I must have read this poem at least six times and each time, I kept getting a different meaning to what Jim Stevens was trying to convey. At first I thought well maybe he was talking about a family in the home that was very miserable, but the home was loved at one point. As I read it again, I was beginning to think that it’s a person that suffers from schizophrenia and having this battle going on within his head. The struggles being waged between reality and fictions ie hallucination both visual and auditory. The author probably has this disease that can cause you to withdraw from the people and activities in the world around you. Which causes a person to retreat into a world of delusions and fantasies. The Image of the house is a significant way selected by the poet to emphasized the sentiments of a person in a state of extrem pain and the longing for better days. It can also mimic the selfishness that human beings have when they are so immersed in their own sorrow that they cannot think of anything or anyone else. So I think that he has all these parts of his brain that he created and believes these things are actually happening.
In the last stanza the description of a broken window and unprotected door depicts a human being suffering mental torture and pain that the mood in the house is so aware to the outside world that even the neighbors are calling it a madhouse. Pain and misery has risen to such a level that the house has gone of unsound mind as a schizophrenic person.
I really like how detailed this person described their opinion. After reading this post I read the poem again and I see what this person mean by getting a different meaning. This poem is very interesting and very meaningful. About the last stanza “description of a broken window and unprotected door depicts a human being suffering mental torture and pain that the mood in the house…” now I actually see where they are coming from about pain and suffrage.
You have to read the poem at least three to four times in order to deeply understand and feel the poem.
I myself, actually thought the same as moriama says “that the family living in the house was miserable”. Where it says “It had begun with slamming doors, angry feet scuffing the carpets, dishes slammed onto the table”; I picture a couple living at this house who can’t get along and always there conversations turn into an argument. That slamming of the dishes and the door I feel symbolizes some kind of relationship turning out to be really awful. At one point I see this haunted house image as if ghosts are stalking this person and giving off a significant message to leave the house.
As the author describes “Seeing cracking paint, broken windows, the front door banging in the wind, the roof tiles flying off, one by one the neighbors said it was a madhouse”. I see a ghost of a person that died years ago and suffered real bad things in this house. There are so many different things going on in the poem just like the blogger says “I kept getting a different meaning of the poem”; I felt that I was also getting a variety of meanings. I like the way the blogger interpreted the poem’s meaning to that “it’s a person that suffers from schizophrenia and having this battle going on within his head”. We see that the house refers to suffering in regard we see this person struggling with hallucinations visually and auditory, the person’s isolation has made him or her blunt these strange imaginations.
Perhaps, the person is just suffering depression and has put her or himself in isolation.
I disagree with the original blogger and with jjkidcudi1. Although the poem may have different meanings and connotations that may lead us to infer about the family that lived inside the house I feel like the author is really directly talking about the house. I feel like in this poem the author personifies the house which indirectly tells us about the family. As if someone from outside, a neighbor is describing to another individual about an abandoned house in the neighborhood.
The story I get is that there was once a normal family living in the house (inferring from the descriptions being illustrated as a cause and effect as opposed to simple face, meaning it wasn’t always true). Then one of the members began developing Schizophrenia (inferring from the title), and emotions began rising (“angry feet scuffling”), then physical chores began to be neglected (“dishes were left unwashed”), following a last attempt to deal with the situation (“the half-apologies, noisy reconciliations”), however they failed (“…the sobbing that followed.”) and the family slowly fell apart (“..keeping to themselves, keeping out the other…it was a madhouse”) and eventually gave up and left. The end effect being an abandoned house left unmaintained and in shambles (“…broken windows… roof tiles flying off…”.
I agree with the blogger moriama about the poem Schizophrenia, the more I read this poem the more thoughts conjure up in my head about its meaning. It indeed speaks of a family in disarray. The house represents a unit of an entity, be it a family or a person. The poem speaks of inner fighting of the members of the family or the different thoughts of the individual. Is shows the inner fights starts mildly and escalates into a full blown one when the poem says,”It had begun with the slamming of the doors…” to doors locked, to all the fighting stopped, borders drawn – shows the distances being kept by the members being apart, to the house being destroyed, which symbolizes the family being destroyed or the individual.
By stating the house suffers the most speaks volumes about the harsh reality of inner fighting within a family, the family is eventually destroyed, that which the house/family itself is supposed to protect and nurture.
The individual affected by Schizophrenia has mild symptoms and it gradually increases to the point of destroying that individual as the house in the poem. It’s a malady of the brain and the mind.
As a bad habit, I would normally dive into the poem without even looking at the title. I did just that when reading Schizophrenia and like all of you, interpreted the poem as the author describing a chaotic home. Through the use of personification the house is given human like characteristics (“The house came to miss the shouting voices”) and the reader gets a better sense of the harm that is being done to the house.
After reading the poem a second time, this time looking a the title I came up with a slight different interpretation. I agree with Moriama, and think that maybe the chaotic house is like the mind of schizophrenic. After all the house is the center of a family and our head is the center of our bodies…? Well furthermore the poem opens and closes with the line “It was the house that suffered the most”and this statement along with the descriptions in the poem helps me see the suffering and pain one with schizophrenia may encounter. It was interesting how Moriama correlated the events in the poem with visual and auditory hallucinations and I can see how the stanzas relate.
i believe that the house is personified so that through the house we can get a sense of the people who lived there and their characteristics. i agree as others have mentioned that the house is representative of the family. i took the cloth to mean a wash cloth for the dishes, (typically something you use to wipe things clean) gets dirty every time you use it,”the grease stains spreading”(every time they had a fight) till it eventually ended up shoved under cluttered dirty dishes to it formed a hard crust. this crust represents something beyond repair, something to the point of no return, where things cant get wiped clean again. the dishes left unwashed because no one wanted to deal with it again.
The house embodies schizophrenia and a bit of paranoia , it hears voices in silence and it shows us there were instances of arguments and anger built up through detailed emotions. essentially what is being said by the poet is that the house is a broken home, it has wrecked itself. i say wrecked because there is a lot of past tense verbs in the poem, we dont know if its the house that suffered the most and is still standing or the one that suffered the most and no longer exists. the division that existed inside the house was that of its inhabitants. we see that division through locked doors, borders and rooms with loyalties.