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Postcard from Kashmir - Agha Shahid Ali
[alert-success] Postcard from Kashmir
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[alert-primary] Short Summary [/alert-primary]
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Introduction:
The poem is set up like a dramatic monologue, with the speaker telling an invisible audience their deepest feelings. The speaker of the poem looks at a letter from Kashmir that shows a scene in the Himalayas on it. Looking at the picture makes them miss the place they left behind and makes them feel nostalgic. They use a bunch of pictures to talk about their bond with Kashmir. The first picture is the postcard itself, which looks like a gift from a trip that people send back home.
The postcard :
The speaker, on the other hand, got the letter from someone in Kashmir, which is their home country. This makes it sound like the speaker is not in Kashmir right now, but in a faraway place.
"Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox,
my home a neat four by six inches. "
The speaker has a small mailbox that the letter will fit in. The speaker thinks that Kashmir has shrunk down to the size of a post card.
The next line says that the letter is what home means to them now, which is a reference to the fact that they no longer live in Kashmir. Also, the speaker now lives in the Kashmir of the picture, which is a romanticized version of the real Kashmir.
"This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. When I return,"
The Jhelum River :
The Jhelum River will not be as blue, and the colors will not be as bright. In Line 9, the speaker says that even his love for Kashmir will be "overexposed," like film that is left in the light for too long. In this way, it will fade.
"The colors won't be so brilliant,
the Jhelum's waters so clean"
This means that the speaker's image of Kashmir will be different from the real Kashmir.
Kashmir in Memory :
The last stanza declares:
And my memory will be a little
out of focus, in it
a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped"
The speaker says that even their image of Kashmir will change, being like a blurry picture. Kashmir will be "out of focus". There will also be dark spots on this memory picture from when the film was not developed yet, which represents the time when the artist was forced to leave Kashmir, the speaker's memory of Kashmir is getting less full because they have not been there in person in a while.
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