Shari Miller Wagner

The poem "The Sunken Gardens" opens with a memory: the memory of the Sunken Gardens on Wagner’s grandparents' wedding day. These are both Wagner’s memories and her grandparents, since Wagner visited the gardens to reconnect with her grandparents. In this garden the memories come together. She then moves on to a beautiful description of the garden that dances. Wagner describes how the years will take over; the garden will fall into disrepair and be taken by vandals, but the newly wedded couple standing in the garden cannot see that. This garden, cultivated in an old quarry, is bursting with life for the newlyweds who are beginning their life together that day. But there is a tension underlying it all. Wagner knows something that her grandparents do not know at that time, something about the trials that they will face in the future. But they cannot see that now standing in the garden; for them time stands still in their joy. Caught up in the present, they cannot see what will become of them and of the garden.

It is said that in poetry all gardens refer to Eden and our human longing for paradise. This garden was a paradise at one time and Wagner’s grandparents yearned for it. Once they left that garden, as Adam and Eve left Eden, they entered the real world to start their life together. The garden becomes a symbol of the peace and tranquility that Wagner’s grandparents long for. Over the years, the garden looses its beauty until it becomes a shell of its former self. So too fade Wagner’s grandparents as they age.

The figurative language in this poem is used rtfully and sparingly. The language revolves more around the descriptive than the figurative in the first stanza when Wagner describes the garden. One of my favorite lines is a wonderful example of personification "petunias so white they ache" (22). The petunias become feeling creatures in this image, themselves aching in their whiteness. The simile of goldfish as "shards of stained glass" (7) gliding through the water evokes an image of vividly colored figures moving through dark water. This is one of the most obvious uses of figurative language in the poem. When she refers to paradise being designed from the "gape/ of a quarry" (10-11) you know that she is referring to the garden even though she does not call it the garden. This is an example of metonymy--using paradise, a word we associate with gardens, instead of the word garden itself.

Wagner catches the shifting nature of time in this poem. In the end, the poem captures Wagner’s wish for her grandparents to be able to find each other again and seek out that garden. "The Sunken Gardens" is a poem about the quest for that moment and place of peace that all people long for.