Does anyone understand the poem Fear Drowned by Sharon Olds?
What metaphor? The poem appears to be about someone who momentarily loses her significant other in the sea. Surely you’ve had a similar experience — you’re somewhere with someone, and all the sudden you realize that you don’t know where they are. Are they gone? What’s happened to them? Anxiety takes hold of you. The only really problematic part of the poem is the last stanza. The lines “Once you lose someone it is never exactly / the same person who comes back” are interesting in the way that they conflate being (“is”) and perception, which is more accurately what is being described. She’s saying that she can’t really look at him the same way any more, after feeling that she’d lost him, but instead of saying it in those terms she says that *he* has changed. Read into that what you will. It’s an interesting choice.
