Conscience and change

The poet admits that she has let the old house down. She asks for its forgiveness, and her great-grandmother's.

She says she has torn out the old lady's spirit from herself, the way one picks a seed out of a fruit, and thrown it on her pyre: she has let go of the old values and the old pride.

Call her callous or selfish, she says, but do not blame her blood, which still remembers the gems, the gold, the perfumes and the elephant ride.

So guilt and independence pull against each other in the poem. The memory lives on, even though the house is dying.

Compared with Donne, her poem is very different: free verse, plain modern words, a direct, personal voice, and themes of family, class and change.