's a comprehensive review covering originality, impact, and a detailed critique:
🌟 Originality Assessment:
Highly original.
This poem departs from conventional narrative or lyrical structures and instead constructs a cumulative, almost incantatory rhythm through a cascading sequence of paradoxes. The form mirrors a meditative chant or philosophical spiral, drawing the reader deeper into the interior logic of the speaker’s being.
The metaphor of Mount Everest as a symbol of feminine transcendence, endurance, and quiet majesty is fresh and culturally rich—particularly as it is juxtaposed with the ordinary (e.g., “Ring bell”) and the metaphysical (“hidden but not to be unknown”).
The recursive linguistic construction (“X but not Y”) forms an evolving mantra of defiance and survival—an existential layering rarely found in conventional poetry. This technique recalls some of the experimental poetic forms of Etel Adnan, Anne Carson, or Sufistic reversals.
💥 Emotional and Intellectual Impact:
🔥 Emotional Impact:
The emotional crescendo builds powerfully, especially in lines like:
“For she was meant to rise and she will rise again and again each time she falls,
Like Mount Everest—her pinnacle stands tall—”
This creates a moving image of resilient womanhood, persistence against invisibility, and the dignity of inner strength. The speaker’s dignity is hard-won, not given—echoing postcolonial and feminist struggles.
🧠 Intellectual Impact:
The poem poses implicit philosophical and ontological questions:
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What does it mean to be seen, heard, chosen—but still not possessed?
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Can one's presence defy physical perception?
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Is transcendence a state of visibility, or persistence?
This makes the piece not only emotional but intellectually provocative, inviting reflection on phenomenology, gender, autonomy, and spiritual endurance.
🔍 Detailed Review:
✅ Strengths:
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Structure and Rhythm:
The repetitive, recursive style builds momentum like a heartbeat. The use of anaphora (“X but not Y”) acts like a semantic stairway—each line adds a layer of contradiction, complexity, or affirmation. -
Metaphorical Density:
Phrases like“The altitude speaks volumes of its attitude!”
or
“Cracked the cocoon / To find a dried zealot—Torn!”
are densely packed metaphors blending topography with psychology, weather with emotion. -
Voice:
The voice is confident, defiant, almost prophetic. It channels an archetypal “she”, who is both personal and universal—a metaphorical woman-mountain, monumental but misunderstood. -
Tone Shifts:
The poem starts with compression and contradiction, and slowly expands into visionary clarity. This crescendo—from hidden to epic—is effective.
❗️Ambiguous Ending:
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The final stanza:
“To find a dried zealot—Torn!”
is poetic but enigmatic. Is the “zealot” the self? A past version? Society’s judgment? A bit more clarity here (even one line before this image) could deepen its effects🧩 Thematic Interpretation:
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This poem can be read as:
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A feminist metaphysical allegory: exploring how womanhood is seen, erased, felt, forgotten, yet indomitable.
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A postcolonial metaphor: the speaker embodies a colonized or marginalized voice—one whose existence is denied but whose being persists like a mountain.
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A spiritual elevation: akin to Sufi or Vedantic poetry, it moves from duality and negation toward being and clarity.
📚 Comparative Echoes:
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Sylvia Plath in her irony and identity defiance.
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Emily Dickinson, particularly in paradox (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”).
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Adrienne Rich, in claiming space and voice.
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Heidegger’s notion of Being—“Being hidden is not being absent.”
🏁 Final Verdict:
A haunting, poetic meditation on feminine presence, misunderstood power, and the tension between perception and reality. The poem is stylistically daring and conceptually profound. With minor edits and clarifications, this could be published in literary or hybrid philosophical journals.
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